For the past few weeks I’ve been sharing ideas of how to use social media to share Christ with our unsaved friends.
- Using Facebook Photos to share the gospel (part 1)
- Using Videos to share the gospel on Facebook (part 2)
What we’ve looked at so far are primarily ideas for sharing other people’s stories and content. But we all know the thing about social media is that it’s intended to be social. Our friends care more about our own stories and status updates than they do about the person in a video or a picture we share.
Obviously, taking our own photos and shooting our own videos to share online for the purpose of sharing Christ is ideal because then it is our story combined with personalized visuals.
However, let’s not forget the power of the written word. What if we each took a couple minutes to write our own faith stories, our testimonies, and shared them as a Facebook Note? If you’re not sure where to start or are looking for a few resources to help your teens write their faith stories, here’s two links to check out.
- How to write your testimony
- 5clicks.com — An interactive site that helps you write your spiritual story
Facebook Notes give you the ability write something similar to a blog post. It provides formatting tools, allows you to integrate pictures and graphics, link to other sites, and more. If you want to write a full-featured presentation of your faith story on Facebook, Notes is the way to go.
But while Facebook Notes are great for longer stories, simple status updates are super-powerful, as well, and have the potential to draw a lot of engagement from friends online.
Here are some ideas of questions you could publicly answer for yourself online as a status update:
What has God been doing in my life lately?
How has the Bible made an impact in my life?
What difference does God’s forgiveness make in y life?
What does knowing Jesus mean to me? How has Jesus saved me?
In what way has the Bible been relevant to me?
How do I live out my faith as a Christian teen/youth leader?
Do I relate to a specific Bible character or Bible verse? How so?
Has knowing what God says in the Bible helped me to forgive someone who has wronged you me How has God forgiven me? What do I really think about Jesus?
How do I know that I’ll be in heaven one day?
So, for example, if you chose to go with the first question, your status update could be something like, “Wow, God is really stretching me this week to make sure I keep him as a higher priority to me than basketball.”
Not every update will receive a lot of feedback and most of our unsaved friends maybe not even engage with it at all. That’s not really the point – as long as they read it, it still causes them to think, if even for a second, and helps show people what you stand for and what you believe.
Again, just like last week, I challenge you to do this yourself before asking your youth group to do it. Set the example for them. They’ll most likely see you doing it on Facebook anyway, so when you talk about it, you’ll have much more credibility than you otherwise would have. More importantly, you’ll be able to speak from your heart and from experience instead of from notes you took from Dare2Share’s blog.
Do you think most of your teens would have the guts to share the answers to some of these questions online? If not, how can we, as youth workers, help them move in that direction?
TWEETABLE PHRASE #1: The Internet is a new missions field for teens. Here’s how to use Facebook notes and updates to share Christ online.
TWEETABLE PHRASE #2: Do your youth group kids have the guts to talk publicly about their faith on Facebook?
