Digital Discipleship

Social media has changed the landscape of how we share Jesus forever. It used to be rallies, cable TV shows, and church outreach events, now you can reach large crowds with your social media account. Of course, it’s not always that simple.

Social media isn’t always an effective space to talk about things like faith and Jesus. Have you ever wondered why you can post a picture of your cat falling off the couch and it basically goes viral, but a post about your faith makes you feel like people are scrolling with their eyes shut?

How can you leverage your socials to share Jesus in a way that’s effective and engaging? To do this, it’s helpful to understand the nature of the environment in which you’re communicating.

The Social Space

When posting online, the first thing to recognise is you’re operating in a ‘social space’. A social space involves a large audience, for example, a lecture, a church service, or even a YouTube video. Information can be shared with a large audience, but often at the expense of meaningful engagement and personal transformation.

The Personal Space

Talking about Jesus in a way that results in ongoing life change is most effective when you’re operating in the ‘personal space’. A personal space takes place in one on one conversations or small group interactions. Here emotional guards can be lowered, trust can be built, and meaningful life transformation takes place.

We can learn a lot from observing how Jesus communicated in these two spaces. Although He operated in both spaces, he invested heavily in the personal space. Most of his time was dedicated to his 12 disciples and as a result they were the most impacted by him and had the most meaningful life change. We still experience the effects of this investment over 2000yrs later.

So how does that apply to posting about Jesus on your socials? Here’s a helpful strategy: speak to the large audience of your social media space, but prioritise drawing people into your personal space to share Jesus with them.

Here are 5 tips on how you can maximise meaningful engagement with your social media account.

1. Be a Normal Person - Intersperse your posts about Jesus, with posts about your everyday life. People are primarily interested in who you are as a person. Your relationship with Jesus is best shared in the context of your everyday life. Also, if people always scroll past your Jesus posts, the social algorithms will cause them to eventually not see your posts at all.

2. Ask Questions / Polls - Engagement is gold! There’s plenty of engagement tools built into social platforms like questions, polls, sliders and video replies. Draw people in by asking intriguing questions and utilise polls in your stories for interaction.

3. Challenge The Norm - You can grab people's attention by using language that challenges normal cultural ideas and their perceptions of what it means to be a Christian.

4. Speak To Need - There are many needs out in the community. Raise the topic and share how Jesus, church, and faith intersect with those needs.

5. Follow Up In DMs - When people engage with what you post in meaningful ways, follow up with them in DMs, or ideally, in-person.

Let’s follow Jesus’ example of drawing people from the Social Space into the Personal Space. (Matthew 4:19) “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” Keep in mind that while it’s nice to get a lot of likes on our posts, every number is a person. Be intentional and prayerful about taking people deeper, even if it’s just one person.