Opportunities for the gospel on social media

The average person in the UK spends at least five hours per day on the internet in addition to work-related access and a significant part of this is on social media.

Over 86 per cent of the United Kingdom’s total internet user base (regardless of age) uses at least one social media platform, obviously some more active than others.

Most people online check around 100 times per day, which is about every 10 minutes during their waking hours, especially on their smartphones. (If you find that hard to believe - do an audit on yourself!). This is not an article about the useful topic of how we need to discipline our usage, a worthy topic, but more about how we can use the opportunity presented by this vast marketplace for ideas and discussion. Are we as Christians making the most of this massive opportunity? How could social media be used to tell people about the risen Jesus? Let’s start with a few positives…

● Social media extends our reach; most of us have a greater set of digital contacts than we would regularly be able to speak to. And should those conversations be shared even more widely, the overall audience would be substantial.

● It is not so personally challenging as when speaking face to face with someone. Our ‘listeners’ can choose whether to engage or not.

● It allows us some space when questions come back to take as much time as we need to reflect and answer carefully.

However, this form of interaction for evangelism and apologetics also has its downsides.

● Social media can be a brutal place. The young people I speak to in the UK are extremely wary of sharing anything about their faith on social media in case they get aggressive pushback.

● Misunderstandings can easily happen, and they are harder to detect when dealing remotely with others. Unresolved, this may then rapidly develop into an argument or the breaking of the online relationship. There is no easy way to put our comments in context and to convey the right tone and intensity – emojis are not enough.

● Social media conversations are very fragmented. They can develop over minutes or months and they have no end point. They can be good and lively but then suddenly everyone moves on to do something else and the window of opportunity is lost as our device windows fill up with the latest new posts on other subjects by our friends. This makes the development of a careful explanation of the gospel challenging

● Social media allows us to form carefully curated versions of our lives which don’t match our character. The temptation to be inauthentic is very real.

Armed with the reality of the upsides and downsides, I would still suggest that we can and we should use social media as part of our witness in all the various spheres of life. This is part of living a public Christian life, ready to witness and to give answers.

Now it may be the limit of my social media 'friends', but my observation is that not many Christians and churches are using social media at all, or very well for gospel work. There is plenty of Christian debate, most of it either esoteric or bad tempered. And then there is what I might call fairly passive, (you might even call it lazy) sharing of decorated Bible verses or flyers for church events, or aggressive sharing of something to do with moral issues. Both of these might have their place but are unlikely to move the boulder with people who are outside the church.

What we need is prayerfully, carefully placed posts which are attractive, likely to get engagement, and purposeful.

We can share something of how our faith is impacting our lives, testimonies of other Christians, clips of other good content, provocative questions, social comment, expressions of sympathy, offers of help, short form videos, and many other things that are working out our faith. You can even share a picture of your dinner now and then to show you are a normal person. Think gospel but think strategically, what might a non-Christian read or watch that would move them along on a journey towards Jesus?

Reflect on what you are going to say and listen carefully before answering. Don’t post impulsively.

Social media algorithms (the faceless computer programmes that decide what you are going to see on your feed) thrive on engagement, which normally means conflict. You don’t want to fuel conflict, so you have to think what is going to get people talking without getting them fighting.

And then we need to think about the platform – what works best on each. For example, Facebook and TikTok might seem very similar to each other but in terms of audience experience and expectation they are very different and what works on one platform will probably not work on another in quite the same way.

Be yourself. Don’t try to be something you are not.

And finally, treat anyone who engages with you as a real human being made in God’s image and afford them the courtesy and grace that Christ would expect from you. Don’t treat people like projects or debating opponents but as part of the crowd that Jesus would have compassion on, 'because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd' (Matthew 9:36)

I am sure en would love to hear about your experiences!

This article was adapted from my recent book, 'Reasoning in the Public Square'.