“How can I help families with social media?”
I think this is something that lots and lots of churches are wondering. While culture is ever-morphing and hard to understand– the way people are communicating and integrating technology into their lives is big/obvious and churches feel the need to offer help.
The flip side is that most recognize that they are not experts on social media, much less experts on how social media integrates into adolescent life. And so they either do nothing… which is common. Or they try to provide their congregation access to “experts“… which is rare, but appreciated. (No really, thank you.)
But I want to present to you a plan that is right down the middle and plays into your expertise as a pastor.
How to Help From Your Expertise
As I’m out doing seminars and workshops with people I end up speaking out of two different postures about social media.
- I’m speaking out of specific, long-term research I’ve done on teenagers and social media.
- I’m teaching and answering questions using skills learned and refined in my ministry training and life as a pastor.
In other words, half of the skill set that I have, every pastor has.
Lean on Pastoral Counseling
Often times I’m asked about how social media impacts the home relevant to children and teens. And just below the surface of those questions are questions relevant to family life and marriage. It’s pretty normal that a spouse will attend a workshop and then make mention of their spouse being “the one with the problem in our home.” So, as a pastor, I can see that issues in the home might be flowing from a lack of communication about how the device makes his spouse feel or maybe that he’s using the device because of a larger marital issue or even that they aren’t have sex as often as they’d like because they are staring at their phones in bed instead of each other.
You don’t have to be a social media expert to talk about these things, these are pastoral counseling issues that you, as a pastor, really are an expert on. These are things you can deal with in informal counseling in your office or make a referral to a professional counselor.
Social media might be the presenting issue. But often social media is the symptom of something bigger, it’s a family problem with which you can provide counsel.
Social Media as a Window to the Soul
The more I talk and write about social media the more I realize that the behavior itself is a window to a persons soul. In a normal healthy adult situation, social media usage is congruent to their life. They say things and do things with social media they would do in real life. And where there is incongruence, it’s often from a place of dissatisfaction or unhealthiness.
That’s a two-way street, right? If someone is projecting perfection on social media but you know they are a mess, that’s incongruence. Likewise, if they are a mess on social media about their job, but happy-go-lucky at church… you know that incongruence means something.
I share that because, again, you don’t have to be an expert on social media to notice this. If you’re sensitive to knowing your congregants you’ll be able to see that plainly and ask hard, yet obvious, questions. “Tom, how is everything going at work? You seem… I don’t know… grumpy when you post stuff on Facebook at work. Can we get together and talk about that?”
Use Resources to Maintain Baseline Understanding
Let’s say you want to do a seminar about social media for parents at your church, but you can’t afford to bring someone in? Well, if you take my book A Parent’s Guide to Understanding Social Media and reverse engineer it… you’ll see my presentation. Voila! Start there and add/edit it to fit your context.
Subscribe to my blog, iParent.tv, and Common Sense Media and keep those resources in your back pocket as things come up. But don’t feel like you need to become a social media expert in order to help the people in your congregation.
Wrap-up
Don’t get caught up in the trees to miss the forest when it comes to social media usage and helping families within your congregation. Focus on your expertise, lean on it, and allow the natural love a pastor has for her congregation and your expertise in pastoral care to overcome what you do or don’t know about how to use the latest social media app.
And when you need more help, ask me. That’s what I’m here for.
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