What a time to be alive!

Part 2: How to tell 2 million people about Jesus and your church through Facebook. Really.

There has never been a better time to be a Christian than today. The tools we have to Study the Bible, worship, reach people, connect with people, keep up with people and do all the things that the Great Commission calls upon us to do are unprecedented in human history. Let me show you what I mean. Today, let's talk about how Facebook can enable your church to tell 2 million people a year about Jesus and your church.

Assumptions

Let's assume you have 200 people in your church that are on Facebook. Does that sound high? Consider these facts about Facebook:

• 901 million monthly active users at the end of March 2012. 
• 526 million daily active users on average in March 2012. 
  
• 488 million monthly active users who used Facebook mobile products in March 2012, and more than 500 million mobile monthly active users as of April 20, 2012.
  
• During March 2012, on average 398 million users were active with Facebook on at least six out of the last seven days
  
• More than 125 billion friend connections on Facebook at the end of March 2012.
  
• On average more than 300 million photos uploaded to Facebook per day in the three months ended March 31, 2012. 
  
• An average of 3.2 billion Likes and Comments generated by Facebook users per day during the first quarter of 2012.
  
• More than 42 million Pages with ten or more Likes at the end of March 2012. 
  
• Facebook is available in more than 70 languages.

http://newsroom.fb.com/content/default.aspx?NewsAreaId=22

I pastor a small church and am aware that in a small church this many contacts won't be possible. I also pastor a church in the country. Most of them don't do Internet. I get that too. I am also assuming a middle sized church (or up) in the city that is reasonably well connected to the Internet.

Assumption #2: each member of your church that is on Facebook has 200 friends. I have 4990. I'd have a lot more if they would let me go above 5000. My kids have an average of 827.

Assumption #3: assume you have a Facebook moment each Sunday during church. Pause and ask everyone there to update their status with something like the following. (You might actually put a bunch of different options like this on the screens.)

• Great to be in church today.
• Great music at church today.
• Great to see my friends at church today.
• I love my church.
• I rejoiced with those who said unto me, "Let us go to the house of the Lord."
• Pastor Bob really shucked the corn today. (This one might work better in the South!)
• The music was great at church today!
• Another day to enjoy the abundant life Jesus promised!

The math

OK, assume those three things, here is how the math works out

200 people in your church

X 200 contacts per member

= 40,000 mentions of your church or Jesus every week.

X 52 weeks

=2,080,000

Let's suppose 1% of that works out; it is still a good day! There is a cumulative effect of lots of people telling of Christ and your church over and over and over. A lot of my friends mention something about Christ multiple times every day. Imagine.

I often find myself saying: what a time to be alive! There has never been a better time to tell people about Christ!