Mark McNees has discerned five lessons that the church can learn from Facebook, and has rolled out the first four.
Facebook Lesson #1: It is all about the life of the participants and not the CEO.
Facebook Lesson #2: Facebook culture is very open to ‘friending’ new people into their Facebook community.
Facebook Lesson #3: The Facebook community does not have business hours.
Facebook Lesson #4: The Facebook community is eager to share life with one another.
He will roll out #5 on Wednesday.
Here is how he dilates on these lessons:
Facebook Lesson #1: It is all about the life of the participants and not the CEO.
Mark Zuckerberg definitely has some ideas about community. In 2004 he had a choice; he could start a blog sharing his ideas on community or create a living experiment as an expression of his ideas. If Zuckerberg created a blog he may have built it to tens of thousands of readers which would have been an amazing accomplishment, but his living experiment (F now has 800 million active users living out an expression of his view of community.
What the church can learn from this:
The church’s job is to create a community which encourages, equips, and edifies people to holistically love God and love people. This is the church’s grand “idea.” Largely the modern church’s approach has been a didactic dissemination of knowledge (i.e. sermons, books, blogs), rather than a dynamic community driven expression of faith.
As a teaching pastor, author, and blogger the irony of this post is not lost on me. For clarification however, I am not saying idea creation and sharing is the problem, quite the contrary, the sharing of ideas is central to Facebook, however, the strength of Facebook is in the amount of voices sharing their ideas about community and that is why people check in with FB several times a day.
Tangible expression of Facebook Lesson #1:
Zuckerberg is the creator, founder, and custodian of Facebook, he has created a path for community to exist in ways the world has never seen before. He has done this by giving people a platform to share their thoughts and ideas. The Church can take this concept and intentionally create paths for multiple voices to share about loving God and loving people.