I’m spending this week as the Head Counselor at Summer Camp — that is, Social Phonics Summer Camp. You can follow us all week at the Twitter hashtag #SPSC. The feed is embedded below the fold:
The Tony Jones Blog at Patheos
I’m spending this week as the Head Counselor at Summer Camp — that is, Social Phonics Summer Camp. You can follow us all week at the Twitter hashtag #SPSC. The feed is embedded below the fold:
Been super busy this week. I’m also taking a bit of a breather on the blog as I’m going to be amping up my blogging significantly beginning on June 1.
But I did want to drop a shout-out to the great folks in Minnesota and Indiana who attended Social Phonics Boot Camps yesterday and today. Below are a couple images of the day, from the incomparable Courtney Perry. We’ve added five Coaches to the Social Phonics team, and we’re booking Boot Camps for Fall 2011 and Winter 2012, so please drop me a line if you’d like to host one.
Elizabeth Drescher has a great post at Religion Dispatches, riffing on Richard Beck’s excellent post about Facebook killing the church. Money Quote from Drescher:
Not Enough Social to Go Around
The relationships among the undergraduates in Beck’s research were not formed on Facebook, they were enriched by students’ continued digital contact. The problem with regard to churches and other religious communities (and we see this over and over again with Facebook group pages whose only visitors are the minister and the technophile parishioner who championed the church’s foray into the digital domain) seems to be that there’s not enough social to go around.
That is, if church were, indeed, a robustly social experience, Facebook would enrich and extend that experience, enhancing week-to-week retention through ongoing conversation with valued friends—just as it appears to do with undergraduates moving from the first to the second year of college. Thin connections in face-to-face settings are not magically transformed by technology.
via Facebook Doesn’t Kill Churches, Churches Kill Churches | (A)theologies | Religion Dispatches.
In fact, this very point was made by Mike Baughman at the Social Phonics Boot Camp last week in Dallas, when he challenged the group about how Facebook is actually picking up where the church dropped the ball.
Over at Social Phonics, we put up five posts this week — they were sent to us by an anonymous hacker who’d like church folks to better protect themselves online. I’m pretty up on this stuff, and I learned something in every one of these posts. I encourage you to check them out:
You can subscribe to the Social Phonics Blog HERE.

![]()

There’s a battle brewing in the church in America. It’s not over gay marriage or abortion or whether to do away with ordination (much to my chagrin). No, it’s over who will capture the church market with their church community software. There are three contenders, as far as I can tell, and a whole lot of money at stake — both money that’s already been spent on development, and money to be made on future sales. The three are:
The Table Project – developed and owned by YouthWorks, a non-profit mission organization;
The City – developed by Mark Driscoll’s Mars Hill Church and now owned by Zondervan, a subsidiary of HarperCollins, a subsidiary of Newscorp;
SoChurch – developed and owned, as far as I can tell, by the SoChurch team.
Full disclosure: I used to work for YouthWorks and I have published books with Zondervan. But no one has asked me to blog about this, nor has any of these groups offered me a look at their system.
I don’t have a dog in this fight, but it seems that others do. Last week on the SoChurch blog, Ben Forsberg wrote a quite aggressive post, replete with fighting rhetoric, in which he accused The City of “buying our Google AdWords and following our Twitter followers.” He writes, [Read more...]
The latest edition of the JoPa Productions email newsletter, the JoPanator, was sent today. I wrote the following article briefing churches and ministries about how the new Facebook group function might affect them:
Last week, Facebook announced that they were launching a new version of groups. It can be difficult to keep up with all of the changes in Facebook and Twitter, so here’s a quick primer on the latest change.
Facebook has come under scrutiny for privacy concerns in the last couple years. Users were not comfortable, for instance, that when they posted a picture or note on the wall of a group, that would also show up on their own profile newsfeeds for all of their friends to see. While there have been work-arounds for this, they were never very intuitive.
What the new type of Facebook Groups allows is for privacy. For instance, something posted to a group will only be visible to other members of that group, and it will only show up in the newsfeed of the poster when viewed by other members of the group.
Read the rest here: A Free iPad, a New Venture, and What Do Facebook Groups Mean for You?
And sign up the receive the JoPanator in your own email in-box!
Kevin has posted an interview with me about the JoPa Social Media Boot Camps over at Church Marketing Sucks:
Why do you think it’s important for pastors to use social media?
Tony Jones: There was a time when churches and pastors needed to decide whether they were going to wire the church for telephones. There was another time when they had to decide whether to bring microphones and amplification into the sanctuary. Those were decisions about using new technology to communicate. Social media is simply another step on that path–it’s about communicating with people, and more and more people are using it, so churches need to decide how to engage that.
via Church Marketing Sucks: Social Media Boot Camp for Pastors.

Copyright 2008-2013, Patheos. All rights reserved. Terms of Service | Patheos Privacy Policy | Site developed by Avalon Consulting, LLC

Follow Patheos
Progressive Christian: