3 Ways To Integrate Social Media With Your Church’s Worship Service

There is one thing every church has in common: A weekly church service.

Your church’s worship service is marked on the calendar. Everyone expects them to take place. And they happen every Sunday throughout the year.

The reason I’m pointing out the obvious is this: Your church needs to have a plan on how you will integrate social media with your worship service.

As a church, you can invite thousands of people on social media to join you in the worship of God by only sharing the life of your church. The best way you can do this is by preparing to integrate your church’s worship service with your social media platforms.

Creating a social media plan will help you to engage people on social media, connect individuals with each other, and encourage new people to visit your church. And, most importantly of all, this will help you to share the gospel of Jesus Christ with your community.

Here are three ways you can integrate social media into your worship services. These suggestions will help you to create a social media strategy to implement throughout the week and keep you from second-guessing when things get busy.

#1. Pre-Worship Service

Creating anticipation for your upcoming worship service is important. You can do this by sharing the topic you are going to teach, a video trailer for your sermon series or a personal video explaining what you would like for people to take away from your message (Facebook Live is a great option), or a Scripture or quote you plan on using.

Also, to help create additional awareness, you can create images promoting your worship service. For these images, it can be as simple as including a Scripture or quote over a photo or stock image or, you can create images that include the time of your worship service, the title of your sermon or sermon series, and a URL people can visit to learn more.

Regardless of what you create for people to share, encourage the members of your church to share them with their social media network. People are willing to help, so, if you ask them to consider sharing the content you create, then they will be more inclined to lend a social media post.

During this step, your primary goal is to help prepare the hearts of people for the church’s upcoming worship service. Whatever you decide to share, make sure that what you share leads people to Jesus.

#2. Worship Service

It’s the day of your church’s worship service. Volunteers and staff are at your facilities early getting ready, people are gathering, and the Word of God is being proclaimed.

Sharing God’s work in and through the life of your church will give people on social media a glimpse of your church living and loving like Jesus.

There are many ways you can share the life of your church during the worship service:

· Pictures of volunteers

· Behind the scenes preparations

· Quotes from the sermon

· Images from the worship service

· Baptisms

· Baby dedications

These small efforts will help tell the story of your worship gatherings and encourage your congregation to engage their friends on social media.

#3. Post-Worship Service

After your weekend worship service, you and your team can continue to reach people on social media with the message.

Here are some ideas for you to consider:

· Share Bible verses or quotes from the sermon

· Post the entire sermon

· Share video or audio clips from the sermon

· Provide additional resources

· Write blog posts based upon the sermon

· Upload a photo album on Facebook or Flickr

These tactics will help you to extend the life of the church’s worship service by sharing snippets of God’s work over the weekend.

Your turn

As a church leader, one of the tensions you will wrestle with during the week on your church’s social media platforms is balancing what you share from last week with prepare people for what is ahead. If this is you, then I recommend transitioning to preparing people for the upcoming worship service by mid-week. This date on your calendar will provide a natural transition for you, your team, and your church.

What tactics would you add to any of these steps? Share your ideas in the comments!