The Church has a mandate to show up as salt and light on social media, with the good news of God’s Kingdom

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We invited Sats Solanki, aka the ‘Digital Rabbi’ to come and speak at the Stronger Conference earlier on this year on the subject of ‘Social Media for Good’ and we thought you might like to have access to an abridged transcript of his talk.

Sats helps creatives and church leaders to leverage social media. Sats and his wife Emma also lead C3 Reflect, a church with two locations in London, UK.

The power of social media

A couple of years ago, I worked with a church in York, in the UK, and they really wanted to reach students in their city, particularly kind of freshers coming to the city looking for a church home. I don't know if you've been involved in student ministry or seen what people do, but normally there's a lot of noise on campus, there's a lot of flyers and event promotion and all that sort of thing.

So, we thought let's try out a digital strategy and we really put our heads together and tried to think what were going to be some of the things that students were actually looking for and we came up with this idea, which was to create a little downloadable PDF that would tell people about the best spots, the local hotspots in the city which we called the ‘hidden gems’ of York, and we talked about the seven local wonders of the city, like the best coffee shop, the best restaurants, and places to do food shopping.  

We just tried to position it as something that might be useful to students and we saw over 500 people sign up to download this thing in exchange for an email address. I share that story because I love hearing stories and being part of moments where ordinary local churches tap into the power of social media to reach people for the mission of Jesus Christ.

Sometimes when we think about social media, we don't always connect into the power of it, and the power of it really is about scale. To reach 500 people is as easy as reaching 5000 people, or 50,000 people. The mechanisms and the work really have this tremendous ability to scale and, and it got me thinking about technology, and the Christian experience.

Technology and the Gospel

When I think about Paul writing letters locked down in a prison somewhere, he was essentially sharing content. Today we read those words thousands of years later, and they are still having an impact.

God breathed the Scripture and the ancient technology of writing, brought it to us. Technology has always been at the heart of the Christian gospel. It's been there from the first days of scribes copying historical accounts, and narratives all the way through to the printing press.

And now today, in 2022, the digital world social media, and I'm just staggered by that, because I'm not sure if the early disciples realised that the words they wrote would still be being read in 2022.

In fact, I'll just read from Acts1.6 and it says, ‘when they come together, they asked him, Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?’, and he said to them, ‘it's not for you to know times or seasons, that the Father is fixed by his own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and Judea, and Samaria, and to the end of the earth’.

As far as I can see, I think the digital space and maybe even the metaverse should probably be included in the phrase ‘the end of the earth’. And the disciples were perhaps thinking that Jesus would come back in maybe 50 or 100 years, or in their lifetime, and yet here we have preserved by the power of technology, the words of God in scripture.

I do wonder if the stories that we're telling, and the things that we are recording and the encouragement that we're putting out there whether in three years time when somebody stumbles across that message, looking for truth, looking for hope, finds it because God the Holy Spirit connects what was done in the past by the power of technology to the present day.

Missio Dei

God has chosen to work with his people to fulfil his mission, and his mission is to reach people. His mission is to go where people are and win them and tell them about the good news of the kingdom of God, but God has chosen to use technology, right from day one, to accomplish that mission.

But when we think about social media, we can think a lot about the negatives like online bullying, misinformation and fear and it can be a dark place, but then I remember John 1.5 says that the ‘light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’

What I'm excited about is, when I think about all of the darkness of social media, I am reminded of the way Jesus always comes to enter into the darkest places. He didn't shy away, in fact, he was known falsely as a drunkard and a glutton, because he was so often in the houses of people with a bad reputation.

Jesus wasn't so tied to his method, that he was unwilling to fulfil the mission. He didn’t get bogged down by method. He was so committed to what he was on the planet to do, and the purposes of God, that he would do whatever it needed to reach people in the darkest of places.

And I would suggest that right now, we as churches, and as Christian businesses, and whatever context we are coming into this conversation and this journey, that we have a tremendous opportunity to bring the light of Jesus Christ into the digital space.

I just get excited, because I think about the possibilities of what would happen if we turned up the volume on our online presence? What would happen if we would start to occupy the digital space rather than feel like outsiders to the space? What would happen if instead of feeling like technology was all about these big companies, we would actually see that technology is at the heart of what the church is about, because the church isn't tied to method, the church is all about mission?

Success is faithfulness

Jesus tells us a parable where he talks about the talents, and these three guys are given three different portions of money to look after. You the story about the one who buried his master’s money, that he was punished because he didn't do anything with what he had, while all others multiplied what they had.

And I would love to encourage you, that as far as God is concerned, the definition of success is about faithfulness and obedience. So I think it's really important for us to keep an open mind as we approach social media, no matter what our skill set is, and no matter what ‘team’ looks like for us, and no matter what our capacity is, no matter our personal understanding of software. God is simply looking at faithfulness.

I would love to think that there's a whole lot of churches all over the country and all over the world who think, well, we've just got one youth and maybe a dog to run our social media account, but if we could invest in it, and if we would value it and we could position and lift and elevate and train and do whatever we can to maximise our presence in that space, it that we're in, then it could make a difference.

You see, the outcome of that, will be the light of Jesus Christ coming into our world.

What do we do?

There are ways that we can present the gospel, there are ways that we can reach into people's hearts, particularly around the conversation, like things like mental health and loneliness, and being helpful like serving the community that we find ourselves in.

I was led to think that the best sort of content is the content where there’s overlap between the problems that the people we’re trying to reach resonate with, and the solution that we have in the gospel. That somewhere in the middle in that Venn diagram is where we position our content and I would say that’s right, but also the Christian approach has always been to serve. It's always been to be a blessing to people to win people over with the love of Christ.

And I just wonder, what would happen if we were to lean into that with social media in 2022. Let's go where the people are, let's reach people where they are, which is in the digital space, and if they're there, let's position ourselves there and let's reach people there.