Tips for Social Media Faith-Sharing Outreach

Abstract

Tips for Social Media Faith-Sharing Outreach Sean M. Salai S.J. (bio) When Catholics create spaces on social media for faith sharing, rather than simply launch prepackaged videos into the digital ether, positive things happen. But when Catholics wade into the egoistic muck of social media without a faith perspective, or bring a pre-digital mindset to it, they get dragged down into it and fail to reach others. This is the primary lesson I learned from leading 74 people through a private “Spiritual Exercises Faith Sharing Retreat Group” on Facebook for 30 days in the fall of 2020. This type of retreat offers a promising example that I will unpack in this article to encourage diocesan catechetical directors and church media evangelizers in using the internet effectively as a space for faith-based interaction in their own outreach. It will be helpful to start with a word of context. I am a Jesuit priest, spiritual director, former newspaper reporter, and America magazine special contributor with a research interest in the question of how Catholics use social media to share our faith. I was born in 1980, at the tail end of what Pew Forum defines as “Generation X.” I, therefore, grew up with one foot in an analog world and one foot in the emerging digital world. I grew up thinking of a telephone as something with a cord in the wall that placed calls; I was well into my teenage years when the internet became widely available and was heading off to college when I received my first (very large and clunky) cellular telephone. Yet, computers and the internet became widespread during my high school years. As someone positioned between Baby Boomers and Millennials (the first digital natives) on the generational spectrum, I feel somewhat at home with the world before and after the digital revolution; and I have a desire in ministry to create more intergenerational opportunities in a faith-based community to bridging the gaps between generations. That personal context shaped my desire to adapt the traditional retreat experience of the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola to the youth-oriented culture of social media. [End Page 235] For my Doctor of Ministry research project at The Catholic University of America, from which I graduated in May 2021, I learned a number of things in creating this intergenerational faith-sharing retreat group through America’s existing Facebook groups. First, it’s possible to use the internet to unite people of faith (as opposed to further isolating and dividing them) if Catholics make the effort. Second, people are decent and spiritual in their behavior when they find themselves in a faith-based group on social media that revolves around sharing their prayer experiences, as distinct from exchanging their political or ecclesial opinions. Third, both secular and ecclesial literature on digital communication provides helpful guidelines to anyone making this effort. Finally, the experience of sharing faith in a virtual setting does not replace participants’ offline religious participation, but rather encourages them to stay involved at the same level or become even more committed to both online and offline spiritual activities. I settled on an asynchronous format of daily video reflections with faith-sharing prompts (in which participants could come and go on their own schedule without needing to be online at the same time) as the best way of mediating between competing values to help Catholics of all ages feel more connected than isolated online. My goal was to go beyond merely consuming videos and other digital materials in a privatized fashion, but also to attempt something more creative than crowding 74 people into one synchronous Zoom gathering. As group members grew in a shared catechesis of both the Exercises and the online setting, their common experience evangelized them by forming them for digital discipleship. The Possibilities of Online Interaction I designed my group around the general goal of exploring one effort to evangelize Catholic media consumers through social media, namely a 30-day Ignatian online faith-sharing retreat group based on the Exercises and advertised through America Media’s Facebook page. My general objective aimed to give America consumers the experience of an online faith...