Facebook

Catalyst Church sits right down the street from Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, a college town not far from Cleveland or Akron. The city has only about 28,000 residents, yet the university hosts 25,000 undergraduates. Understandably, this church thrives on young adults and college students.

“I’m 30 years old, and my wife and I are the oldest couples there,” Herron says of his congregation, which is nestled in Portage County, a place where 85 percent of the people are unchurched. That’s why the Acts 29 network planted Catalyst in its collegiate habitat – a place where, if nothing else, a group of diverse students has a common interest: Facebook.

Facebook, a social network similar to MySpace, burst into the Web scene in 2004, allowing students at college campuses across the country (and now the world) to create profiles about themselves and add friends by linking to the profile pages of other college students. Though it started as college-students only, requiring a university e-mail address to log on, Facebook has expanded to the general public. It’s still most popular among people 30 and under. The interface allows young adults to reveal as much or as little about themselves as they want by posting photos, joining groups and sending messages to each other.

Facebook’s content is more closely moderated for appropriateness than is MySpace. Though dishonest people do scour Facebook for people’s personal information, the interface gives people much more control in regard to what they post or don’t post. The privacy settings enable users to allow certain people to view their profiles and decide how much of the profile those people can see. As a drawback, the appearance of a Facebook page is less editable than MySpace, which allows streaming sound and video along with nifty and artistic graphics.

Facebook’s “groups” feature is what Catalyst hones in on most, and it launched a frequently visited and constantly updated Catalyst group.

“Using Facebook is the smartest thing a church can do,” Herron asserts. “What people are desperately looking for is community, and a Facebook group provides that. People need to feel like they belong before they believe.”

As the church is still in relative infancy – leaders set up and tear down every week in a local theater – the Facebook group serves as a central piece of marketing for big events. For example, the church is hosting a helicopter Easter-egg drop at a nearby football stadium, an event targeted at young families. Whenever the church hosts an event, they send a virtual invitation to everyone in their Facebook group.

Catalyst’s next step, Herron says, is to do more with online message boards. Though the Facebook group allows people to write on a collective “wall,” Herron hopes to see Catalyst attendees commenting to each other constantly on virtual threads, similar to Craigslist.com, the online marketplace-and-chat community. Similarly, he notes that a few of Catalyst’s musicians have become active in posting their music on Virb.com, a music-geared social-networking site, and he hopes that even more will create a presence there.

“Using Web 2.0 is so crucial to the 20- or 30-somethings’ popular culture,” Herron says. “The church has always contextualized the message to serve the culture, from pews to printed Bibles to organ music. The Internet is just the next step in doing that.”