32% of Influential Churches in the U.S. are on Facebook

Social Networking is Shaping Religion Today

According to a survey Sojo recently conducted, 32% of the country’s most influential churches surveyed are using Facebook. Some of the churches surveyed included:

• World Changers Church International in College Park, Georgia
• Calvary Chapel of Ft Lauderdale
• North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Georgia
• Southeast Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky
• Second Baptist in Houston, Texas
• Word of Faith International Christian Church in Southfield, Michigan

Of the churches surveyed, 32% reported either having a Facebook page or group for their church or for its individual ministries. All 32% of the churches using Facebook stated that they initially started using Facebook as a means to connect with their Facebook-using members. Now, the top reasons for using this particular social network is still for connecting with members but has evolved as a tool for communicating important upcoming events and volunteer opportunities to members of the congregation that use Facebook. One church reported that they wanted to stay "relevent" to what its' youth in the congregation was using to communicate.

In this survey, junior high and high school membership averaged to be 1,063 members. Averages for college student and members in their early 20's were not applicable.

Two churches surveyed reported that their pastors had personal MySpace pages. MySpace and YouTube tied for being the second most used social networks among the churches we surveyed. Twitter, one of the fastest growing social networks right now, is currently only being used by 10% of the churches in Sojo's survey. Several churches mentioned they were looking into possibly jumping onto the Twitter bandwagon.

Surprisingly, only 10% stated they were using Tangle (originally GodTube.com), the world's largest faith and family-based social network with 550,000 registered users. And another 10% stated they were not using any form of social networks.

Below is a breakdown of the social networking sites revealed in our survey.