Digital Evangelism Issues

Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible
Keith Anderson and Elizabeth Drescher
Morehouse ISBN-13: 9780819227744

If Click 2 Save could be summed up in two points, they would be:

1. If you’re not involved in digital ministry, get a move on it!
2. Once you’re involved, strategy matters big time.

It’s only partially as tough love as it sounds. In an incredibly encouraging and supportive style – backed up with plenty of fascinating statistics, attractive infographics, and references to the best practices of up-and-running digital ministries – authors Keith Anderson and Elizabeth Drescher work off the premise that the digital reformation is yesterday’s news: social media has already reshaped the ways we connect with and relate to each other, and if it is the role of ministers to “engage people exactly where they are,” then we must recognize that “where they are” increasingly includes social media spaces.

Excitingly, as Anderson and Drescher point out, the interactive, socially-orientated character of this new world is phenomenally ideal for ministry. In fact, the same ministerial practices that have distinguished the church for millennia – outreach and friendship evangelism, spiritual care and shared prayer, relationship and community-building–adapt well to the interactive, socially-oriented nature of Web 2.0. In four chapters, Anderson and Drescher take us through the process of getting involved, answering the following key questions:

• Who is our audience? (What are the traits, desires, and expectations of digital natives?)
• How can we create an online presence that is “compassionate, engaged, inspiring, accessible, and informative, but above all…real”?
• Which digital platforms are best suited for us and our ministry?
• How can we best use the platforms we have selected?

For novices to digital ministry, Click 2 Save is perhaps the most relevant, offering practical strategies for starting out, from definitions and descriptions of the most popular social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blogs, YouTube, and FourSquare – to how to use them and build up a networked ministry. Experts in digital ministry will not find advanced technological instruction in Click 2 Save, and – despite the title – evangelism is only one of the aspects of ministry addressed, but the worksheets analyzing how a ministry’s online presence might better represent its unique character and goals might be useful to even the most well-established digital ministries.

Finally, though predominantly addressed to professional ministers, there is plenty to learn for lay Christians as well, especially in terms of how to be more reflective (and effective) with the type of material we choose to post and share online. Theoretical and practical, fact- and experience-based, Click 2 Save has something for everyone. If you are involved with or interested in digital ministry, check it out!

Practicing the networked approach that they preach, Anderson and Drescher have provided more information about Click 2 Save on Facebook and Twitter as well as on their personal web pages. The book is available from Amazon US in paperback and for Kindle, in UK and worldwide.

This guest book review is by Amber Stamper. She is a doctoral student in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Kentucky and is working on a dissertation about digital evangelism, for which she needs feedback on her questionnaire.

As she works through a reading list relating to this topic, she will be sharing her book reviews with us.

• see also interview with the book’s authors on the #chsocm site

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