Social media, local churches and the gospel

Social media, local churches and the gospel

The SLT team has had the unique privilege of engaging widely in social media for the gospel across NZ for a while now. In our own perception, our work represents the wider Church – ensuring Christian messages are seen by the public at key time. This is our motive. This kind of nationwide, gospel-focused engagement is something we identified as a gap, sitting beyond the regular activities of churches and various ministries.

This article exists to share some learnings regarding the pros and cons of social media for churches, along with practical tips to help you make the most of it.

As a starting thought: Having an online presence can matter in today’s world, but it is no substitute for real, face-to-face connection.

Social media is best seen as one valuable part of a bigger picture – but never the whole picture. It’s a tool to support and deepen other relational work that is happening in your church or ministry.

Rethinking Social Media: More Than Just a Noticeboard

Most churches in New Zealand have a presence on social media. But what if your content strategy could do more than just keep people informed? What if it could be a tool for deeper engagement, storytelling, and outreach? With a fresh approach, the social media space has opportunities in it that can make a difference both with your current members as also to your wider community.

If we view social media only as a digital noticeboard for a church community, the most common types of posts will be as follows:

• What’s coming up in church life – events, sermon series, or seminars
• Highlights from Sunday services, youth nights, or special events
• Bible verses or short words of encouragement
• Livestreams of services or sermon snippets

While this content is valuable for informing and encouraging, more is possible.

What kind of ‘outreach equipping’ is needed?

Here’s a simple ‘curriculum’ to reflect the areas I suggest we’d do well to equip believers in via our pulpits and small groups.

• Conversational skills – to know how to ask and lead conversations through good questions.
• Gospel skills – to be able to share God’s story clearly and concisely – ideally within a conversation in a natural way, followed with a natural story, question or invitation.
• Testimonial / storytelling skills – to be able to give evidences to the truth of the message through story, whether our own, someone else’s, the story of amazing things in nature, or of positive societal change enabled by Christianity in history.
• Teamwork skills – because God made us different for a reason. (This releases the potential of ‘invitation’.)

All of these things are biblical, and can be taught from a biblical base.

To be clear of our goal, it not so much that our members talk to strangers as it is that they begin to engage with greater confidence and competence in their everyday conversational opportunities.

1. New Vision: What Might an Intentional Online Media Campaign Look Like?

To give a sense of what’s possible, a recent Hope Project social media campaign at Easter 2025 ran coordinated strategies across Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google Search Ads, and YouTube. The campaign reached approximately 150,000 users through Google platforms, while Meta platforms reached 1.5 million users on Facebook and 350,000 on Instagram. In total, 7.4 million content views by the nearly 1.9 million different people, with 17,500 interactions resulting.

This is an example of intentional investment in both content creation and paid promotion, designed to ensure that Christian messages remain visible in NZ public spaces – reminding people that the Church is present, and that their messages still have relevance to our culture.

These campaigns are guided by clear objectives. For example, the Easter 2025 campaign focused on three outcomes:

1. Make Easter visible – through images and a video/poem
2. Prompt action – specifically encouraging attendance at a local church at Easter
3. To rethink the story – inviting people to question the secular narrative through prompting new thoughts about God’s existence, nature and significance in history to our national culture and values.

This scale is beyond a local church – but not a national ministry.

Localised campaigns are also possible – which is within the budget of a local church or group of churches. Let’s expand on this thought.

2. Using Social Media to Influence Culture, Not Just Inform the Church

What if churches used social media not just to speak to their own members, but to reach the wider public?

One powerful way to do this is by sharing and boosting (through paid ads) content that goes beyond your local church’s activities. Content chosen could be purposed to keep Christian messages visible and relevant in everyday spaces.

This could include:

• Short, thought-provoking Christian messages that keep faith, hope and Christian compassion present in the public conversation
• Stories that subtly dig into reasons for belief – personal, rational, and historical
• Testimonies of life change through faith in Jesus
• Stories that highlight Christianity’s role in shaping our history and values

(We would caution against an approach for local churches that is too direct. This is a connection point to catalyse an interest, not the main room or meeting.)

A tip, at the same time, your regular content intended for your church members could be reframed to be more invitational – written and presented with the public in mind, not just your congregation. For example:

• Family, parenting, or marriage content that connects with common needs and offers hope
• Stories from key ministries, highlighting the people serving and the impact they’re making
• Annual promotion of your youth and children’s ministries, showing their value and vitality
• Sharing what your church is doing in the community — whether it’s Mainly Music, Light Parties, Christmas hampers, or winter packs

If churches across the country adopted the goal of keeping Christian truth visible and actively shared the good being done in their communities, it would gradually shape culture – influencing how people see the gospel, the Church, and the relevance of faith today.

3. FIVE KEYS TO PURPOSEFUL CHURCH SOCIAL MEDIA

A.   Establish a Clear Goal for Your Church’s Social Media
B.   Use the Platforms Your Members Already Use
C.   Build a team
D.   Create a content plan
E.    Identify content that matches your goal

A.   Establish a Clear Goal for Your Church’s Social Media

As illustrated in the previous section, national campaigns are guided by clear, focused goals. The same principle applies locally. Content will otherwise become scattered and lose impact.

For a local church, a simple and effective goal could be: “Build faith; build connection.”

This then becomes the ‘lens’ through which all content is then filtered or shaped. Every post should serve one or both of these aims – encouraging faith and hope, or helping people feel more connected to others and to your church.

This means that not everything that’s interesting to you will belong on your church’s social media. For example, a comment from a public figure might be suitable for a personal profile, but not for your church page. Posting unrelated or even potentially divisive content can undermine trust in a platform, and might sometimes create unnecessary complications also.

Being intentional with your goal helps provides a filter for discerning what to post – and what to leave out. We’ll outline five ‘cons’ of social media shortly.

B.   Use the Platforms Your Members Already Use

From the outset, seek to identify which platforms your members are already engaging with.

What isn’t to be underestimated is the amount of time church members spend on social media. There will even be grandmas who spend 2 to 4 hours per day engaging with people and information online.

The following list reflects how we would prioritise these platforms for local churches, based on their accessibility, reach, and current usage trends: (Data from 2024 / 2025).

• Facebook – has 4.4 million users in NZ currently – 85.3% of population.
  • This is the main-stay in social media for most.
  • Highest bracket of users are 25-34 age (24.6% of total)
  • However it is ‘pay to play’ if you want a wider audience.
• Instagram – has 2.5 million users in NZ currently – 48.3% of population.
  • This is video / photo based and oriented – being about demonstrating a lifestyle more-so than communicating information
  • Highest brackets of users are ages 25-34 (29.9%) then ages 18-24 (29%).
  • With the higher younger audience it can be used to reflect your church culture.
  • It also receives good engagement – being as much as 58 times higher than FaceBook, to give the comparison.
  • Negatively – it’s maybe more generational and, as noted, not so good for sharing information.
• TikTok – at least 1.9 million users, however data only counts age 18 and over.
  • Most popular among 18-24 and 13-17 age groups.
• X (previously Twitter) – has 933,000 NZ users (or 700,000 depending which data is used) currently
  • It is useful for short content and carries lots of breaking news, politics and opinions. Designed to be interactive with people giving their personal commentaries and reactions as content is posted.
• YouTube – has 4.19 million users
  • This is useful for hosting and sharing your videos, while YouTube ‘Shorts’ are a useful interactive tool to share short video clips and messages.
  • The way the algorithms work gives people more of what they already watch. For this reason, if you want to push content out to new audiences in New Zealand, even if you put money behind it your effectiveness will still be minimal. YouTube essentially only promotes more of the content a person has already shown interest in. So while a level of international audience is possible, it’s very-much ‘pay to play’ and therefore best kept as a video hosting and sharing platform for most.

We would think FaceBook and Instagram most suited for the majority of churches.

C.   Build a team

If social media relies on one person, it can quickly stall when they’re unavailable due to travel, illness, or other commitments. The same applies to a ministry creating a social media strategy based around one person.

A team is also valuable where posts generate comments and messages, so you can respond, and in a timely (gently, respectful) manner.

Some people naturally spend time on social media. Knowing this, there are sure to be people within your church who are active users – well suited to this role. For them, checking in and responding as part of a team can be both meaningful and easy to sustain.

D.   Create a content plan

As an idea, aim for two posts per week. Consistency matters, and algorithms favour it. Without a plan, this is hard to sustain.

A plan keeps content focused, organised, and manageable for your team.

We manage several channels, each with a plan. Only our public-facing platforms require regular creative input. Once patterns are set, these can become easy to manage.

E.   Identify content that matches your goal

Consider these areas – inclusive of suggestions to make finding content easy for you:

• Stories about reasons for faith
  • Note videos from WhyChristiansBelieve.nz, LongStoryShort.co or FaceBook posts shared from Creation.com
• Stories about life change
  • Note videos from HopeProject.co.nz, Lifetv.co or knownnz.com  It would be easy to post a testimony every second week. It builds faith!
• Stories about Christianity in our history
  • HopeProject.co.nz is now creating approx. 1min videos specifically on this topic – while links to various other articles or stories can also work
• Stories and invitation related to family, parenting and marriage
  • Testimonies about overcoming challenges in marriage, parenting and more are highly relevant. These ‘scratch where it itches’
  • Courses on marriage and parenting are relevant to your whole community
• Stories and invitation related to key seasons like Christmas and Easter
  • Media from Hope Project can be shared – or just your own.
  • There can be posts at Matariki and Waitangi, regarding Halloween, Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day – and more – telling stories – generating positive engagement and hope.
  • Open invitations to church activities in these time are suitable.
• Annual promotion of key ministries in your church – telling the stories of those doing the work
  • Promote your Sunday School and its work annually.
  • Also your youth group
  • Mainly Music
  • Your community ministries
  • Maybe your amazing worship facilitation team / musicians.
  • Reflect the life, vibrancy, vision, hopes and efforts of your people – by applauding them through story to thank them.

With just the above, a plan with 2 posts per week isn’t difficult – feeding into the life of a church and its community.

As a process, we’d suggest putting the seasonal posts / event promotions in there first – then building around this – while remembering that this is made easy with a team.

4. Five Realities (‘cons’) to Keep in Mind

Disappointment undermines vision. These points are worth consideration.

• You need a team. Not all pastors are into social media. This will work best and be kept at its most simple when shared across a small, reliable team.
• You won’t reach everyone. Your members use different platforms, so no single channel connects with all.
• Reach often requires budget. A small spend can expand your reach to non-church audiences significantly for those occasions where this is desired. Boosting key posts with $2, $5 or $10 will sometimes go a long way – especially for content aimed only at your own geographic community.
• Expect some negativity. Social media is public, and some forget to be civil. They become bold and rude in a way that they aren’t in person. Respond with gentleness, humility, and restraint. Be aware: Many more people will see your replies than the comment itself.
• Too much focus can be a distraction. As in the opening comments of this article, social media is one connection point – strengthening engagement and encouragement, but only inasmuch as this is a subset of a wider ministry.

5. An Encouragement: Occasionally Promote to Your Whole Town or City

Very few do this. We are encouraging that this be changed.

Most churches focus their communication and strategies only on their own members or local ministry events. Social media is an avenue by which local churches can connect wider if they choose to.

Consider, if around 10% of the non-church-attending public connect with a Christian message through a believer each year…

…and another 10% connect through a church community ministry (though the gospel is often not shared)…

…this leaves approximately 80% of the non-church-attending public with no-one seeking to connect a Christian message with them in an average year.

In practice, for all the vast sums of money our churches receive and spend, the MAJORITY remain unreached. This point is rarely considered and discussed.

Maybe we think this isn’t our responsibility, or maybe we’ve just never thought about our wider mission. We suggest this our responsibility – requiring application through individuals and churches in every location.

Reaching the wider populations of our cities and nation is where unity becomes important – and also Church (vs local church) ministries. This isn’t someone else’s responsibility. It’s part of our shared mission.

If you’re sharing content that could benefit a broader audience, it’s worth considering a small paid promotion to extend its reach.

• E.g. Promote Mainly Music once a year to women aged 20–35 – a group that includes most new mums.
• E.g. Promote a Marriage Course to women aged 25–55 – many men attend because their partners invite them.
• E.g. Promote community events like a Christmas service in the park, especially if they include family-friendly activities like games and a picnic.
• E.g. Simply invite people to your Easter and Christmas services; they are welcome.

This is one part of a larger picture, and it matters. The people beyond your church’s regular reach are worth every effort.

A closing story

It is rare that an antagonist in social media admits a change.

A man stated in our social media that faith in God was rubbish. He’d died – and felt nothing. Revived by a doctor the doctor confirmed, “Once you are dead you are dead!”

A gentle reply invoked a second comment. He complained at the injustice of a God who allows suffering. We replied to say he sounded like Job in the Bible, who made the same complaints.

Intrigued, he said, “I’d like to read that” – so we sent him a Bible.

A dozen or more other objections then followed. Having answered these concisely and politely we suggested that eventually a decision of faith is needed. The weight of evidence suggests God is there – but that gap requiring faith will always remain.

A while later he came back stating how different he felt now that he’d decided to trust in God – even though it all still made no sense to him. We suggested visiting a local church and gave him a few options.

Our last reply from him – maybe two months after the conversation had started – was simply to tell us that he’d decided he was going to start going to a church, and had lined up a first church to visit.

Measurable results in social media are rare in our experience. However, every post – so long as it is gracious, gentle, faith-building and also not in strange ‘religious’ language… can be a part of a persons’ journey. A journey toward faith involves one hundred small steps – with a range of connection points and invitations amongst them.

Millions of New Zealanders are on social media each day, and for hours at a time!