If I were on a church\u2019s pastoral search committee, one question I would have for each candidate is:<\/p>\n
What social media accounts do you use, how often do you publish on them, and who in your life has total access to your page and your private messages and could confront you, if necessary, about anything on there?<\/p>\n
A brief unpacking:<\/p>\n
What social media accounts do you use?<\/strong><\/p>\n In general, I would be more comfortable with regular Facebook use than I would be with regular Twitter or Instagram use. All variables being equal, Facebook, as ridiculous as I often find it nowadays, is probably the social media platform that can most be justified by saying, \u201cThis is where the people in my church are.\u201d If you\u2019re a typical evangelical church, the odds are good that fewer than 10% of your people on Twitter or Instagram, but it would be not surprising if about half of the congregation was on Facebook.<\/p>\n The point of this question is not to just to see which platforms the candidate prefers, but to get a read on why, if he were to become pastor of my church, he would continue to use them. A pastor who<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When pastors log on to social media and berate others relentlessly, post incessantly, or communicate inappropriately, it is very likely that red flags were visible before the point of crisis.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":566,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[793],"tags":[312],"class_list":["post-64393","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-9marks","tag-leadership","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64393","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/566"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64393"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64393\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64395,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64393\/revisions\/64395"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64393"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64393"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/biblicalcounselor.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64393"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}