Pastoral leadership and facebook

I was concerned this year, as our interns were returning to campus, to hear that several of them had been urged by various people in authority not to be involved with facebook at all while on internship. That kind of advice — that is, “simply leave it alone” — is generally very bad. If you’ve already had an account and a set of practices with it, simply deleting it can disrupt and even damage existing relationships. It’s also such am important space for so many people that refusing to engage it strikes me as particularly foolish.

That being said, there are still a lot of important issues to think about -- very few of which have any kind of consensus about "best practices" associated with them. Here are two interesting reflections by pastoral leaders about facebook and ministry. The first, which also appeared in the Christian Century blog, has elicited a number of comments. The second is an older piece, but I think it's still relevant, and makes clear how naive it might be to think that it's possible to have a "personal" and a "professional" face in that space.