Rick Warren introduced an idea several years ago in his book "Purpose Driven Church".  The concentric circles represented the influence and relationships of a community in this order:

1. Community
2. Crowd
3. Congregation
4. Committed
5. Core

It provides a handy framework for understanding influence and commitment among the people in any given church environment.  I began thinking recently about the use of social media and the context within which they operate for pastors and churches.

To me the correlation between technologies goes something like this:

1. Community = mass media (radio, tv, youtube)
2. Crowd = Twitter
3. Congregation = facebook
4. Committed = email/phone
5. Core = face to face / coffee

Community is a larger body that pretty much allows one-way communication or limited two-way.  Community has been traditionally fostered through mass media and now perhaps some narrowcast media as well. At Coffee Creek we implement a weekly podcast and our media team produces a vimeo video that is available 24×7 for streaming on the internet.

The crowd is a smaller group that raises it's hand and says – I'd like to know more. Twitter facilitates this sort of relationship with a feedback channel through retweets and direct messages. With twitter I send updates on service themes, topics, and links to resources that fit our current theme or teaching series.  This is a natural occurrence as I read, highlight, and copy the thoughts into 140 characters or less. follow @clarkfrailey on twitter

Next a congregational relationship is a little bit closer in that I know your kids names and care what you might have done over the holidays.  facebook facilitates a closer connection by sharing photos, videos, and more posts of a more personal nature that engages a conversation (via comments).  Our Coffee Creek facebook fan page allows us a level of more personal connection to a smaller group of people that have expressed an interest in knowing what's going on around Coffee Creek.

The committed group is a tighter group that expresses a desire to be on the "inside track" – to me communication in email and by text/phone provide this group a deeper connection with volume of content and ability to ask questions and receive responses. At Coffee Creek we send a weekly email update with little text and big pictures that link back to website pages for further info or registration forms as appropriate.  MailChimp is an excellent and reasonable service for sending regular emails to targeted mailing lists.

The final group, the "core" is the group that probably deserves to be communicated with regularly (monthly/weekly) in face to face conversations, coffee meetings, and brainstorm sessions. It's hard for me to envision how this group could maintain the direction and unity necessary for a core if they did not have some significant face time outside of social media.

One major upside of social media to me is that crowd, congregation, and committed prior to this technology were largely omitted from these channels of communication (outside of a newsletter or special mailing).  Social media allows an extra layer of connection that should strengthen the bonds of all levels of relationship