The Twilight of Church Social Media and the Dawn of the Influencer-Evangelist

As trust among institutions and brands rapidly drop, new challenges - and opportunities - arise for local churches on social media

Pexels/Aidan Roof

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This is the third of four posts adding some additional commentary to Ian Harbor and I’s recent piece on ERLC.com, “4 social media shifts the church should know about”. Each of the four shifts could be an entire article by themselves, and this week, I will be focusing on the third shift in that article, “A shift from brand to influencer”. Like last week, I will be opening up a thread in Substack Chat for further discussion, and Ian will be chiming in as well!

One Clarification Before Continuing

Among certain corners of the Internet, there is no shortage of discourse about how institutional church power ought to be taken down a notch. That is a conversation I am willing to have (and think is very much worth having for a variety of reasons¹), but it is not in view here for this piece. My number one goal for this piece/series is to provide guidance to church leaders on how they can continue to steward their church’s social media presence well, not to enjoin a much larger discussion about whether churches are actually brands or how much institutional power a local church ought/ought not have. Additionally, in speaking of churches as a “brand”, I am not doing so prescriptively, as though this were a good or ideal thing. Rather, my insights are descriptive as I attempt to draw connections where connections can be made. If I don’t explicitly state an assumption you may think I am making, there is a good chance I don’t share that assumption!

The Institutional-Brand Trust Crisis

Let’s set the stage for this piece: according to Gallup, confidence in U.S. institutions are at a new low. From 2021 to 2022, there was not a single major institution in the U.S. that did not experience a decrease in trust (or in one case, stayed the same) from the American public. This includes not only congress, the military, banks, and television media, but it also includes the police, the criminal justice system, and of course, churches and religious institutions.² When averaged out across all institutions, only 27% of American adults express “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of trust in all these institutions - down from the previous low of 32% in 2021.

These downward trends carry over across party lines. Democrats, already with a low percentage of trust in “the church or organized religion”, only decreased 1%, from 27% to 26%. For Republicans, trust decreased by 6%, from 52% to 46%. For Independents, it’s even higher: a decrease of 10%. from 35% to 25%. This puts the difference between Independents and Democrats at 1% away from each other, and the difference between I’s/D’s and Republicans at a whopping 20-21%. Less than half of Republicans have “a great deal or quite a bit of confidence in the institution”, and only a quarter of Independents and Democrats.

This decline in trust does not just extend to institutions - it extends to brands as well. The Dieringer Research Group (better known as “The DRG”) reports that while brands may be more trusted than the government and media, at the same time, people would not care if 75% of brands disappeared. Only 39% of North Americans are seen as “trustworthy”, the 12th straight year of decline. While The DRG attempts to frame these trends along an optimistic “age of trust” view, they do not hide behind the fact that the “age of cynicism” view is quite strong.

Taken together, two clear pictures emerge:

1. Institutions and brands are seen with increasing suspicion and distrust, and

2. Suspicion and distrust weakens the power of institutions and brands.

If brands and institutions are weakening, this creates an opportunity for something to fill that vacuum. In this case, something already has filled that vacuum: partnerships with social media influencers with large followings, and there is no better illustration of this than skincare company CeraVe’s wildly successful TikTok influencer campaign in 2020.

The CeraVe Influencer Campaign of 2020

In Beauty Business Journal’s stellar write up, “How CeraVe Became an Unlikely Gen Z Favorite”, Mark Jeffreys describes how skincare company CeraVe blew past it’s main rival, Cetaphil, in 2020. Key measurements for this explosive growth included the number of 5 star reviews that began to appear for CeraVe’s products, and the frequency at which the word “TikTok” appeared in the reviews (e.g. “saw this on TikTok”). A handful of skincare-tok influencers, namely Hyram Yarbro, were recommending CeraVe products to their GenZ audience, and when CeraVe recognized this, they jumped headfirst into the trend - not by promoting themselves as an brand, but by promoting their products through personalities. As Jeffrey’s summarizes:

“Before this, Gen Z, like generations before, discovered skincare brands from dermatologists. But with the rise of skincare influencers creating content on social media platforms like Tiktok, dermatologists are no longer their first go-to when it comes to skincare. They now get their recommendations from skincare influencers, more relatable because they are closer in age and know what it feels like to be in their shoes. This shift has led to otherwise unassuming brands like CeraVe becoming popular enough to sell out their entire supplies.”

Jeffrey concludes with a point that this series, and the ERLC piece that spawned it, has been been making since the start:

The power of social media, especially video content, is here to stay. As Gen Z’s purchasing power increases, it is high time that marketers focus on what type of content resonates well with this generation and adapt accordingly. Video content in TikTok and YouTube will continue to shape impressions of a product so it is crucial that brands look into user-generated content, not just as a trending buzzword but as a means to reach out to a wider audience.

To be sure, there is a danger in over-emphasizing Gen Z trends and changes as though the trends and behaviors of Millennials, Gen X’ers, and Boomers were no longer relevant. Bob Hoffman, in his hilarious (and often savage) Ad Contrarian newsletter³, often notes that the ad industry’s newfound obsession with Gen Z behavior has led to some foolish and nearsighted decision making that have cost businesses more than they’ve helped them. But at the same time, these trends in Gen Z are not unique to just Gen Z, nor are these trends appearing in a vacuum or against the grain of other trends. Taken together, the decline in institutional and brand trust, along with the shift to social media as television and the rise of location-neutral social media, does not hamper the rise of influencers - if anything, these three trends are the very preconditions necessary for influencers to truly take off to unprecedented heights.

What Does This Have To Do With Local Churches?

At this point, a natural objection may arise - what does any of this have to do with local churches? Business and marketing trends can provide some helpful context or secondary guidance for churches, but churches are not a business, nor do we market a product. Why does any of this matter?

The short answer is this, from our ERLC piece:

Most people will see a church’s online presence the same way they see brands. They aren’t personal. They are self-serving, focusing primarily on pushing out church events and information, not helping or engaging the social media consumer. People are going to look for and care about your church online less and less. They don’t go to the internet to find a brand, they go to the internet to find a person.

The longer answer is this: if most people see your church’s online presence the same way they see brands, and if brand perception and trust is increasingly seen with suspicion and distrust, it means they will see your church with suspicion and distrust as well.

No, churches are not businesses, nor do we market a product. However, when it comes to institutional social media, churches are operating in a space that lives and breathes business and products. Calling “the Gospel” or orthodox teaching a “product” may border on sacrilege, and yet in this space, everything is flattened out to a product, whether a literal product or the cosmic mystery of Jesus Christ. If you want to play in this space, these are the rules of the game, whether we like it or not.

Of course, taken together with the shifts towards location-neutrality and interest driven algorithms, this shift towards personal-influencer driven social media does not help local churches at all. These two shifts combined together effectively spell the end of “traditional social media management” for local churches; even if you were to begin pumping money into your posts, your appearance as an institution will be met with more suspicion and distrust by default.

This creates a fork in the road: when it comes to a church’s institutional social media presence, there are three general paths a church can now take:

1. Spend 2x/3x/4x the amount of time/energy/revenue into maintaining a traditional social media presence for increasingly-diminishing returns.

2. Consolidate your institutional presence around short-form video content on the platforms your church currently uses.

3. Scale back on your institutional social media presence and spend that time/energy/revenue on supporting personal/individual representatives of your church.

For the vast majority of churches, Route 1 is not even possible, much less desirable. Route 2 is a gamble, but is viable for more churches than Route 1 (and I have a piece in the works outlining a blueprint for how this would even work). For most churches, Route 3 will be the route that they either willingly or reluctantly embrace - but I want to suggest that with these new challenges come some exciting new opportunities for both evangelism and digital discipleship.

The Influencer-Evangelist Model - A Convictional Sketch

On Christmas Day, my church ended its service by singing “Go Tell It On The Mountain”. You probably know the lyrics by heart, and what the lyrics are about: from the highest and most visible points possible, where people can easily hear, we ought to loudly proclaim the coming of Christ and his Gospel.

Where are those ‘mountains’ today? You can probably see where this is going: the highest and most visible points of our world today are often mediated through social media.

“Go Tell It On The Mountain” has a uniquely individual emphasis. It isn’t about institutions going to the mountains to the declare the birth of Christ; it’s that you, as an individual, ought to do this. Traditionally, we call this “evangelism”, and those who evangelize are “evangelists”. While we ought to emphasize the personal, corporeal, and embodied nature of biblical evangelism, we ought to take comfort that “God, in His ordinary providence, makes use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at His pleasure”⁴ - and we ought to shudder at the unbelieving suggestion that God's providence cannot extend to social media algorithms as well.

I worry about what my students, family, friends, and fellow church members hear about Christianity and Christians on TikTok. I have no room to point fingers - I spend plenty of time on Christian Twitter, by no means a bastion of pious orthodoxy - but I am someone with a decade of training and experience in apologetics, and who studies theology, biblical studies, and church history for professional development and as a hobby. I worry about those whose minds and hearts may be ensnared by false truths or deceptions that rob them of the truth and the freedom it brings, who lack the tools, training, and support to recognize and reject error and deceptive allure where it is found.

But what have I offered in exchange? Yes, I can tell them to come up to where I am at - to read the things I read, to study the things I study, to just stop using TikTok because I don’t use TikTok. But that is not the way of Christ, who descended to seek and save the lost by taking on a human nature through his incarnation. Christ did not tell us “come up to where I am”; he “descended into hell”, as the Creed says, to save those held under the sway of sin, death, and the devil.

I would appeal to pastors and church leaders not from a place of expertise, but of conviction: if we are concerned about the spiritual falsehoods of short-form video, but we are not offering an alternative within those spaces, we are forfeiting a chance to share in the sufferings of Christ as we descend to a place many of us do not want to go to magnify the glory of Christ. Short form video requires little more than the phone in your pocket. It requires you to speak clearly; public speaking is a core skill of vocational ministry. It requires you to inform and educate; the office of “teacher” is one of the main offices of the church. It requires you to be fully personal and vulnerable, and not hide behind a podium or institutional branding to shield you from pushback and criticism.

Those of us in church leadership have often been trained by institutions to preserve institutions for the good of the people these institutions serve. Yet if institutional trust is at an all time low, and continues to trend downward, your people will not look for institutions for guidance and instruction, but from other individuals they relate to. You could be one of those people - if you’re willing to humble yourself and share in the sufferings of Christ.

As we say in the ERLC piece, “God didn’t come to us as an abstraction or a brand. He came to us as a person and it is other persons who are his ambassadors, or representatives, in the world according to Paul (2 Cor. 5:20).” To whom much has been given, much will be required; and to whom with great concern about how nasty and terrible TikTok and YouTube can be, there is great opportunity to shine a bright light in a deep darkness.

This is, in its most raw and fundamental form, my sketch of an influencer-evangelist model. It is not complete, and needs to be developed more, but if institutional social media is on the decline, this model is the way forward for churches - for Christians - on social media. It is not a new model; I remember this model being pioneered by Tony Birdsong and Tami Helm in their book “@StickyJesus: How to Live Out Your Faith Online” back in 2009. And yet, it is more relevant than it ever has been. We not only have the opportunity to lead with truth, but to give people places to belong to, and next week I will explain how social media’s shift from information to identity creates more problems - and more opportunities - for pastors and churches on social media.

Substack Chat for This Week: Your Favorite TikTok/YouTube Short Christian Content Creators

I recently took Twitter off my phone to be able to focus more on writing. For all the chaos of Twitter, Substack’s growth and improvement gets me excited to write and engage with readers through one of their best new features, Substack Chat. While I hope a desktop version comes in the future, right now it is only available on the mobile app, so if you’re reading on email or desktop, consider downloading the app!

Here is my question based on this week’s post: what are your favorite TikTok or YouTube Short Christian content creators? There is a good chance that your answer is “I don’t know any”, and if that’s the case, I hope some recommendations appear to point you in the right directions!

Thanks for reading Passing Through Digital Babylon. Next week I will be writing on the fourth shift of our ERLC piece, and what it means for the future of church social media as tribalism rises above truth, and the challenges and opportunities this shift brings. If you enjoyed this piece, please consider sharing it on your socials or texting it to a friend who might enjoy it too!

Together, we are passing through Digital Babylon,

Austin.

1. Namely, how decline in institutional integrity and trust is one of the greatest drivers of violent radicalization in our country. If you’re scared that America is getting more violent and dangerous, the single most helpful thing you can do to push back that trend is to restore trust and integrity to our foundational institutions - and to not contribute to eroding them further.

2. Technically “the church and organized religion”, but I don’t want the wording to get in the way of the point I want to make: distrust in “the church” includes your church as well.

3. I should add his writing can be very vulgar at times, but credit must be given where it is due: he is not only one of the best advertising writers active, but one of the funniest writers I read on a regular basis.

4. Westminster Confession of Faith 5.3