A megachurch in Tennessee is collaborating with Facebook as part of its outreach program to build an online community that will help parishioners connect with each other.
Mt. Zion Baptist church was recently visited by a professional team from Facebook during a Sunday service to teach parishioners how to navigate the church's social media page.
"The biggest challenge of the church is getting people connected. Often, people see a church and don't know where to connect," the church's senior pastor, Bishop Joseph W. Walker III, told CBN News.
The social media company had launched the church's Facebook Group to help fulfill Walker's vision to "Connect, Commit, and Change."
The Facebook team is led by Nona Jones, who serves as the manager of Facebook's faith-based partnerships.
"People are becoming more and more isolated, but I think today was evidence that when you bring people together for the shared purpose and vision of community of faith ... there's tremendous energy there," Jones said.
As part of the outreach, Facebook launched a program called TechPrep, in which 50 kids from the church would learn computer programming directly from the social media giant on Saturdays.
Walker believes that his parishioners can acquire programming skills that can be used in the future to build technologies that will not only diversify the workforce but also help the church evangelize.
Jones, who is married to a pastor, started collaborating with Mt. Zion Baptist after hearing about Walker's mission and his work with youth. Prior to working for Facebook, Jones had been involved in the ministry for 18 years.
"I've preached around the country and around the world, and what's interesting is I wasn't asked to join [Facebook] in spite of that. I was asked to join the company because of that," she said.
She went on to note that Facebook works with leaders of faith communities across the world to help the social media giant "understand what are the products and tools that are needed to build community on our platform."
The social media giant has also formed partnerships with other well-known ministries, such as Life.Church, Elevation Church and The Potter's House.
Last summer, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used churches as an example of a community that brings people together when he hinted that he wanted the platform to be used as a means to create meaningful communities.
In January 2017, Zuckerberg met with church leaders in Texas to find out what role churches play in forming the community, and how it helps the community recover following disasters.
