The "It's Complicated" Series

The first time our church really dove in to social media stuff was during a series on relationships. We were looking at the family of Jacob. He had a manipulative mother, a clueless father, a hot head brother who wanted him dead, he accidentally married the wrong sister because of a scheming uncle, and his other wife was mad that she couldn't give him babies.

We wanted to talk about how relationships were messy, and started talking about what that looks like today. Someone mentioned that on Facebook, in your relationship status, one of the options besides married, single, etc., is "it's complicated."

We ran with it, and thought that would be a great name for the series. But we didn't stop there. We decided to make fake Facebook accounts for each of the characters, and assigned a different staff person to run each one. We would continually update their statuses and invited people from the church to join in the conversation and friend the characters.

For example, one of the posts from Isaac looked like this:

Isaac Beersheba Canaan
I love my boys Esau Hairy-One and Jacob Ben Isaac but when they constantly fight and bicker all of the time I think of how crazy it was to pray to God to open Rebekah's womb! Want to know the whole story? Check out Genesis 25:19-34

We also made a series of Jerry Springer-esque videos with some of the youth and whoever else we could grab to help tell the story. Here's one of them:

It's Complicated skit

It was a great way to be interactive with others on Facebook and allow people to share something kind of goofy from the church online but also help them to understand the story and share it with others. We had bunches of people friend the various characters.

What creative ways could YOU use social media in your church to tell the story?