(Note: the blue horizontal menu bar directly above lists the subsections of "The Parish Facebook. Beginning with "Self-Organizing Religious Communities," be sure to read each of these subsections before moving on to "So Many Wishing Me Happy Birthday!")

The Parish Facebook

Brian Brunius had lived in Manhattan for ten years, and he sometimes, but rarely, attended Mass at his local Catholic parish. "I would go in and leave. I would never hang out to talk or chat," the thirty-eight-year-old TV producer and new-media consultant said. At one point, he put his e-mail address down on a church sign-up list, something he quickly forgot about. About three months later, he received a parish bulletin in his in-box; his e-mail address, along with many others, appeared in the address list. "Within the next twenty-four hours, I got about thirty friend requests on Facebook from people I didn't know and had never met," said Brunius.

Brunius was already a member and active user of Facebook, the social networking utility that has rocketed to mass popularity after it opened to a general audience in 2006. Members can automatically submit their list of e-mail contacts to Facebook, which then displays the people from that list who are already Facebook members. "It turned out all these people who 'friended' me were members of my parish," explained Brunius. When his e-mail had shown up on the mailing list, parish members were easily able to see he had a Facebook profile. Brunius said yes to all the friend requests, a step that allowed him and his new friends to view one another's profiles, which include photos; tastes in movies, books, and films; and countless other opportunities for personal expression.

"Then this little dance started," recalled Brunius. One of his new contacts would send him in an invitation via Facebook for a church event or choir performance or committee meeting. At first he was unsure how to respond: He didn't know if he was being invited personally, or if the person had simply invited all his or her Facebook friends. "But I found myself very likely to click, 'Yes, I will attend,' even though these were people I had never met," he said. While previously Brunius's only parish-related activity was attending Mass, he now found himself at events like a Christmas concert after receiving an invitation from a Facebook friend who was a choir member. "There's no way I would have gone to some of those things if someone hadn't invited me," he said.

Hearing of Brunius's experience, Helen Mildenhall, a faith blogger and manager of OfftheMap.com, a community website for offbeat Christians, pointed out personal invitations and relationships are what bring people into religious congregations. "What's interesting is that it works online, even when that invitation is coming from someone you don't really know but whom you are 'friends with' on Facebook," she said. This model may have worked particularly well because Brunius was at home on Facebook; it was a venue of genuine connection for him, and he paid attention to what happened in that space.

Brunius said he still doesn't attend Mass regularly, but he goes more than he used to. Belonging to a parish, he said, "has become part of my identity again."

"If I meet someone new at church, I go home and see if any of my Facebook contacts are friends with that person," he said. Because Facebook shows users what friends you share in common with another person, Brunius sometimes discovers that a new acquaintance from church shares mutual friends with him. "When I see we have friends in common, I feel some kind of connection, some sense of possibility. It draws me into a social circle." Brunius said most of the friendships he has through Facebook with parish members have not yet evolved into deep or long-lasting relationships, but this limitation does not trouble him. "My life is full as it is, so I'm not really looking for new friendships. But now the parish has this tiny grab on me, not through the organization itself, but through each of these individual relationships."

Although Brunius works professionally with new media—one of his projects involved creating a website for an order of Catholic sisters—he said this personal experience helped him see the power of online tools for congregations. "A lot of people have been afraid the Internet is going to be a closed space that isolates people and limits real human communication. For me, the experience has been quite the opposite. I am hooked into a community I never knew existed. We had only this one small thing in common: We were all on a mailing list."

This experience of interconnectedness has not always been easy. Two parish members who friended him through Facebook later "de-friended" him and told him why: They said they could not be associated with him because he was gay, a fact they discovered on his Facebook profile. But Brunius said he does not regret having a single space online that brings together people he knows from his past, his personal and professional life, and now his religious life. "It has made me more committed to Facebook. If you're online, it's not possible to hide. I see people doing and saying things through Facebook they would have been ashamed to do ten years ago, so I think that shame is disappearing." Brunius also joined the Facebook group related to his parish as well as a group bringing together Catholics from around New York City. But he eventually left these groups because the volume of messages and invitations was too much to handle.