Join Discord or for a video tutorial on how to get set-up and signed in, watch this video.
Since the beginning of SBCC, we know that so much “church” life lives outside of a Sunday morning; it happens in every connection we have. So very early in our life together, two Facebook groups were created to help facilitate community all week long. The Collective and Open Forum have served as two unique ways to get more connected to each other and to our city.As we began shifting our framework to Community, City, World we were giving the opportunity to evaluate whether these groups are the tools that serve us best in ongoing community.
A few observations:
- For any number of reasons, not everyone is on Facebook. Social media is complicated and we’ve heard from some of you that the SBCC groups are the only things keeping you on Facebook. For some, they deactivate during specific times of the year (whether that be Lent, election cycles, or more).
- If you call SBCC home, you have to request to be a part of two separate Facebook groups (and if you’re a guardian of a kiddo, you have to request to join a third).
- Facebook users are inundated with all sorts of personal, professional, just-for-fun, and, yes, political information. We’ve heard from some of you that a lot of times Collective or Forum posts can get lost in the noise and get missed.
- It’s independent of any other social media platforms and allows you to only see the information you choose to see. By joining and using our SBCC only invite link, you land on our server (which, for a lack of better terms, is basically our own app and one-stop shop for SBCC related info).
- Safety is of the utmost importance to us and Discord offers a variety of safety and privacy settings that allows SBCC, and each of you, to determine your experience on the app. While we require first name, last name, and photo for verification purposes to become a “verified member”, you can further choose to disable DMs, friend requests, and more.
- The South Bend City Church server can house a Collective channel (group), a Forum channel, a channel for “What’s Happening”, channels for our students and their mentors, and can grow with us as we live into our framework of Community, City, World.
Because of the observations made about Facebook, and the flexibility of Discord, we will be migrating our digital community to Discord. While we hope that we can make this change quickly, we recognize that it may take time to get the word out. The Facebook groups will remain active until January 1, 2025, but we encourage you to make your way over to Discord and start living your life over there. We hope that this makes SBCC information easier to find and the continuation of community easier throughout the week.
