Where do you draw the line on social media interactions with students? Why?

It’s like everyone online has their own twenty-four-hour satellite TV station running at full broadcast power, all the time, and we just change channels or tune in and out depending on what’s on. It’s one of the few areas I think it’s wise to put caution before anything else. Digital reality is removed from all the nuances of body language, tone, and context. The danger is that anyone using social media can reveal too much out of context or inappropriately. When I think about young people dealing with normal or out-of-the-ordinary life and angst, my fear is that using social media as an outlet or a source of reassurance can push young people out of healthy contextualized relationships where they can deal well with their issues and frustrations.

Similarly, it can create false expectations, false ideals to live up to. It’s easy to portray for yourself or observe in others a life that is better than—leading to unhealthy imitation or perspective. So here’s a few things I do and encourage others to do:

Be friendly with lists and privacy settings. You have to be transparent (so, perhaps consider living and displaying the kind of life on Facebook that doesn’t need any privacy), but you also need to be smart. Not all your family and friends on Facebook want to interact with your students. Always create lists and manage your post visibility according to lists; customize your security settings. This includes chat settings.

Can we talk about it offline? Rarely will discussing it online be helpful in the long term. I often make myself unavailable to chat online with students or with students’ parents. Both groups need face-to-face or phone time. However, if I’m online and a student chats to say hi, no problem. If the conversation turns serious, I take it to a phone call. Often students find the courage to type before they talk, but it’s my responsibility to turn text into talking by getting them on the phone or in a room. Same with text messaging; it’s just a no-no.

The drama queen and the passive-aggressive tragedy. We all have those students, and they can be difficult to deal with face to face but can be even worse given social media tools. You know the ones. They take potshots at the “friends who disappoint” them and use social media to talk about how lonely they are, “but it’s no surprise.” The dark underbelly of blogging and social media is that it creates a platform to talk, even if no one’s listening. My rule is that I simply won’t engage in the public forum, but if the pattern of online behaviour matches offline, real-life behavior, then it’s time to intervene and address the issues.

Should I be friends with my students on Facebook? Probably the question everyone starts with. So long as you can treat students with the same level of respect that you would hope for, then yes. But you need to think it through and let your supervisors know what your plan is so that you’re working from a basis of positive trust and in an affirming environment from the outset.

What about randoms? Very few people become friends on Facebook first and transpire those relationships to real connections. I’m lucky; one of my best friends and I met online, but our friendship has transcended that and lasted ten years. We were peers, however, and the balance of trust in our relationship was equal. As a youth worker, you have a level of trust from parents, students, your church, and society that must be maintained. I’ve often had to decide what to do with random requests from speaking at an event or students who came to youth group once. Reading the above, can you guess my response? Of course I’ll say yes, but everyone goes into a list!

Human communication is complicated; there’s no two ways about it. We weren’t really designed for one-volume broadcasting, and we have to remember that. We were designed for layers of influence, relationship, conversation, and the beauty of the spoken word. Social media should only ever be a springboard into a better, deeper, relational swimming pool.

The highest ideal and supreme example of communication is found in God, who became man and brother to us. In our liturgy, we pray that we might “come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity.” That Jesus Christ came to earth in bodily form to repair the fractured relationship between God and man powerfully exemplifies the importance and significance of real relationships. Jesus walked among us. He listened. He spoke. He told stories and shared meals. He cried at the loss of a friend. He healed others with forgiveness, a touch, or a vocal command. Jesus Christ is the fullest experience of God being in relationship with us. We who desire to communicate God’s love for others and the invitation to be disciples of Jesus must recognize the value of real relationships in our various ministries.

Virtual relationships only hint at intimacy. We who believe in the incarnation recognize the highest value being placed on relationships where we “dwell among” others. Because of this, our relationships seek and desire not a transitory acquaintanceship but the fullest of commitment to one another.

In virtual reality, there can be a false perception of closeness, but it is not true intimacy. In our faith, we understand the truest intimacy to occur when we are in communion with one another. The earliest Christians understood the role of communion, intimacy, and relationship building as imperative to discipleship. In the Book of Acts (2:42-47), community is articulated: “All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their property and possessions and divide them among all according to each one's need.”

It sounds contrary to speak in the ideal of intimacy of Christian relationships but then put on the brakes. Consider these issues: There is a difference between being friendly and being friends with children and youth. I do not include young people in my social circle. Healthy boundaries between adults and young people must be maintained. It is uncomfortable and inappropriate when there seems to be a special relationship between an adult and a young person who seems to be a favorite. The appearance of special relationships will always undermine one’s effectiveness in addressing the whole community. As ministers, we are called to objectively assess how others might perceive or misconstrue your behavior and the behavior of the adults with whom you minister. Social networking makes it difficult to maintain the perception of treating all equally. There is great risk in patrolling the internet for the young people to whom you minister. While a young person should have no expectation that statements made online are private, it is the parent’s role to monitor their child’s behavior, and those who minister to young people on behalf of the church never should usurp the role of the parent. Intentionally monitoring and probing where young people have shared their intimate thoughts violates their privacy, not unlike picking up a participant’s retreat journal over a meal break.

Now, when I share my personal policy not to friend young people under the age of eighteen, I do get some pushback. How can I celebrate kids’ birthdays…? How can I publicize upcoming events…? How can I monitor the loves lives of the kids…? And the questions each end in “…without Facebook?”

Facebook has not even been around a full decade yet. There are ways to develop pages that give your church a presence online. As for the rest, those of us who have been around for a while still send birthday cards through the mail and keep our ears perked during pizza breaks.

What’s the point? Jesus is calling you and I to enter into students’ lives, live incarnationally among them, and embrace the inherent danger that brings. Jesus isn’t calling you to do anything stupid or to break the law. But he often calls us to do things others consider stupid, unsafe even.

Youth ministry is dangerous. It will bring you into temptation. It’ll bring you face to face with your deepest fears and greatest annoyances. It’ll cause you to create policies and break them at the same time. Chances are, as you engage with students online, you’ll see all of that and a whole lot more.

I remember several years ago, when Xanga was hot, stumbling around and finding most of my students’ blogs. I was shocked by what I read. Many of them shared intimate details of their lives they’d never shared with an adult in our ministry. Fears, doubts, experiments, dirty deeds, the whole enchilada. That knowledge forced me to consider my response. Since I had crossed the line and found them in space they presumed to be private, what was I going to do about it?

In the end I decided not to broach the subjects, either directly with them or indirectly through my choice of teaching topics. To have done so would’ve revealed that I had violated their privacy. Sure, they hadn’t password-protected those things to keep me out. It wasn’t as though I had done much more than surf around to a few links. But I didn’t go there because I hadn’t been invited either.

Invitation is the dividing line in my eyes. I think that, as we engage with our students through social media, it has to be about permission. I know many of them say things in Facebook messages or chat that aren’t honoring to God. I know many of them have secret Tumblr accounts and private circles on Twitter and/or Google Plus. But I don’t want to force myself there without permission. I don’t think my role as a youth worker should come with expectations that I’m an FBI agent, cracking into their private spaces to discover what they really think.

That’s my advice. Don’t go sneaking around where you haven’t been invited. Instead, live before your students with open arms and invitation to deeper and deeper levels of intimate, incarnational discipleship.

The second question is about your own disclosure. Should you encourage students to friend you on Facebook, follow you on Twitter, read your blog, or add you on Google Plus?

First, I think your church leadership should wrestle through this question together. I know it sounds lame to think about drafting a policy, but there are both philosophy of ministry and legitimate liability concerns to think through. Most school districts do not allow teachers to socialize with students on Facebook. There is good logic there that is worth wrestling through as a staff. Whatever the policy is, it’ll take the staff team policing one another to enforce it.

Second, I think that when you do engage your students, you should do it through a ministry account and not your personal account. For instance, it’d be a good idea to create a Facebook page for your ministry or church and then interact with your students by using Facebook as a page. It’s a nuanced difference but an important one. It puts you in a position where you are obviously an agent of the ministry instead of the individual person. Because, at the end of the day, that is your role. Just like you attend a Friday night football game as a representative from the high school ministry, you engage with students online as a representative of a ministry.