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Blog » You Can't Do That on Facebook: Serve
You Can't Do That on Facebook: Serve
People often point to Facebook and wonder why the church would even need the Table. Facebook is ideal for outreach, but it falls short at building community. That's what the Table is all about. We encourage churches to use Facebook and the Table together. But the fact is there are things you can't do on Facebook that the Table is designed to do.
Like serving one another.
Serving & Sharing on the Table
The Table's Serve App allows you to post volunteer needs and items to give away or share. It's a way to help and encourage the church to serve one another. When you're posting needs, you can add specific tasks, invite people to get involved and more. When you're giving away or sharing stuff, you can post a picture, categorize what you have available and easily re-post something to loan out again. You can even see a record of how many people have been served or items shared.
It's designed for the church to serve each other. It encourages an attitude and culture of serving and sharing. That's pretty cool.
Serving & Sharing on Facebook
Not so much on Facebook. You can certainly post needs and give away or share things on Facebook, but not very well. You'd have to post those things as a status update, which means the system doesn't encourage you to serve or share, people aren't expecting it and there's no place to go to find a bunch of needs to serve.
You could certainly give away a random item or ask for help with something like moving, and you'll get a response. But there's no culture of serving. It's a one-time thing and it's not likely to happen again.
There are some marketplace apps on Facebook that allow for classified listings like Craigslist, and a few that offer Freecycle-like sharing, but they're pretty buried, not widely used and don't allow for posting volunteer needs.
Squash Apathy
The Table is designed to squash apathy. We're built that way. Facebook? Maybe it'll step on apathy once or twice by accident, but that's about it.
Of course that shouldn't be too surprising. Facebook is a worldwide social network that's designed for loose connections. It doesn't foster intimate community and that means it's not a good place for serving and sharing to take place. But the Table is designed for that intimate community. It makes serving and sharing natural, the way it should be in church.