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Our guest for this episode is Carolyn Clement, the Digital ministry passionista at her home parish of Trinity Episcopal Church in Tariffville, Connecticut. She is an innovator, singer, teacher, mother of three, wife, digital ministry advocate, and Episcopalian!  

In her day job, Carolyn works on the product development and innovative team for a financial services organization. 

When she is not tweeting over at @singingcarolyn, you can find her in Simsbury singing in her home with her two standard poodles and helping her daughter plan her wedding. When she’s available, Carolyn leads sessions on Social Media at ECCT’s Spring Training and Gathering, held in Meriden annually, usually on the first Saturday in April.

We know Carolyn best as the creator of Social Media Sunday (#SMS18, this year), which began in 2013 as a movement to help parishes and worshiping communities use social media to spread the gospel—encouraging folks to take their smart phones out and tweet the sermon, snap a selfie, or just share that they are at church that morning. 

In this episode she explains how it got started and what that first Sunday was like, and how it spread out from Tariffville around the world, got millions of impressions, and moved from June to September. (One thing she mentions was a “church in social media chat” known as #chsocm (which is evidently pronounced as: cha-SOCK-em).

She talks about the “why” behind it as well as the “what.” And she gives some advice about #sms18 as well as about social media and churches (and people who go to church). Even if you’re the only one at your church on social media you can be the “army of one,” she says. Don’t forget how important it is to click! Click, Like Comment, Share (in that order of increasing importance, she says) is essential. It all increases the value, thus, the reach, of the day.

Carolyn was introduced to Facebook years and years ago and immediately saw its power. She likes all kinds of digital media, though, so we spent some time chatting about Facebook (she loves that they collect the images and share the memories), Snapchat, and other options, and how she continue to support people at her church in her community to use social media and share God’s love.

Social Media Sunday is September 30, 2018 this year so use #SMS18. Find resources on the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/SMS15/ including links to compilations of resources elsewhere.