Facebook decides -- following clicks and $$$ -- that it should encourage online prayer

There are 2.4 billion Christians in the world today, according to most estimates.

Then again, nearly 3 billion people have Facebook accounts. Nearly 70% of U.S. adults use this social-media platform, which recently passed $1 trillion in market capitalization.

"I will use Facebook to reach people, because you almost have to do that," Father Andrew Stephen Damick, chief content officer for Ancient Faith Ministries, a 24-hour source for online radio channels, podcasts, weblogs, forums and more. The ministry was born in 2004 and is now part of the North American archdiocese of the ancient Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch.

Facebook remains, he noted, "the No. 1 social-media platform in the world -- by a lot. You can't ignore all those people. … We knew this before COVID, but the pandemic made it impossible to deny the obvious. Everyone had to go online, one way or another."

Facebook Live became a way to stream worship services online, even if all a pastor could do was mount a smartphone on a stand. Even small congregations began holding online religious-education classes, support groups and leadership meetings.

As for worship, it was one thing for Protestant megachurches to stream TV-friendly services built on pop-rock Christian music and charismatic preaching. The online options were more problematic for faiths in which worship centered on the smells, bells, images and tastes of ancient liturgies.

Then, in early June, images began circulating of a Twitter message introducing "Prayer Posts" allowing Facebook users to "enable group members to ask for and respond to prayers" with a few clicks in a page's control settings. Participation could be as simple as a user clicking an "I prayed" button linked to a prayer.

This isn't a totally new idea. The Facebook "Prayer Warriors" group already has 865,700 active members, a flock larger than the average of 518,000 Episcopalians that attended services on an average Sunday in 2019, according to the denomination's statistics.

Let’s just call this a podcast day — period.

This week’s “Crossroads” GetReligion podcast will be posted later, focusing on an often overlooked religion-related niche in American politics. Think “nones” and the 2020 White House race and related issues.

n the meantime, here are two rather strange — for GetReligion readers and listeners — Orthodox media podcasts that may still be of interest to some people, including religion-beat pros.

Both of these chats are directly related to newsy topics that come up here all the time. What makes them different is that the topics are framed in ways that appeal directly to an Eastern Orthodox Christian audience, as opposed to be handled straight on as topics linked to mainstream news coverage.

In the first, I was invited on the national Ancient Faith Today podcast hosted by Father Tom Soroka, who serves at St. Nicholas Orthodox Church in McKees Rocks, Penn.

The topic for this hour-long show was “Media Bias,” with a focus on explaining to clergy and laypeople the complex nature of news in the age of the Internet. How did we end up with a blurred line between news and the op-ed pages? How can news consumers stay sane in an age when elite, high-quality newsrooms produce solid, old-school journalism on some topics and then, on the very next “page,” offer agitprop on other topics, especially those linked to religion and culture?

Click here to tune that in. At the heart of the discussion was the varying ways that professionals and laypeople struggle to define the term “fake news.” That will sound familiar to GetReligion readers (“Fake News? The Economist team doesn't know where Liberty University is located.”

This podcast is one of the flagship offerings of Ancient Faith Ministries, which started out long, long ago as a trailblazing online radio ministry — years before podcasts and other related podcasts were the norm. (Trivia: I donated an early slogan for this crew — “Ancient faith: All digital.”)