Facebook has been getting some bad press lately for its handling of what was at one time private user information. Or at least information that users could keep private easily, if they chose to.  There have been so many changes lately, it’s hard to keep track.

It’s time to rethink Facebook. And I don’t just mean rethinking our personal use of Facebook, even to the point of deleting our accounts, which some high profile users have done recently. I mean it’s time to start rethinking congregational use of Facebook.

Facebook can do some good things for congregations. It connects us in new ways, draws us closer together, and helps us stay in touch. That’s at the heart of any congregation’s mission.

But as Facebook proves itself less and less trustworthy, should we be encouraging congregational life to happen in Facebook? At what point does Facebook cross a line that violates our values so egregiously that we take down our congregations’ pages? At what point does it become irresponsible to encourage people in our congregations to join Facebook so they can be a part of our congregational groups and pages, especially those who aren’t very web savvy and who won’t understand Facebook’s increasingly labyrinthine privacy controls?

I’m encouraged by the Diaspora project, a project to build a “privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.” They’ve gotten all sorts of great press coverage lately, including the New York Times. They’ve already raised over ten times what they were hoping to to finance this as a summer project. (They’re all in college or just graduating.) I threw them a few bucks myself.  (A warm hat tip to Yet Another UU for clueing me in to Dispora!)

I don’t have any answers on this one, just questions.  But if Facebook keeps going down this path, we might all find ourselves having to make some tough decisions about our congregational Facebook presences.