Who Should Run Your Church's Social Media?

The two ways it usually goes wrong

Everyone posts. Staff, volunteers, and well-meaning members all have the password. Posts are inconsistent, the tone wanders, and nobody notices when something goes wrong.

One person does everything. A single volunteer runs every account. It works well, until they burn out or move away, and then the church’s online presence disappears overnight, sometimes along with the passwords. (See the handoff checklist.)

The fix is a simple structure with clear roles.

Five roles (some people wear several)

Role	What they do	Who it often is
Direction	Sets the purpose and tone, decides what matters most, speaks for the church in hard moments	Senior pastor or leadership team
Owner	Runs the accounts and the weekly rhythm, keeps the policy, trains others	Communications lead (staff or volunteer)
Creators	Find sermon moments, make clips, take photos, write posts	Volunteers, students, young adults
Approver	Reviews content before it’s published	The owner, a pastor, or a designated adult
Responders	Reply to comments and messages, move prayer requests to pastoral care	Online host, communications lead, prayer team

In a small church, one person might be owner, approver, and responder, with a couple of creators helping. In a larger church, each role may be a small team. What matters is that every role has a name.

Direction: the pastor’s part

Pastors don’t need to manage social media, but they should:

• Set the purpose. What is our presence online for? (See what is our church live stream actually for?)
• Be in the content. Clips of the pastor’s preaching are usually the most important thing a church posts.
• Approve sensitive content and speak for the church in a crisis.
• Champion it publicly, so the congregation knows it matters and shares.

The owner: the most important role

The owner keeps everything running:

• Holds the accounts (on church-owned email, with two-factor authentication)
• Keeps the weekly posting rhythm (see a sermon clip posting schedule)
• Maintains the church social media policy
• Recruits and trains creators
• Reviews results monthly (see are your clips bringing people in?)

This can be a volunteer, but it needs to be someone with steady time and good judgment, and a named backup.

Creators: where young people shine

Creating content is the perfect place to involve more people, especially students and young adults who understand short video. They prepare; the approver publishes. (See the Youth Clip Team.)

In WorshipMetrics, you add as many team members as you need and decide who can access what, so creators can prepare clips in Reels without ever holding the church’s account passwords. With cloud Reels on Pro and Max, they can work from home.

Oversight without bottlenecks

Approval shouldn’t mean every post waits a week for the senior pastor. A few ways to keep it moving:

• Approve the rhythm, not every post. Agree on the weekly plan; the owner approves routine posts.
• Reserve pastor approval for sensitive topics, personal stories, and anything controversial.
• Use a shared queue so the approver can review a week’s clips at once.
• Set a turnaround. For example, routine posts are approved within a day.

Make it survive turnover

• Accounts registered to church-owned email
• Passwords in a church password manager
• The weekly routine written down
• Two people who know how everything works
• Access removed promptly when someone steps away

Then when your best volunteer moves away, it’s a handoff, not a crisis.

Start with names

Write the five roles on a page and put a name next to each one. If a role has no name, that’s your next recruit. More on the social media for churches page.