"I was able to utilize social media, to begin my church planting journey." Reylourd and his team created an app to help them connect with people in their large city!
“Hi, good morning. I'm Reylourd Reyes, and I'm a church planter here in Manila, Philippines, coordinating church planting in our conference. I have been involved in church planting in the past seven years. And I planted a young adult church here in Manila that has different locations and meetings in different locations.”
“I was able to utilize social media, to begin my church planting journey. I started connecting with people in the city through social media, looking for groups I could connect with. And in the process, I came across this application called MeetUp. It also has a website. Meetup or meetup.com is a place where different groups connect to each other. If you go to this, if you download this app, or if you go to this website, you will find different Meetup groups.”
“And so I started looking for groups I can connect with. Most of the groups here are organized by unchurched and secular people. And so I started connecting with these people until I realized I could actually also start my own Meetup group. That's when I started organizing this group called CAFÉ Life.”
“CAFÉ stands for Community, Authenticity, Friendship, and Experience. It's a small group idea. And so we started connecting with different people. The idea is really to connect with the young professionals and open an avenue for young professionals to connect and hang out after work. So I started putting that on Meetup and I was surprised. Young professionals, young adults started showing up in our Meetup groups. And so we started connecting with a lot of young professionals. That's how the church plant started.”
“Through that, we were able to connect with a broader demographic, mostly unchurched and secular. And through this application, through Meetup, we were inspired to also form or to come up with our own app. So my team, who are mostly young adults and young professionals, started developing this app called CAFÉ Life.”
“It's available for download for iOS and Google or Android phones. When you download this app, this CAFÉ Life, you will find a list of different groups meeting in the city. And these groups are being led and coordinated by our members. And you would also see different discussion groups or different discussion guides as this is being used by our groups meeting in different places.”
“Today, our church utilizes social media to connect with a lot of people. We have small groups meeting in Zoom or Google and we are still meeting more new people through social media.”
