We’ve recently introduced the email address “church@stjohns-es.org” in Facebook and website posts as a way for church members needing information to reach out to a ministry’s lay leader.

Here’s why we’ve taken the step of providing a generic email rather than posting the ministry leader’s home or work email:

1. Search engines crawl all Facebook posts, looking for information they can use to populate their own websites.
2. Specifically, some companies have programs that scan Facebook events that have geo-located event details in the post. The program then creates a new post about the event incorporating parishioner emails and phone numbers, making your info available worldwide to anyone who clicks on the post.

In an effort to protect parishioners from phishing or simply any kind of unwanted contact from an outside source, we’ve created the new email address; rest assured the account is closely monitored by church staff, and emails are forwarded quickly to the appropriate ministry leader.

~St John’s Staff