Mark Zuckerberg meets with church leaders to learn about community building

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has met with clergy members in Texas in order to learn the role of the churches in building a community.

The gatherings, in which Zuckerberg also met with school and business leaders, took place in two Texas cities on Jan. 18 as part of the billionaire's "Year of Travel," in which he will visit states he has not been to before, Baptist News Global reported. Zuckerberg stated on the travel page that he plans to visit 30 states this year.

Aaron Zimmerman, an Episcopal priest who was invited to one of the meetings, said that he and the others were astonished when Zuckerberg explained that he was there to ask questions and listen, not to give speeches.

"The clergy spoke 90 percent of the time. That impressed me a lot," Zimmerman said about the meeting in Waco attended exclusively by ministers.

John Crowder, a pastor at First Baptist Church in West, thought that Zuckerberg will give a speech to promote a charity or new technology, but the Facebook founder only spoke for about 60 seconds and started asking questions.

One of his questions focused on how the community recovered from the 2013 fertilizer explosion that devastated the city. Crowder said Zuckerberg wanted to know about the role churches played in the recovery, and he was also curious about how congregations of different denominations worked together.

"We got to tell him that right after the explosion, people in town just automatically turned to the church for help. They knew that was the place they could go and that is the role the church plays — at least in a small town," Crowder recounted.

Additionally, Zuckerberg also wanted to learn how churches prioritize their ministries.

"He was interested in how much the church focuses on what he called 'religion' and how much it focuses on what he called 'community service.' That was actually not a bad question for churches to consider asking themselves from time to time," said Crowder.

When Zuckerberg asked how churches go about forming community, Zimmerman explained that there is a larger community that gathers together to worship and connect believers to God, and smaller groups that connect people with each other.

Zimmerman said that the meeting left him with the impression that Zuckerberg seems to be trying to do the right things from a place of humility.