Religious institutions are starting to tap into the social media because of the insane connections that social media offers between people and their company or institutions.  Social media sites allow businesses and institutions to connect with millions of people every second of the day.  You can't get much better as far as media coverage than that.  Many religious sites such as BlackandChristian.com are offering sermons, bible studies, and articles online for people to interact with and connect with others and hear their daily sermon without having to go to the church if that is not a possibility for them.  This is a great strategy to get many people involved outside of the church premise.  The religious leaders know that they need to go where the people are, and today that is social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and Flickr.  The websites that are using social media have seen tremendous results and activity on their sites and are very please with it.  This is going to take the religious institutions to a whole new level and hopefully get younger people involved.