The Church and Social Networking

Facebook, myspace, secondlife, Friendster, LinkedIn, Windows Live Spaces, Flickr, Classmates.com, MyChurch, YouTube, GodTube, OurStage, myVideo, Twitter, MSN, AIM, Meebo, WordPress, BlogSpot, etc etc etc

They all have one thing in common; connecting people – whether by broadcasting what you are doing, expressing yourself, blogging, asking questions, maintaining a web-based public profile or just communicating to individuals on the other side of some arbitrary distance over the internet.

And one thing is very evident from this and that is that the world is a whole lot smaller; way way smaller. In fact in one person could in all likelihood know any other person through a very small number of sequential relationships. There is a theory called six degrees of separation that is the idea [that if a person is one step away from each person they know and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people they know, then everyone is an average of six "steps" away from each person on Earth (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_degrees_of_separation)]

This is a scary idea, because Jesus said in Matthew 24:14: “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come” It was always thought that the world was small because one could, with relative ease, travel to any place in a short space of time. Yet now one does not have to travel to communicate to any person or to any group of people. Even with Videos and now DVDs of sermons so readily available; preaching of the Word of God is not restricted to a physical location and the availability of a preacher.

Ok, this may not hold true for the subsistence farmer in Tibet who does not know what a DVD is or what social networking means. But you may know that farmer thru the theory of ‘six degrees of separation’ and maybe, as a Christian, your interaction with people may indirectly affect that farmer. It’s a long shot, but would it not be cool to find that that was actually the case when you get to Heaven. Awesome.

And now in this modern age of networking, we can interact with people without knowing it. We can write a blog, post a comment, submit a video, tweet, or maybe podcast, and in so doing make an investment into someone’s life that will cause a chain reaction to Salvation. This by no means takes anything away from the Holy Spirit – firstly because whoever created these social networks were gifted by God to create them and secondly it is God’s work in them that ultimately brings them to Salvation, everything else is just a tool or a means to the hopeful end result.

I think that it is really cool to be working in the video side of things as a volunteer for God (essentially) , to be aware of what can be done for the purpose of Salvation in the realm of Social Networking for both video and audio. I see churches making podcasts available of sermons on iTunes, I see cool video being posted in blogs and video sites that just show God off in awesome ways. Some of the most influential  of Churches have regular blogs and tweets where you can see pretty much anything discussed from family, creativity and actual video work done for the Church.

However there is quite a weight of responsibility on  Christians in such environments of social networking, firstly because such environments are conducive to the pushing of moral boundaries, just visiting YouTube casually can result in an unnecessary temptation, it is unfortunate that this is the case. Secondly there is that pressure that can be placed on you to keep the facade up of the perfect Christian whenever you post something. Hmmm, we were watching On Location by Andy Stanley in our Community Group, and one of the things that came up was this idea that a little bit of righteousness goes a long way – as in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah when Abraham ‘argued’ with God to spare the people if only 10 were righteous in a town of about 800 – that almost only 1%. That may well be the case for the online community – that there is only 1% Christians. The fact that you are there may play a role in an unsaved individual, that maybe your just being there may go a long way to saving them, or even better – playing an active role in being righteous in the the environment of social networking will go a whole lot further.

As for the Church playing a role in reaching the lost within the online networks, one thing that is certain is that it takes only one seeker to find a place where God is and be found for it to be really worth while. Ok that sounded strange. What I think is that the Church has an important role to play for God in the online community in the form of a corporate involvement (Church Web Site, Sermon downloads etc) and individual involvement ( personal blogs, videos, tweets, etc). And just being online, even reaching someone without knowing it can actually reach further that the theory of six degrees of separation - that maybe the subsistence farmer in Tibet has an internet connection and he reads your blog.