I think I
was late in buying in to social media or in recognising its potential in terms
of mission and evangelism: I remember asking myself why I would need this while
at the same time, given my record as a Luddite, recognising in some vague way
that it would catch on.
I resisted
Facebook for a long time but did embrace blogging: I felt I had a voice and, as
a Christian, I had something to say and share. In some self-indulgent, misty
way, I think I saw myself in the tradition of Nick Baines, the Blogging Bishop
and Giles Fraser who tweets, uses Facebook and regularly writes for the
Guardian. My style, as I saw it, was light, observational humour.
I soon found
a network of people willing to discuss – and not all with the same Christian
worldview - and I felt that my knowledge of the world-wide Anglican Communion
and other denominations was greatly enhanced by regular contact with them.
Well, times
have changed: Facebook, Facetime, Twitter, My-space, Pinterest, Instagram and a
whole host of other sites I am not cool enough to know about have brought us closer
together …. while having the potential to drive us further apart. While on the
one hand I have a friend who tweets and Facebooks on the work of his church as
a means of evangelism, on the other hand the world of Christian Social Media is
not for the faint hearted and can be an incredibly combative environment where
no prisoners are taken. On more than one occasion I have been told that my
carefully thought through position on, say, the theology of stewardship and its
link to climate change was an obvious outcome of my “sin darkened mind”. (This
from a Texan). When we view social media from a position of our own discontent,
whatever we find will be coloured with bitterness. There is a real danger at
this point in finding one’s self locked into a dialogue of the deaf where no
one listens because everyone is keen to score points and assert the supremacy
of their own argument. “See how these Christians love one another” to summarise
1 Peter. It can all become very unedifying. There was a wonderful cartoon doing
the rounds on Facebook a while back showing a man hunched over his laptop.
“I’ll be up in a moment darling. I’m just telling someone they’re wrong on the
INTERNET.”
In the
media, hardly a week goes by without some public figure or other being exposed
for intemperate language in a tweet, followed either by an apology and a
resignation or by an attempt to brazen it out … and a resignation. Do you
remember the priest who tweeted how boring the synod meeting he was attending was?
Social Media seems to have become a largely rule-free zone where people can interact
while accepting minimal personal responsibility for what they write. In the
absence of guidelines for healthy and polite social media etiquette, are we left
to decide our own boundaries for dealing with the many cyber opportunities out
there?
What is the
Christian to do? (And I have to declare an interest here because things that I
have written have not always been taken in the spirit in which they were meant.
I believe I’ve learnt from that but I also hope that others have too.)
Well, the
churches have woken up to both the opportunities of Social Media - and its
disadvantages - and diocesan policies now abound.
Like it or
not, social media isn’t going away: all our young people take it for granted.
When the Apostle Paul described what it meant to love others, he specifically
mentioned that love does not boast. That post, that tweet, that picture isn’t
just a picture, it isn’t just a tweet, it’s an opportunity to love others in a
way that reflects Jesus – or it’s an opportunity to show them something quite
different, something that looks nothing like Christ.
· So what are the pros and cons of
Social Media for the Christian?
· How could Social Media best be used
by the church?
No comments:
Post a Comment