What the Church can Teach Us about Social Networking

When I retired a few weeks ago, I had to deal with a problem I never had leaving other churches in my 45 years of ministry:

What do I do about my Facebook friends who are members of the church I just left? 

This article by Jeremy Smith  helped me think through my ethical duties, and also gave me simple technical directions so I could fulfill those duties.

Nevertheless, I did some geezer grumbling about new-fangled ways of doing ministry and how it had all changed in the last decade. After all, when I was appointed to my last church in 2005,  Facebook was still a college  . . . uh  . . . facebook -- a pictorial directory allowing students to look up the name of the cute classmate sitting in the third row of Survey of Western Civilization.

But after some weeks away from the demands of pastoral care and church administration - and spending more time on  social media than I should - I realized that, in fact, the Church was the first social network and we can learn a lot from social networking geniuses like Jesus, Paul, John Wesley, and Frances Willard.  They can help us overcome the three sins of social networking and create purpose-driven networks that make a difference in this world.

The Three Sins of Social Networking

The things we all despise about social networking --  and too often participate in -- are: superficiality, shouting and oversharing.

Superficiality: 

Do I really have to spell this out? Are all those people really your “friends”?  Do you really believe Jesus denies knowing you in heaven if you fail to share a kitschy picture of Him on your newsfeed?

Shouting: 

Again, this is obvious. Note the contrast between the crass, even stupid, things your friends post in favor of the other candidate for president, and the tightly reasoned, insightful, and persuasive slogans in favor of your candidate.  Sadly, so many people are on the wrong side of every issue that right-thinking people like you and me feel like social media creates barriers rather than bridges.

Oversharing:  

Umm, did I ask you what you had for breakfast?

The Church as  Model Social Network:

Build Networks on Common Experience rather than Common Grievances

Paul’s letters and John Wesley’s correspondence reveal a network powered by shared experience. Paul described it as an encounter with the Risen Christ or the Holy Spirit. John Wesley would often invoke a “religion of the heart”.  These experiences united people of different cultures and social classes, just as the very first Christian Social Network, AKA “The Twelve Disciples,  pulled together a Zealot and a tax collector among many other strange bedfellows in their common loyalty to Christ.

Some of the more meaningful Facebook experiences I have had come from my membership in pages for UM Clergy and, especially, for wearers of cochlear implants. The latter is especially important to me because I wear two CI’s, but there are less than half a million people in the world who  have even one.  Those of us on the site may live in the U.S., Australia, Germany, Brazil, or in many other places. Our skin color and religions may be different. Some of us have graduate degrees and some are barely literate, but the common experience matters more than the differences.

Christians are people who have seen God at work in Jesus Christ and Jesus Christ at work in their own lives. Can we share that experience with others?

Use Networks to Hold People Close

It’s also clear that Paul used his letters to tell people that he loved them, he cared about them, he was thinking of them.  Again, we can tell from the names and addresses mentioned in these letters that these people lived on the other side of mountain ranges or the Mediterranean from Paul, but he wouldn’t let those barriers of distance separate him from his friends.

What can we learn from Paul about how to use social media to connect with people we don’t know, build bridges with people who are different, and hold tight the people who matter?

Use the Network to Do Good

Frances Willard, a primary founder of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, shared her spiritual ancestor, John Wesley’s, genius for creating social networks. Local chapters elected representatives to district organizations that, in turn, elected representatives to state, and then national organizations.  This influenced the structure of many mainline Protestant women’s organizations, especially what we now know as the United Methodist Women.

Regardless of what one may think about the social experiment of Prohibition, these social networks also hastened women’s right to vote and influenced countless other causes.

In the 1970’s, I served a small town congregation in Upstate New York. One of the UMW’s leaders was married to the owner of the local cheese company; if you have eaten New York State cheddar, the chances are good that you have eaten their cheese. At the time, the UMW was concerned about multinational corporations,  like Nestle, pushing third-world mothers into using baby formula that they could not afford and probably didn’t have pure water to make safely. This woman, whose political orientation would make Ted Cruz look like a liberal, was seated next to a high executive at Nestle at a formal dinner one evening and she challenged him on the company’s practices. All this because of her membership in the social network called the UMW.

We have seen the power of digital Social Media in events like the Arab Spring. Can we use what we already know, as the Church, to change the world today?

If we work with these questions, learning from the history of the most powerful and effective, and I think, the original international social network, I believe we can move from superficiality to love, building barriers to building bridges, and sharing only what matters.