Can we begin there? Can we agree that God is present in social media? Photo by Foxtongue on Flickr.
I attended a meeting yesterday of the Diocesan Postulancy Committee, wherein the postulants for ordination for the Diocese of Toronto were asked to reflect on the church and social media. As one of the group’s leaders put it, after we watched a short video introducing the topic, the question is no longer if we use it but how, and how well.
An interesting conversation followed. Because in that context I am there primarily to hear from the postulants, I didn’t say very much—that, and I suspected that once I got started it would be hard to shut up again. But this is some of what I might have said, and have been thinking about since.
First, the question is wrong. The title of this little reflection is wrong. This isn’t (or, IMHO, shouldn’t be) about the church and social media. This is about GOD and social media.
For surely there is no one who wants to say that God is absent from social media. Unless one is a fanatic who condemns the entire enterprise as the work of Satan (and I am sure there are a few such out there), one needs to begin from this starting point. God is on Facebook. God tweets. God posts videos on YouTube. And God most surely uses whatever tools human beings come up with to reach out to this world with love and compassion, with a prophetic call to justice, with gospel.
Can we begin there? Can we agree that God is present in social media?
If that is difficult for the reader to accept, may I share a few stories from my own personal experience?
God is present in these spaces
I could tell you about the Young Clergy Women Group (YCWG), which began life as a Ning, a linked group of personal profiles with a closed password. That password protection means that a moderator, or group of moderators, decides who may join and who may not, which allows for a great deal of safety. It is a place to meet women around the world struggling with similar issues. Single clergywomen talk about how to tell a first date what one does for a living; young moms share strategies for dealing with a toddler who wants to be with mom when mom is trying to preside at the Eucharist. We all lament and rage at the misogyny that continues to exist within the institutional church, and brainstorm ideas to help one another deal with specific manifestations when they emerge. We discuss the lectionary readings for the coming Sunday. We enjoy one another’s poetry and visual art, all of it touching on our faith, all of it inspiring our faith. We pray. God is there.
I began tweeting relatively late in the game, in the early spring of 2010. In June of that year I attended the meeting of General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada. Before arriving, I had “friended” on Facebook one of the women I had “met” through the YCWG, and found out that she would be at General Synod as well. I had also found her on Twitter that spring, and we exchanged direct messages through Twitter to arrange to meet to travel to the opening Eucharist together. (As soon as we found one another, we exchanged a hug, and yes, physical presence is important in a way that virtual presence will never replace.) Over the course of General Synod, the two of us along with a few others including official General Synod staff (all, I believe, under 40 years of age), began to tweet our impressions and thoughts about synod using the hashtag #gs2010. People picked it up around the world, and followed both the live stream on the national church’s website and the Twitter feed, giving an added, personal dimension. (At the start of General Synod, someone had told members at an orientation not to text or tweet during synod because it might distract others. We ignored them but did, at least initially, try to be discreet.)
And then, during the final discussion of the motion regarding human sexuality, a marvellous thing happened. One of the youth members of synod tweeted: “The Lord be with you.” Many responded, “And also with you.” (Although I think I recall one “And with thy spirit.”) The original tweeter continued: “Let us pray. For those participating in this debate, Lord have mercy.” And we were off.
For the entire time the debate was going on on the floor of synod, so was this Twitter prayer. We prayed for those who struggled with making a decision at all, for those who felt we were going too far, for those who felt we were not going nearly far enough. For those who would have to implement this decision, for those in the Anglican Communion who would be hurt by what we decided. For those at home we would have to face with this decision. For those on the floor of synod who were gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered and queer who were tired of being spoken of as if they weren’t present. For each and every speaker who came to the microphones. For the Primate, and the staff, and those who had led the discussion groups. On and on, for over an hour, this prayer poured forth from the laptops and the BlackBerrys and the iPhones around the floor of synod and from those following #gs2010 across the country and around the world. We were not distracted from the debate by this activity; if anything, this prayer made us even more deeply aware of what was happening. God was there.
This fall I discovered a group of tweeters who call themselves the #outlawpreachers. There is a Facebook presence, but the group primarily exists through Twitter. Most of these folks hold some position of leadership in a church (some more institutional than others) and find their theology or their lifestyle to be somehow at odds with either their official denominational position or the wider “Christendom” teachings. Four weeks ago, one of the outlaw preachers and his wife experienced the birth of their twin sons at 20 weeks’ gestation. The boys lived for about an hour before they died. The #outlawpreachers community gathered. Immediately, of course, there were prayers and virtual hugs. Then, one of the founding members suggested we put together a “grace bomb.” People created videos, wrote poetry and prayers, shared favourite passages of scripture, one wrote a song and played it. All these were delivered to Micah and Jacob’s parents on All Souls’ Day. God was there.
I could go on. At length. But can we now, please, agree that God is present in social media?
Social media is a place to be “mission-shaped”
Over the past few years, the mission-shaped-church thrust of much of the work being done in our diocese has prompted us to look past our own church walls, to look out into the world in which God has placed us to ask the questions, Where is God at work here? And how can we get involved? Where is God inviting us to be co-creators of God’s kingdom in this time and this place? We have learned to say that it is not that the church has a mission; it is that God has a mission, and invites the church to come alongside.
I would maintain that the same questions need, desperately, to be asked of the world of social media. Where is God at work here? And where is God calling us to be a part of the carrying out of that mission?
When the question is posed, as it was at the postulancy committee meeting, in business terms (how the church can best leverage its social media presence in order to ensure the success of our “brand”), we have before us such an incomplete picture as to make it untrue.
Websites, or at least the vast majority of church websites, are of the stuff of Web 1.0; we put information on the Internet, a person goes and finds it. Email is often the same; the weekly email I send to members of our parish to keep them informed of happenings and to offer prayers are just this. This does not make them wrong, of course; we still invest money and time on the signs in front of our churches and our church newsletters, because there are people who are looking for us and we need to make it as easy as possible for them to find us.
Social media on the other hand, Web 2.0, is far more interactive. A blogger says something in her post; I respond with a comment, someone else chimes in. I post a link to a website on my Facebook page; someone comments on it, and the conversation continues. Someone makes a video about how a church might be more welcoming; someone else makes another, and posts it as a video response on the original video’s YouTube page, and the comments weigh the pros and cons of each approach.
If the question facing us is only, “How does social media form a part of the marketing strategy of the church?” then the suspicion and concern with which it is clearly viewed by some is understandable. (Mostly this criticism is from those who are not themselves participants in that world, and it is unclear to me whether the lack of participation bred the suspicion or vice versa.) Social media is free flowing, radically democratic, unpredictable, impossible to control. In this sense, it is far more like the children’s talk than the sermon, more a conversation than a professorial lecture. More the realm of the Holy Spirit, one might say, than the purview of the levitical priesthood.
The social norms in our culture are known to most of the members of that culture. We don’t, for the most part, say hurtful or abusive things to one another. We respect one another’s points of view, even when we disagree. These norms, for the most part, also exist in the online world. Perhaps without the element of face-to-face connection, it is easier for some to breach those norms, but we all know of people who simply seem unable to cope with externally imposed norms regardless of context.
It is true that, once said, once posted, a piece of information, point of view or statement in the world of social media is out there (although many social media do allow one to un-post a comment, untag a photo, retract a comment, and doing so is not technically difficult). Perhaps it being “in print” makes it more “permanent” than something that is spoken aloud. Yet most participants in social media understand this, and therefore allowances are made. “Ooops, my bad” tweets aren’t infrequent; apologies are nearly always accepted. In my observation, the people who take most gravely social media mistakes are those who are not involved in social media themselves.
There has been a particular point made for clergy, that as representatives of the church in the eyes of many (both within the church on outside of it), they need to be especially conscious of their digital presence and what it says about the image of the church (not to say the image of God). Paradoxically, perhaps, this is why I believe that there is much to be said for the transparency of social media.
Any cleric who “friends” parishioners on Facebook allows, even invites, a level of mutuality that can be incredibly healthy. Parishioners might not ever know that their priest runs marathons, or paints pictures, or loves the writings of a particular author, and knowing these sorts of things can make a huge dent in the still-surviving clericalist culture of our church. On the other hand, the friends a priest might have outside the church will certainly see, through social media interactions, the deep place of faith in their friend’s life. Certainly, a certain level of professionalism is to be expected; whining publicly about one’s bishop is probably not smart, nor is complaining about the choir’s poor performance last Sunday. Yet I highly suspect that those prone to inappropriate online behaviour are those prone to inappropriate behaviour in the physical world.
Social media and the online world will never take the place of physical, face-to-face contact. There are things that can happen in the physical world that could never happen online. A tweet or Facebook comment that says *hugs* is nice when one is struggling with something, but not the same as a real hug. Sacrament, with a capital “S,” cannot take place where there is no water, no bread, no wine, no gathered community. Yet I would maintain that the fact of the incarnation does not mean that God cannot work through digital means. God’s inward and spiritual grace has worked in my life, several times, through outward and visible signs of social media.
God has placed us on earth in this time and this place. This most certainly means that the church, through the parish and the members, have a calling to participate in God’s mission in the world, in the alleyways and the drop-ins, in the high-rises and the farms, in the coffee shops and the malls. We are called to incarnate the body of Christ in the world in which we find ourselves.
Yet I have a strong sense that the Holy Spirit is also out there in the digital world, lurking among the hundreds of millions of Facebook users and tweeters, playing hide and seek with us, urging us to find her. Will we? And once we do, will we have the courage and the will to follow her lead?
