When Facebook is better than Church (and when it's not)

The advent of social networking tools such as Facebook has been largely ignored by the church, or where they have been employed it has been as an extension of existing church structures (e.g. for a small group to keep in touch, or to disseminate church notices). However, I think we are vastly underestimating its impact (or potential impact). What about if social networking became one of the primary expressions of the church-at-large in the coming decade, because it can facilitate the work of the church in some ways better than our existing structures? How come? Well, first it is large: most of us have 100-200 "friends" on Facebook, all of whom have some kind of meaningful connectionto us; in a local church we probably have meaningful connections to 10-20 people. Second, it is integrative: when I post something, it goes to my high school friends I haven't met for 20 years; old friends from Sheffield; work colleagues; athiest friends; church friends; the whole lot. For too long we have led slightly different lives with our church friends and the "others" - now we break down this barrier, and rightly so. Third, it is immediate; I post the fact that I'm having a bad day and 5 people respond in an hour sending prayers (or good vibes for the athiests) my way. Fourth, and maybe most importantly, it is highly relational: it expands and deepens my relationships. I might not be able to actively keep in touch with 100 people but I feel connected to them just by reading their status updates; it does not replace immanent relationships, but enhances and expands them. So I think Facebook and its kin are amazing vehicles for expressing the relational aspect of church that completely break down geographic, denominational and artifical boundaries, that don't need a church structure, and to be frank seem to work better than physically going to a church building every Sunday. And why not? God is not constrained by location and now we can escape from that constraint a bit too.

So if we can download the best sermons from the web, and have a full relational experience through Facebook and informal, physical meetings, what is left for "church" to do? Well, plenty, I think. The intimacy of deep prayer, communion, laying on of hands, confession and absolution, communal worship needs a place. The magnitude of celebrations. Some waves of the Holy Spirit and healings seem to only spread by physical contact. A local gathering place in our local community. But let's be willing to realize when we need to let go of things and let God use all the tools at his disposal to do his merciful and loving work, and embrace the freedom that gives us to make the traditional "church" do those intimate, amazing, immanent things.

Here is a challenge. How about skipping church one Sunday, and instead get on Facebook, take some time reading your friends' posts, pray for them and post some responses? Or make arrangements to meet one of your local friends who is going through a hard time for a coffee? Okay, you don't have to skip church if you don't want to, but you see my point. In his 1980's book "The Harvest", Rick Joyner prophesied that in the next decades God would create a worldwide network of Christians and would bring together people in groups as needed to do his work. And that the church had darn well better adapt to that (my paraphrase: I'll try to get an exact quote). That was before the Internet, and well before Web 2.0. So let's get excited by the Web and listen to see what God might be asking us to do with it.

Why we can't settle in a church

A recurring question for me at the moment is why I can't be comfortable settling into a church setting. There are plenty of very good churches to choose from in Bloomington; it's just that the structure of the church as a whole (sermons, weekly services, pews, small groups, etc.) doesn't seem sufficient at the moment and in some ways seems like a distraction. Something so central and important can't be centered on a weekly denominational meeting or be confined by traditional expectations. Previously, I have thought of revival in terms of getting people to come to church: but surely a true revival makes the church and society in all its color and complexity synonymous. It's not that I think the church is outdated or irrelevant; it's just there is far more work to be done than can be contained in its boundaries. So I think we are called to work on this "going beyond" the church structure which is why we can't settle at the moment. 

Sailing in a new direction

It's an awfully long time since I have posted anything here, and this is for several reasons, not least the arrival of our wonderful twin daughters Alina and Alexis, but probably more fundamentally because I feel like I've run out of important things to get of my chest. I think I really need to just make this blog more of a personal journey and stop trying to derive too many general principles. Thus it will be.

I am currently in a phase of life which is wonderfully rich, but leaves little time to reflect on the richness. I have an amazing wife, four beautiful children - which we had to fight for with our whole beings, but that is all part of the blessing; people who can support us and for whom we can have an impact on their lives; a nice place to life and a stable job, not to be sniffed at in the current climate. Life has borne fruit, we have a double portion and harvesting is hard work. The trick is keeping the richness and depth inside when so much of life is external. You have the fruit but are you taking the time to water the tree for the next crop?

Which gets to where I want "church" to be. It has to be logistically easy, has to be able to efficiently cut to the quick of what God is doing for a person, and has to impart real vision based on what God is actually doing, not some genericised form of it. It is so easy for vision to get fainter and fainter then it just goes poof one day and you hardly notice, except for the aching feeling of futility. I'd love for one of those waves of the spirit to come along and just do a whole bunch of internal reorganization for me with a lot of sobbing and presence of God. But maybe I need to put some effort into doing a bit myself to get things going. We'll see.

Music

Since the earliest I can remember, music has been the most powerful way to impact me. My emotions can be changed and my perspective broadened in an instant by a piece of music. My only problem is in selecting what to listen to and remembering to do it (and getting the technology right - iPod? CD?). The interesting thing is the impact is always positive, no matter what I'm listening to. This is unlike other media which tend to be neutral and depend on content. Often a song will impact me on multiple levels at once. Here is an example - not the most profound, but one which is simple enough to describe. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" (tight fit, etc) has always appealed to me for unknown reasons and has recently been one of those songs to twang strings in me. I found out the whole encouragement of the song is not that the lion is sleeping (i.e. is disabled) but that he is alive, and his presence is not felt only because he is asleep: he will spring to roar and defend in a moment. Now when I listen to it I'm hit on multiple levels: you get bogged down in the everyday and God seems far away, but he is there, powerful, and ready to wake when we are ready to roar with him; life might seem mundane but the lion will roar again; there is strength in community and family; etc, etc. Here is a version on Youtube. So the relevance here is I think music is hugely important to our lives, and we have in the West almost lost the ability to sing, dance and let music impact our souls particularly in community. Church has been one of the last places this has been preserved (albeit with rather flaccid 1970's folk music and rather archaic hymns if I may say so). So if Church is happening outside the "church" how do we not only preserve the music but widen its use?

It's been a while

Well, for a variety of reasons it's been a while since I posted. The biggest change since the last post is that I've realized that there are many people thinking the same way about church (or similarly at least), and rather than being a lone warrior charting the future of the church, I'm probably a bit behind the curve just catching up! In particular, our friend Dave pointed me to a book called "The Shaping of Things to Come" whose authors have thought this through much more than I have. There is also a website called "Friends of Missional" and another author whom I haven't read called Donald Miller. It seems that this is being called the "Missional Church". I have some catching up to do.

Radio frequencies

It's been a while since I posted, so there are a few things to catch up on. The first is that it's about time I tried to convey something that came to me several months ago, but is quite hard to explain because it is a metaphor related to a technical aspect of radio communication (one of my hobbies). The short message is that we as Christians have been used to communicating with God on our different church frequencies - Vineyard, Pentecostal, Catholic, whatever, and then switching to "everyday" frequencies outside church. Just like radio frequencies, the church frequencies have various eligibility requirements to using them (baptism, confirmation, church membership, common values, whatever) and so are not accessible to those outside the church. God is however going to start communicating on the "everyday" frequency that everyone (church or non church) can tune into, but which currently contains mainly white noise. The implication is that we need to start listening for God on the everyday frequency and not just our church frequencies: eventually He might stop using the church ones altogether. In the meantime, we might need to operate as bridges, or "repeaters" between the two frequencies. I hope that made some sense :-)

Partitioning of the Church

Each week, God seems to be really challenging an assumption I have about the Church. This week it's that the Church is necessarily composed of a set of independently-operating churches. I just got a sense of how odd it is that we affiliate ourselves so strongly with membership of a particular denomination or church: "I belong to such-and-such a church". Then we really don't have much to do with people outside that church, except in a vague sense of being part of a "greater body". This division is less pronounced in the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches, where membership is of the catholic, or universal church, and division is geographic. The problem here is that since the reformation they don't represent the full breadth of the church. My feeling is that traditional church delineations will start to be dissolved: not because there is anything intrinsically bad about them but because they will be unnecessary as God arranges groupings as necessary (interestingly, this was mentioned by Rick Joyner in his 1989 prophetic book, "The Harvest"). This doesn't mean we should close our churches down, but we might want to think more loosely about membership and emphasis on pulling people into our "silos".