God will always find a way to tell His story. Before the printing press, the Bible was the information of the elite. By restricting access to this information, the folks on top safeguarded the chasm between themselves and the huddled masses. Yet even then, God’s Word was living and active, though it was passed on to the little people in narrative form and they were dependent upon the conscience and interpretation of their leaders regarding its accuracy. With the invention of the printing press, the world was flattened, so to speak, as God’s written Word became available to literate people regardless of their station in life. In the church and the secular world, accuracy and certainty replaced mysticism and oral tradition as the qualifications by which people determined the value of something.
Six hundred years later, we have free access to the accurate, written Word of God. But sometimes I wonder if our quest for accuracy has actually rendered it inactive in our lives. Too often, our myopic emphasis on Bible knowledge has reduced the story of God to an intellectual exercise, the Christian life to a literal translation of the original Greek text. Churches become repositories of biblical fact, not places that inspire their members to go out and become part of God’s story. We have become a group of Christian thinkers. Meanwhile, the rest of the world is sick, starving, orphaned, and crying out for help. Where are all the Christian doers?
It’s time to redesign our church culture once again, and I believe that, just as God used the printing press to revive His church so long ago, He will use the revolutionary invention of our era to revive us again. I’m talking, of course, about the internet.
The first function of the internet, Web 1.0, was to provide organizations with a website. This was really just an online brochure that people could visit to access information. Running a website requires both tech knowledge and money, which explains why churches have been some of the latest adopters of this technology. While websites continue to serve a useful purpose, they do little to change our consumer mindset. But there is a renaissance coming, a rebirth of the power of narrative in the practice of our Christian faith. With the advent of social networking (Web 2.0), we have been given a tool with the power to unite us.
Web 2.0 has been to today’s culture what the printing press was to previous generations, except this time the actual printing press is available to anyone. With social networking sites like MySpace, Facebook, and Blogger offering users access to their own free websites, they have taken the tools of production from the elite and made them available to common people. Users have the freedom to personalize the content and to post pictures and video, and others can post a response. Over 170 million users have registered accounts with Facebook or MySpace. Clearly, the ancient power of narrative is alive and well. We want to share our stories. We desire real connection with other people.
But what about accuracy? Is that blog featuring the “brilliant financial mind†really qualified to give you stock tips? What if that cute girl on MySpace is really a 40-year-old, male, sexual predator? True, since anybody with a computer can publish information on the internet, you can be sure that some of that information is not reliable. That’s why the next shift in social networking is headed toward affinity groups, organizations of people drawn together by a common cause or passion, that will serve as trusted resources. So far, the online tools of social networking have been available mainly to individuals, not to organizations. With the introduction of Unifyer (unifyer.com), a new web-based application that brings the best features of social networking to churches, that trend is about to change.
Through social networking tools like Unifyer, the internet is going to help people to look more like Jesus than ever before—not by providing a forum for them to debate points of doctrine, but by allowing them to organize and to become the hands and feet of Jesus. Imagine the possibilities if churches could offer a safe place for members and seekers alike to share their stories and respond at a moment’s notice as they discover an opportunity for ministry. Our connection with other people of like minds and like passions produces encouragement to go out and make a difference for the Kingdom. That is the commodity of social media. It reminds us that we’re not alone.
Social networks will serve as the settings for many spiritual conversations, but they’re really for action. This is not about sharing the Roman road. It’s about meeting people in their desperation. It’s about medicine, food, water … mosquito nets. If the printing press flattened the world, the internet has made the world smaller. With the use of a simple webcam, we can be privy to the needs of anyone, anywhere, and the cycle from narrative to knowledge comes full circle. We meet the people. We see the pain. We hear the stories, and they move us. The Word leaps from the page, and we are driven to act. Our lives are God’s story.
Matt Frazier is the president of Pursuant, a Dallas-based company specializing in online fundraising.
