Social Media is going to change the Church—whether or not the Church participates.
The Church is slow to embrace the power of this influence in our lives. It goes against the way the Church has worked for a very long time.
Trust and obey. Foundational words of faith. It means to trust and obey God, by the way.
Somehow the God part gets forgotten. Keeping Christians in line becomes an emphasis of anyone feeling empowered. The lines drawn by church leaders can be moving targets. Ideas change from century to century, decade to decade, and nowadays, year to year.
No one dares to quote the Bible to justify slavery anymore, but it worked for nearly 2000 years.
It worked when slaves had no voice.
Centuries of habit are going to be hard to break, but the time has come to trust the people of God. If we do something egregiously heretical, there are any number of forums for redress. There is no longer a need to monitor the thinking and voice of individual Christians.
We have always believed in this. It’s just been hard to practice.
We teach every three-year-old — Let your light shine.
Then we start to add the “buts” until their little lights are snuffed out.
The Church has never had more potential power. It can motivate and move EVERY member. You don’t have to roster us. You don’t have to qualify us. You don’t have to sort us out by race, age, status, or genitalia. We’ve been structuring our faith around such nonsense for a long time. Someday we are either going to laugh at our historical efforts to limit or exclude (thereby protecting power) — or hang our heads in shame.
This potential power of social media should spur our efforts to effectively share our faith outside the church. We are going to have to be part of the dialog outside our walls — because that’s where the conversations are taking place.
We have to be educators in many forums. We have to mix with the rest of the human race.
That approach has been taken before!
Let Go and Let God.
photo credit (retouched): crazyluca69 via photo pin cc
