children, Ellie, Finn, Dulcie and Tess. He would also like to thank his mother, Rose Hamelin, and father, Rick Anderson, for being advocates for education and supporting him in his call to ministry. Keith extends his grateful appreciation to the people of the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Woburn, Massachusetts, whose vision for sharing the Gospel inspired many of the ideas and practices in these pages and whose support and encouragement has been essential in the writing of this book. Heartfelt thanks are also due to Elly and Kathy Alboim, Susan Pursch, The Rev. Scott Howard, The Rev. Mark Huber, and The Rev. Arthur Scherer.
INTRODUCTION
Digital Pilgrimage
What’s this chapter about? How a Lutheran pastor and an Episcopal professor connected through social media and what that has to do with this book, with a bit on the chapters ahead.
OUR DIGITAL SOCIAL MEDIA CONNECTION developed a few years ago, just after Elizabeth published an article in the online magazine Religion Dispatches. The article was about the encouragement of Pope Benedict XVI for Roman Catholic priests to enter the rapidly developing digital religious landscape by blogging on faith and spirituality whenever they could. While the article lauded the pope for his concern that the church be actively represented among the many voices in the religious blogosphere, it also pointed out that the pontiff had missed the social media mark to a considerable degree because he had assumed that digital social media functioned in the same top-down, one-to-many way as mass broadcast media. The inexperience with digital practice illustrated in the pope’s letter was hardly unique to the Roman Catholic Church. Mainline churches of all stripes were more or less bumbling into the digital domain, despite what turned out to be native gifts for relational communication that are ideally suited to life in the Digital Age. Elizabeth eventually explored mainline engagement with new media in much greater depth in Tweet If You ♥ Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation.
WHAT IS DIGITAL MINISTRY?
Digital ministry is the set of practices that extend spiritual care, formation, prayer, evangelism, and other manifestations of grace into online spaces like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, where more and more people gather to nurture, explore, and share their faith today.
It can also refer to these practices in both online and offline spaces as they are influenced by the networked, relational character of digital culture in general.
But the article on the pope’s entree into the digital domain did more than anchor the subsequent book. It also brought us together as colleagues in what we now think of as “digital ministry”—colleagues whom it is all but impossible to imagine might have connected before the age of digital social media. In the weeks after the Religion Dispatches piece came out, Keith emailed Elizabeth to share some insights from his work on the role of social media in his own church in the form of a presentation he’d recently given to a group of Lutheran clergy that included a couple quotes from her article.
Keith’s presentation, “From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg: How Social Media is Changing the Church,” moved beyond the commonly offered religious repackaging of marketing advice for profit-making businesses to locate social media participation in the theologies and spiritual practices that shaped and continue to animate the Lutheran Church. And, not for nothing, it had a way cool picture of Charlton Heston holding an iPhone version of the Ten Commandments that Elizabeth was able to poach for an upcoming talk on the Bible and social media.
So it was that, from three thousand miles and a denomination away, a Lutheran pastor and blogger became a colleague and friend to an Episcopal writer and educator. Now, a couple years later, we have become collaborators on Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible, sharing the fruit of an extended conversation about the role of new media not only in our own denominations, but across the church as it attempts to remain engaged in a rapidly changing world. Together, we have become digital pilgrims of a sort, traveling, sometimes together, sometimes apart, through the byways of the rapidly changing digital landscape and sharing tales of who we meet and what we find along the way.
We begin with this story not only because it seems a particularly charming, Digital Age way for two writers to come together on a project, but also because it says so much about how relationships are formed, how knowledge is created and shared, and, ultimately, how faith is reinforced and extended in the world today. Over the course of the past two years, we have shared resources and connected one another to colleagues. When Elizabeth put together a relatively impromptu tweeted, global Pentecost prayer service in 2010, Keith and a few members of his congregation, the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer in Woburn, Massachusetts, joined in. So, it’s fair to say that we’ve worshipped together as well.
All of this unlikely interaction has taken place between a pastor and a religious studies scholar whose face-to-face interaction was, until pretty far along in the writing of this book, limited to flickering images on weekly Google+ video “hangouts.” Which is to say that without digital social media, this book would absolutely not have been written. More significantly, the church would be a teeny bit smaller, a teeny bit less connected, a teeny bit less catholic. Multiply that by the healthy percentage of mainline Protestants and Catholics among the more than eight hundred million Facebook users, and you get a sense of the impact of social media on the church and on Christian ministry today. It is the reality of our own digitally enabled relationship that is at the root of Click 2 Save and of our enthusiasm for the potential that new social media have for enriching and extending the mission of the church. In the chapters ahead, we lay out what we see as a strategic approach to living out that potential.
CHAPTER 1: REMAPPING OUR WORLDS
While we wouldn’t go as far as to say that effective engagement will save a rapidly declining church on its own, we are confident that much of the hope for revitalizing our churches and sustaining their good work in the world is related to the ability of leaders in ministry to engage people exactly where they are. And “where they are” increasingly includes social media spaces like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and LinkedIn.
This means that everything’s a bit topsy-turvy these days, with all the world’s major newspapers offering religious insight and education; bloggers of all stripes sermonating and otherwise opining on theology, spirituality, and religious life; websites and smartphone apps offering opportunities to pray, meditate, sing, confess, learn about religions, and mount arguments for and against them. Religious formation and spiritual enrichment are now all over the digital map. Chapter 1 begins, then, by exploring how digital media have remapped the world we all share, constructing not only new worldviews that challenge long-held notions of geography and place, but also reorganizing relational possibilities across the planet.
Once we’ve spent some time mapping the evolving digital planet, we move in Chapter 1 to describe the inhabitants of its most robust communities, Facebook and Twitter, by way of highlighting the differences between so-called “digital natives” and the people we typically see at church on Sunday. It’s a huge world with lots and lots of people, so the view is from somewhere above ten thousand feet, but our hope is to orient you to the general terrain so you’ll be better prepared to gather resources, make connections, and enter conversations that will help you to develop a social media strategy for your church or religious organization.
Travel across this new landscape of social networking sites is on the rise across generations, demographic groups, and around the globe. Recent research by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and Neilson has illustrated this growth in the population in general, but it also points to particular practices of digital engagement that are significant for mainline churches and ministers who wish
