Listening—taking time to get to know people in social networks based on what they share in profiles, posts, tweets, and so on, rather than emphasizing the communication of your own message
Attending—noticing and being present to the experiences and interests of others as they share themselves in digital spaces
Connecting—reaching out to others in diverse communities in order to deepen and extend the networks that influence your digital spiritual practice
Engaging—building relationships by sharing content, collaborating, and connecting people to others
This networked, relational LACE, Elizabeth argued, is a re-emerging mode of engagement that connects life in the ancient and medieval church to life in the church today, offering opportunities to enrich our relationships, our communities, and our churches after long centuries of increasing separation and distancing brought about by mass media and, in particular, broadcast media like radio, television, and movies.2
As we move in Click 2 Save to draw out the implications of the Digital Reformation for hands-on ministry practice, we explore the LACE more spe cifically through what we see as basic “arts of digital ministry”:
Offering spiritual care to others through practices of prayer, comfort, encouragement, and inspiration
Offering hospitality by extending welcome, creating sacred space, respectfully evangelizing, and incorporating others into the church
Forming disciples and enriching their spiritual lives through preaching, education, and small group ministries
Building community by engaging others and helping to connect them to one another
Sharing public witness through activism, social justice practices, advocacy in partnership with the marginalized and forgotten, and supporting the vitality of local communities
Chapter 4 also shares three detailed social media case studies. Two are from individual ministry leaders—the Reverend Nadia Bolz-Weber of the Lutheran mission church House for All Sinners and Saints in Denver, and the Reverend Matthew Moretz of St. Bartholomew’s Episcopal Church in New York. Another is from an organization—the Massachusetts Council of Churches. Your strategy, whether for your personal ministry or for your church or other religious organization, will not of course be exactly like any of those we share. We offer them, however, as an illustration of the kinds of reflection that go into developing a social media strategy and the results this reflection can provide.
“Approach social media as you would anything else in the church. If you have someone in your congregation who has gifts for it, try to make use of those gifts.”
—Emily Scott, Pastoral Minister
St. Lydia’s Church, New York
CONCLUSION: DIGITAL INCARNATION
When we started this project, we talked a lot about what the word “save” in the title meant to us. It’s a tricky word for mainline Christians, who have had—at least since the end of overt colonialism—less evangelically oriented, less proselytizing traditions. We tend, that is, not to announce our faith too loudly lest doing so impinge on the beliefs of others. We don’t generally call out the personal sinfulness of others and offer absolution within our churches. We don’t make a point to articulate, often even privately, the distinctiveness of our denominational traditions.
Elizabeth tells the story of her grandmother, who, as the family passed the churches of other denominations in her small town on the way to “the true church,” would sigh and say, “I don’t know why those people even bother to get up early on a Sunday. They’re all going to damnation anyway. May as well sleep in.” (She said that in the car, of course, not on the sidewalk.) The fact that mainline Christians seldom even think such things anymore, focusing more on our commonality as Christians than theological differences across denominations, is surely all to the good.
But it also seems to be the case that our understandable embarrassment over the demeaning and divisive dismissal of other faiths that was tolerable in earlier times has turned into a stultifying silence about who we really are as mainline Christians and how our faith allows us to live with others in the world in remarkable, loving, and healing ways. This has only been exacerbated by what many see as a co-optation of the word “Christian” itself by more fundamentalist believers, whose often condemning approach to sharing the faith has sowed disdain and outright hostility toward all Christians. As a result, many people who believe in God and in fact participate in Christian communities prefer to identify as agnostic, as “spiritual but not religious,” or as having “no religious belief in particular.”3
Our perspective is that new social networking platforms enable us to extend the love of God to others in ways that make our mainline Christian traditions more authentically present in the world. This may not “save” other believers and seekers in the sense of converting them to our particular denominations, and it may not “save” our churches in terms of numerical and associated financial stability. But, as you’ll see in the Conclusion, we think our participation in the new media landscape has a profoundly salvific effect nonetheless, saving God’s church from a marginalization and irrelevance that prevents us from doing the work of love, compassion, and justice to which we are all called.
We began this chapter by noting that this book itself began in digital conversation. It might almost go without saying that this conversational mode continued as Keith and Elizabeth worked on the book, the ideas in each chapter being shaped through email, Facebook posts, tweets, documents swapped on Dropbox, and Google+ video chats. However, in order to manage the work and avoid creating a schizophrenic tone, we divided the chapters between us, and shared comments after each draft. This process has allowed us to produce a book that is very much a collaborative product, drawing upon something of a single authorial direction in each chapter, but nonetheless expressing a shared vision and voice.
Still, because we each also bring unique perspectives to our shared project, from time to time you’ll see call-out boxes with short comments from one of us. Likewise, you’ll find notes on terminology that might be new, and tips on practices and resources that can make your digital ministry easier. And, you’ll find profiles of digital ministers we interviewed during the course of writing this book. What can we say? Keith is a digital native, and Elizabeth is pretty fully naturalized. Like more and more of the people you encounter in church and other ministries, we roll through the Digital Reformation with a lot of other voices and information in tow. We hope it’ll make for lively reading that supports your developing digital ministry while modeling the modes of communication current in the digital domain.
ENOUGH ABOUT US: ABOUT YOU, GENERALLY IN PARTICULAR
Writers typically write for a more or less imagined, composite reader—a “you” made up of a variety of backgrounds, characteristics, and experiences drawn from very different people. This is certainly true for Click 2 Save, which we address to the broad category of “leaders in ministry” that includes clergy and laypeople in both formal and informal ministry roles. We take a kind of “priesthood of all believers” understanding of readers of this book, assuming that each of us in the church is called to witness to and welcome others into the faith regardless of our title or role. In that sense, we’re all leaders
