with God in Jesus Christ that is at the center of our faith. So, in the end, we see Click 2 Save as a book for disciples in general.
Click 2 Save also speaks to the very particular experiences, stories, and questions we both have encountered in our respective pastoral and educational ministries. It is drawn from conversations not just with the people we interviewed for the book, many of whom will be profiled in the pages ahead, but from ongoing conversations with colleagues, church members, and a rich blend of friends whom we regularly encounter in face-to-face and social media settings. Their questions about social media participation as it might help to address the challenges facing their various communities are very particular, very much located in the realities of sustaining small or large church communities; growing or declining service, community, and social justice programs; and tending established and emerging spiritual friendship networks.
One of the things we’ve learned as we’ve studied social media practice in religious contexts, talked with a wide range of practitioners, and mucked around in Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and so on ourselves is that there is no one-size-fits-all approach that will address the particular needs of each community or individual. But, of course, the beauty of new media is that it is endlessly adaptable, and this is exactly what we invite you to do with this book. In effect, we invite you to write Click 2 Save with us, using the information we share in light of your particular needs to develop a social media strategy for your specific ministry. At the end of each chapter you’ll find space for this customizing of the ideas and approaches we share. We hope, too, that you’ll visit the Click 2 Save Facebook page or Twitter feed to share your experience as you adapt and apply the ideas in the chapters ahead in your particular context.
As you get ready to develop a social media strategy for your church or religious organization, we will invite you to step back a bit and consider what motivates your social media participation and what you hope to accomplish by deepening your practice. The puzzle piece icon that appears throughout the book marks the spot for strategic reflection on the material covered in each chapter. If you’re working with a group on social media strategy for your community—a practice we certainly encourage—you may want to copy the strategy page for participants.
You’ll see other icons throughout the book that mark our comments on each other’s ideas, profiles of digital ministers across the denominational spectrum in a variety of settings, social media tools that may be helpful in your digital ministry, definitions of social media terminology we use in the book, and quick tips for social media practice. Here are the icons you’ll see in the pages ahead:
PIRATE THIS BOOK
Back in the day, political activist Abbie Hoffman wrote an ironic bestseller called Steal This Book, which aimed to promote the overthrow of the government by encouraging a number of ethically questionable and wholly illegal activities. That’s hardly our agenda in Click 2 Save, but we do want you to make this book your own, to use it as a launch for conversations with friends, colleagues, parishioners, and others involved in the revitalization of mainline churches as they serve God in the world. We’ve come to almost all of the ideas we share in the book by way of such conversations, and we’re very much looking forward to hearing your voice and seeing your community as we continue to develop our own digital ministries.
To get started, please take some time on your own or with friends and colleagues to reflect on the strategic questions below.
Why do you think digital ministry is important for you and your church or other religious organization?
What are your personal and/or organizational goals for digital ministry?
How much time do you have for digital ministry?
Who will support you and/or join you in digital ministry?
What other resources are available for your digital ministry?
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REMAPPING OUR WORLDS
How Social Media Have Transformed the Landscape
 | Social media have remapped the world, pushing beyond all sorts of boundaries—geographic, demographic, and conceptual alike. In this chapter, we look at the new global, social world and the people who inhabit it as background to the upcoming discussion of participation in specific social media platforms from a faith and ministry perspective. |
REMAPPING THE WORLD
Even if you happened to be off on a remote, Wi-Fi-disabled island vacation in the summer of 2011, by the time you sailed back to reality you surely caught the news that Facebook had grown to more than seven-hundred-fifty million users, eclipsing all other social networking communities. The surge in Facebook membership (which topped eight-hundred million as we were sending this manuscript to press) and the way it has begun to change our view of the world brings to mind the shift in mapmaking in the sixteenth century, after wider global travel and mechanistic mapmaking altered the reigning perception of the world. In the ancient and medieval worlds, a map was less a representation of geopolitical reality than it was an expression of the cultural terrain from the perspective of the mapmaker and his patrons. For example, the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi (or “map of the world”) situates Jerusalem in the center, the Garden of Eden at the top (which is east on the map), and a variety of other biblical locales—Noah’s ark, the Red Sea, Babylon—along with England, Scotland, and Ireland all out of geographical proportion to Asia.1 And, of course, medieval mapmakers made sure to indicate the dangerous waters leading to unknown territories where “thar be dragons!”—signaled by detailed illustrations of dragons, sea monsters, and other mythical creatures who stood for those locales we know are somewhere around the bend but whose inhabitants we do not know or understand.
A medieval mappa mundi, then, marked not national boundaries or natural terrains, but rather spiritual and psychosocial ones—worldviews, we would call them today. They told stories about how people imagined the world and themselves in it.
While we’ve come to make maps with greater geographical accuracy, we fool ourselves still if we believe that our modern maps reflect any uncomplicated, uncontroversial reality. This is because the nations and the borders we now recognize through the boundaries drawn on modern maps are political ideas rather than geographical facts, the results of negotiated histories and relationships. Ask the people of Tibet where China really is (or vice versa), and you’ll come into a swirl of contested history, tradition, and
