Spread the Word: Social Media and the Work of God
It’s right there on the Cherry Hills Community Church website – chcc.org. The tenets held by our church, called The Essentials of Our Faith, is found on the Beliefs page. There are sections on Jesus Christ, salvation, the Holy Spirit, and the One God.
The section on The Great Commission reads, “The Lord Jesus Christ demands all believers to proclaim the Gospel throughout the world and to make disciples of all nations. Obedience to the Great Commission requires total commitment to him who "loved us and gave himself for us.” He calls us to a life of self-denying love and service." For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them." (Ephesians 5:2, 2:10 NASB)”
As today’s Church of Jesus Christ, we define our faith by the ancient and eternal truths of Scripture, but the world we live is dependent on constantly changing super technology. History shows that spreading God’s Word can be risky, so understandably churches everywhere are wondering how, and if, to use the staggering power of technology in response to God’s call in the Great Commission. Does Cherry Hills use the “new media” to spread the Word throughout the world, making disciples of all nations?
Yesteryear
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Social Bookmarks: sites such as Del.icio.us, Blinklist, and Simpy. Websites are tagged and people can search through the websites bookmarked by other people.
Social News: sites such as Digg, Propeller, and Redit. People interact by voting for articles and commenting on them.
Wikis: sites such as Wikipedia and Wikia. Encourage interaction by allowing people to add articles and edit existing articles.
Search Engines: sites such as Bing, Doghouse, Alta Vista, or the king of search engines – Google.
Social Photo and Video Sharing: sites such as YouTube and Flickr. People interact by sharing their pictures or videos and by commenting on other users offerings.
Social Networking: sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn and MySpace. People across the generations interact by building and commenting on profiles, adding old and new friends, joining groups and causes, and having discussions. |
At the beginning of the Reformation, the established Church resisted and hindered the work of John Wycliffe, the Oxford professor, scholar and theologian who produced the first hand-written English language Bible manuscripts in the 1380s. Known for his opposition to
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John Wycliffe
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the teachings of the Church, which he believed to be contrary to the Bible, Wycliffe and his followers produced dozens of copies of the Scriptures in English. The translations so angered the Pope that 44 years after Wycliffe’s death, he ordered the dead man’s bones to be dug up, crushed and scattered in the river.
A hundred years later, during the reign of Henry VIII, William Tyndale shared Wycliffe’s belief that every child of God is entitled to read the Bible in his own language. Tyndale was so disgusted with the indifference of the clergy to the spiritual needs of the people that he resolved to provide the Scriptures to all strata of people. “I defy the Pope and all his laws,” he once told a clergyman, “If God spare my life, I will make the boy that driveth the plough know more of the Scripture than thou dost.”
William Tyndale spent years on the run, translating Scripture as he went, until he was betrayed and incarcerated. At his trial he was condemned for heresy. Mercifully, Tyndale was strangled before his body was burned at the stake. His last words were, "Oh Lord, open the King of England’s eyes". Only three years later Tyndale’s prayer was answered when Henry VIII not only permitted the printing of the “Great Bible,” he also paid for it.
Yesterday
In 2010, we don’t worry about having our bones crushed and scattered, or being burned at the stake. Still, as Michael D. Miller, president of NavPress said in a recent interview, “… the Christian world is technophobic. We have always tended to be that way, all the way back to Gutenberg’s printing press. The established church struggled to embrace it, and yet the radicals in the Protestant Reformation used that technology to print the Bible. The Internet is the same platform, only on steroids. It is massive.”
For Christians today, the danger of the Great Commission is not spreading the Word as much as it is not spreading it, especially now that doing so is easier than ever before. Cherry Hills Community Church is committed to using the tools and resources available to us, which means technology, and which means social media.
With the glut of information available on the Internet, people are using social media to obtain and decipher the facts they need, and to get opinions from sources they respect and know, quite often on a personal basis. According to Erik Qualman, author of socialnomics: how social media transforms the way we live and do business, “In less than three years, [social media] became the most popular activity on the Web, supplanting pornography for the first time in Internet history. Even search engines weren’t powerful enough to do that.” If the goal of spreading the Word is to reach as many human beings as possible, social media is the way to go.
Interaction
The keyword of social media is interaction. Social media is a variety of instruments that people are using for information, connection and discussion. About.com suggests the easiest way to understand the networking that takes place on social media sites is to imagine being back at high school. “You had friends in school, and you knew quite a few people even if you weren't friends with all of them, but it's likely that you didn't know everyone.” If you ever moved to a new school, you started out with no friends. After a couple of classes, you started meeting people and began socializing with those that had similar interests.
It works the same way on networking sites like Facebook. As you add friends, their friends, if allowed, can partake in whatever you post, and so can their friends, and so on. Imagine if what you posted had to do with faith, with gospel, with Scripture. That’s spreading the Word.
The Potency of Electronics
The older we are the less likely we are to use technology the way the young do to meet, express themselves, use information and stay connected. And yet the Barna Group reported last year that, “…churches have to work hard to keep pace with the way people access and use content, while also instructing churchgoers on the potency of electronic tools and techniques.”
Those of us not in school any more may question whether people can be evangelized virtually. Miller, of NavPress, also recently said, “…we have an internal debate going on as to whether you can disciple people virtually. My answer is, you bet. Someone else says, “I have to be face to face.” That somewhat limits it, doesn’t it? How do we get the Great Commission done if we don’t use these tools?”
A challenge comes in using the technology effectively without losing the personal touch. Steve Maegdlin, senior vice president with Focus on the Family says, “We need to deploy online communities as an extension, not a replacement, of traditional forms of community…Statistics show that your current and future constituents are familiar with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Blogger, MySpace and a host of other sites. They want and expect to have similar capabilities when they engage with your organization…”
All The Kids Are Doing It
In a July 4, 2009, New York Times article, reporter Paul Vitello wrote about the current social networking trends in churches. “Evangelical Christian ministers were among the earliest Web networkers, and today, popular preachers like Rick Warren and Joel
Osteen have thousands of followers on Twitter…” He added that other faith leaders are slowing catching on, “…Pope Benedict XVI opened his own Facebook page in May. It has attracted about 62,000 fans, whose uncensored greetings, requests and occasional insults appear on its “wall,” or comment board.”
Closer to home Denver Seminary benefits from the interaction offered by social networking. “Communication today is an active dialogue with nameable people who have venues in which to share their opinions,” DJ Turner writes in Outcomes, a Christian Leadership Alliance publication. “At Denver Seminary, we are intentionally leveraging technology to establish these connections in appropriate and relevant ways.”
The seminary also uses social networking tools to manage their technology. “Google Alerts and TweetBeep help us stay on top of what people are saying about us, providing the opportunity for us to engage the authors of that information when appropriate. Insights from Facebook, YouTube, and Google Analytics help us track and measure activity on our website. Ekklesia360, our content management system, helps us manage the community engagement opportunities on our website. These tools are essential for helping us set goals and measure the effectiveness of our efforts.”
It’s Not All Paradise
Trinity Church, an adventurous Episcopal congregation in Manhattan, New York, tried a Twitter experiment on Good Friday last year. Hundreds watched a traditional dramatic performance of the Crucifixion from inside the church, but thousands more followed along as a staff member “tweeted” messages like “Darkness and earthquake,” “Crucify him!” Everything went all right for the first hour, but the second hour was interrupted by text-messagers inserting unscripted characters that were everything from benign to crude.
Trinity still considers the Passion play experiment a success despite the interlopers. Since then the church has been tweeting bits like “God be with you” or “Inspire us with your holy spirit” in real time during worship services to followers from Europe to California, and even to some who live locally.
What About Here At Home?
An early use of technology at Cherry Hills was the church website chcc.org, which was one page that went live in 1999. Data and Web Services Director Sarah Damour recently reported that, “According to one ranking site, our website ranks 300,955 in the US. This, of course, is compared with sites like Google, Facebook and Ebay. Sadly, PornHub is rated number 35. In the category of Religion and Spirituality, Bible Gateway is number one, but is closely followed by LDS.org, IslamWay, Astrology, Tarot, IslamOnline and a Muslim dating service.”
During the month of February alone, chcc.org had over a million hits, almost 39,000 a day. So while Cherry Hills’ presence on the internet is noteworthy, speaking almost as loudly are voices that warrant our attention. Jesus Christ calls all who believe in him to proclaim the Gospel throughout the world and to make disciples of all nations. It will be crucial that we don’t talk just amongst ourselves, or as some would put it, preach to the choir.
Facing the Twitters
This past year Cherry Hills began making use of social networking media. On October 4 the congregation was invited to bring their cell phones to participate in an interactive worship service led by Pastor of Small Groups Mark Shupe. Mark posed questions to the congregation and participants texted their responses to a website that compiled them and enabled the results to be posted on the big screens. “I think it opens up opportunities for any large congregation to get instantaneous feedback. We learned that, for us, the use of questions that elicit percentage, yes and no, and ABC choice answers give us the best use of texting.”
Last fall, Elder Tim Coan facilitated a blog during the Grace Based Parenting class, which has now opened the door for future blogging around the church.
On Facebook, participants are staying up to the minute on life at Cherry Hills. As of this writing, a mention of Love in Action Sunday planned for April 25 was posted 12 hours ago, preceding a pulpit announcement. A Cherry Hills Facebook fan clicked an icon that indicates she likes the post, which gives the staff instantaneous information about how the congregation is responding. The fan will be aware of changes and opportunities regarding Love in Action as they arise. This information is also available on the church’s Twitter.
Spread The Word
Sarah Damour wants the Cherry Hills congregation to know that all information regarding members and participants kept by the church is private, safe and protected. Our desire is to provide a place on the Internet for people who want options for how to interact with their church family.
Michael D. Miller, the president of NavPress, clarifies the issue, “I don’t want to stand before the Lord and have him say, “I introduced you to these tools. You knew about them. You knew the Great Commission, and you knew I called you. Why didn’t you do something about it?”
Does Cherry Hills use the “new media” to spread the Word? The answer is yes. Throughout her history Cherry Hills has responded to the Great Commission, to God’s call, and today’s tools of technology are helping us continue to “do something about it”: helping us proclaim the gospel, making disciples of all nations.
Do you have a story?
The communications department at Cherry Hills Community Church is always interested in hearing how God is at work in the lives of people in our congregation. If you have a story you would like to tell, or know someone else with an inspiring story, please contact us.
Carrie Daniel
303.325.8306
