Flashback: Like the Facebookers to Win the Facebookers

I originally posted this on March 21, 2012. As I was speaking about all of this stuff at a conference yesterday, I was reminded that it's good to sometimes go back to the basics of what you do and why you do it. This is as much for me as it is for anyone who reads this.

Rick Warren tweeted before Twitter was invented. I remember as I was first reading "The Purpose Driven Life" in college that I was drawn to the short, well-put phrases that filled the book.

"We are products of our past, but we don't have to be prisoners of it."

"You were made by God and for God, and until you understand that, life will never make sense."

"The best use of life is love. The best expression of love is time. The best time to love is now."

Critiques of the book at the time often centered around these short phrases. Pastors and theologians warned that Warren was simplifying things too much. The quotes were cute and memorable, but that didn't mean they were something to order your life around. It didn't go deep enough.

But what Warren recognized was that this type of communication was catching on in the collective consciousness. The days of people sitting down to read a long, well thought out essay on a particular truth were fading fast. We are a society that likes things in pill form, and we had begun to believe that if you couldn't say it in one or two sentences, then it wasn't important enough for us to read, let alone remember.

In March of 2006, Twitter was born, and over the last 6 years, it has become imperative for thoughts to be shared in 140 characters or less. Today Twitter is used by over 100 million users, and is growing rapidly. One of those users is Rick Warren himself. As of this morning, the pastoral master of the quirky quote has 529,003 followers on twitter.

I have 151.

However, my guess is that my experience as a pastor on social media is a way more likely scenario for most pastors than the Rick Warren experience.

The truth is this: the emerging generations have grown up and gone through their formative teen years with social media. They don't know a world without Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr, Instagram, and MySpace. As Christians, I believe we have a choice. We can either stand up against and try to turn the tide of the culture away from these growing online cultures, or we can embrace them and do our best to live out the Gospel even in these places.

The choice many go with is to combat social media. Whatever happened to kids playing outside? What about REAL relationships? What about face to face interaction? While I don't disagree that there is some validity in asking these questions, the reality is that for many, online relationships ARE real relationships. Honestly, with the amount of time that people spend on social media, there HAVE to be real relationships formed. They may look different from relationships in the past, but they are real in that they begin and end and induce emotion. It is human interaction.

Also, face to face interaction isn't going away. It is still the supreme form of communication and the one most often practiced. But to think that it will ever again be the ONLY way people communicate is a false hope.

Instead of rejecting social media, Christ followers must embrace it. It is a reality we need to live in to. Jesus was the ultimate example of what this looked like. It was called the incarnation. Humanity was dirty and broken and ugly, and yet Christ took on our form and walked with us and talked as we did, living among us.

Paul later explained how he practiced incarnationalism in spreading the Gospel.

"Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings. (1 Corinthians 9:19-23)

The places Paul went and the people Paul witnessed to were unclean and untouchable. They were outside of Paul's social norm. But Paul realized that if he wanted to reach them, he couldn't be an outsider. He had to be in and amongst them, becoming like them in every way he could while still remaining blameless in character. He had to be willing to give up the norm he was comfortable with, taking on a way of life that didn't make sense to him, in order to share the Gospel in the most effective way possible.

Our task today in the realm of social media is the same. There is nothing inherently evil about Facebook or Twitter or any other social media. For us today, I wonder for the Facebookers, how can we become like the Facebookers, to win the Facebookers? For the Twitterers, how can we become like the Twitterers, to win the Twitterers?