Infographic: 2013 Social Media Stats

Posted on December 29, 2013 by Chris

Mobile Marketing Watch have published a fantastic info graphic on social media in 2013:

87% of American teenagers send text messages each month

Posted on December 23, 2013 by Chris

We all know teenagers are glued to their mobile phones. New data from the Family Online Safety Institute shows which mobile activities are keeping them hooked.

Text messaging is the most popular activity, which 87% of teens have done in the past 30 days. More than 80% of teens also have also participated in mobile gaming, emailing and social networking.

Statista‘s chart shows how many teens engage in different mobile activities:

Analysis of Wikipedia has shown that Jesus Is ‘The Most Significant Person Ever’

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Chris

Two computer scientists have completed an analysis of Wikipedia data, and found that Jesus Christ is the single “most significant figure in human history.”

To come up with their top 10 list of significant humans, the researchers looked at individuals who have impacted opinions and movements over time, according to entries in the online encyclopedia. Napoleon, Shakespeare, Muhammad and Abraham Lincoln rounded out the top five, followed by George Washington, Hitler, Alexander the Great and Thomas Jefferson. The researchers said that the lack of women on the list was a result of gender inequality views throughout history.

One of the professors behind the algorithms told the Pacific Standard,

“We would call Jesus ‘The most significant person ever.’ With over 2 billion followers a full 2,000 years after his death, Jesus is an incredibly successful historical meme”

Hidden YouTube Fun

Posted on September 25, 2013 by Chris

Try this:

1. Pick any YouTube video. (An individual video – not channel videos)

2. Play it, then pause.

3. Click somewhere outside the video.

4. Type 1980. Enjoy what happens next.

5. Tweet/share this post with everyone!

Thanks to morethandodgeball.com

Toddler Buys Car While Playing with Dad’s Phone

Posted on August 6, 2013 by Chris

Don’t give your smartphone to anyone that you don’t trust with your money. Paul Stoute of Portland, Oregon found that out when his 2-year old daughter Sorella used the eBay app on his phone to purchase a 1962 Austin Healey Sprite:

“She decided to open the eBay app, and started clicking around and one thing led to another and we own a car,” he told KOIN 6 News, laughing.

Mom and Dad had an “initial panic,” he said. “‘What do we do? We can’t really afford it’ kind of thing.”

But they decided to keep it.

Paul plans to keep the car, restore it, and give it to Sorella for her 16th birthday or high school graduation, read here for more.

Digital Children: Q&A with Bishop Paul Butler

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Chris

Q&A with Bishop Paul Butler at the Digital Children conference:

Why is it that most Vicars only receive 1 seminar on children’s ministry in 3 years of full-time training? Wouldn’t disagree with you, keep arguing and don’t seem to get anywhere. Heads of Theological colleges began to take it on board but changing the culture takes time.

In Australia people are licensed as a Children’s Minister or Youth Minister – everything rises and falls on leadership – why are we not empowering on this? The last year or two of CYM has struggled to get its numbers in the Children’s Course and the number of churches that are employing a children’s specialist. If All-Age becomes the sustainable model do the training colleges begin to slim down?

Churches seem to struggle to find the calibre of workers should we employ from abroad? But the Border Agency would not welcome this.

Refreshing to have a Bishop who gets it – don’t take that for granted – for many a children’s worker issues of leadership are real. How do we encourage leadership generally from sentiment and rhetoric to meaningful action? Show me a budget and I will tell you what your focus, but let’s be honest in our accounting so that we include volunteer hours. Honestly don’t know the answer which is one of the frustrations. Chair the Joint Liaison Safeguarding Group between CofE and Methodists – one of the positives is that Bishops are now waking up to the seriousness of the situation and to the wider issue of where are headed with childhood. One of the things might be to find different ways in – coming from another angle people are now willing to speak about The Good Childhood etc. Alongside Safeguarding try Parenting and Grand-Parenting skills.

Youth worker seeking ordination thinks schools and community work has to stop – that you graduate from children’s and youth ministry to focus on the grown-up issues of weddings, funerals and more. Part of that is about placing Ordinands with Vicars and Rectors who get it. It is still depressing to hear that said especially given how we now say bring your business skills, or teacher skills or social work skills. In some Dioceses the do a weekend to train Curates on Children’s and Youth ministry.

Parishes that are having the most significant success are those that are tackling the issues of poverty – for churches doing football etc., they were feeding children, building better homes and more. We can ask for more children’s workers but it is about missiology and the child piece in that. It is not rocket science to look at what works for the community, 8am service was to allow the workers to milk the cows, do the service and then go back to cook lunch whilst the Lord and Lady attend the 10.30am.

Half churches aren’t engaging in children’s and youth work – there is a sense of larger churches growing due to their churches – thereby leading no people to lead that work. How do we solve this? There are schemes to get a part-time worker; maybe it is okay for some churches to not have children’s work as some areas have a demographic where there are very few children and so should focus on the elderly etc., and partner with a local place for the few children; ecumenical partnerships will be increasingly important.

Sticky Faith talks about involvement in all areas of the church being key for faith development, but All-Age Worship is often the worse attended, committed to it as a principle but how do we shake that image. The only way is to shake it up by having an all-age group to plan the all-age worship to think how the different ages etc. work as too often it is child worship not all-age.

We are still focussed on aspirations – children and young people who go to university – half don’t so how do we connect with them? So much is connected to those who go off to university, and we have to go back to Rakes with the Sunday School movement and the Ragged Schools – what is the equivalent for us – Glee Club and where we can raise aspirations.

Greatest cricketer in Viv Richards asking a guy in his congregation who was a poor county cricketer to improve him. How? He watched and spotted and commented it and left it to Viv to make the changes.

Digital Children: Bishop Paul Butler

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Chris

Bishop Paul Butler led the next session at the Digital Children conference:

Children in attendance at church has been in decline although in 2011 Baptist numbers were up and the CofE numbers were just about steady

Sales of Sunday School materials are in decline, wider materials such as Bible reading notes etc. are also in decline.

Half of all churches have little or no contact with children, and more than half have little or no contact with young people.

Schools

Our engagement with schools is stronger than it has been for a number of years, and the opportunity is there. We all know it can vary from Head teacher to Head teacher, but the options are there, especially if we are creative. Why is Open the Book so successful? It says you don’t need to be young, it is dramatic, it is creative, people enjoy it, and it tells the Bible stories very faithfully. Too many churches still think engagement with schools is taking assemblies even though they haven’t been called that for a long time – it is running gardening clubs, breakfast clubs, after-school clubs.

Messy Church

Lots of research but no one knows why it works. It is the willingness to explore the questions as to what it looks like – what do the sacraments look like in Messy Church, how does it change from a monthly event to a lifestyle – trying things out some of which work and some of which don’t. Whilst in Walthamstow, was told by a Superintendent from the police the problem is that we have to know it works before we will try it. Messy Church will continue to grow and variants will develop, e.g. Godly Play in prisons and Alzheimer’s work.

Toddler and Carer Groups

They continue to flourish at extraordinary rates – very quickly parents are asking for wisdom on how to parent and bringing children up spiritually.

Church Clubs

Still a huge role for places where children can enjoy, run around, be free to explore. But we need to explore BGT and XFactor which is dance, drama and comedy – why aren’t we doing more Glee Clubs etc.

Sport culture

150 years of football which local churches started. Southall is a town of 7,000 inhabitants, on Sunday morning there are 500 young people in the local football club. Why are churches not freeing adults to go and be at Southall Town FC – don’t set up your own clubs.

Mentoring

Single parent families seeing so many young people growing up with no male role model, where does the church fit in with mentoring.

Residentials

We need to grow these further, interesting conversations from schools visits with senior staff about how they matter to the life of schools and how funding limits could cause problems. We need to help churches grow their residentials, also including families.

Church Worship

Churches will move to all-age as the norm, what Mary Hawes does in Teddington with 25 minute services is going to be important. Sustaining Sunday groups as they are in the current format is near impossible. We may even see the beginning of Sunday afternoon school again as seen in the development of the Messy Church timings.

Poverty

In 2011 Paul’s diocese was the fastest growing, one common feature is they engage with the local community for the sake of the community not for bringing people into the church. We need to work alongside Sure Start, social workers, schools etc., as the poverty issue is going to be the one that will run as there is a growth in child poverty, even the government are admitting that 250k extra children will fall into child poverty due to Welfare Reforms.

Get the Story Out

We have to get the story of Jesus out into people’s lives. We have to use digital resources but look at low tech not high tech in the sense of YouTube, Facebook, Gavin Tyte’s beatboxing – not technically brilliant, mass market and massively possible. We want some people who are brilliant at high tech but we have to get the message out. This doesn’t just apply to children’s and youth work – it is the whole work of the church.

Which are the stories that will connect? Paula Goodyer and Paul Butler are working on a book for 2014 taking a dozen bible stories with Bible scholar and passionate children’s worker reflecting together on the stories. There is the whole of the Bible not just the favourite bits which are often mis-represented in the way they are told and dumbed down.

Don’t give up on evangelism with children – who knows what we might be sowing for the long-term.

Digital Children: From Clay Tablets to iPads

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Chris

Dave Roberts carried on the Digital Children conference with Clay Tablets to iPads:

Watching a programme about impressionist paintings was like watching paint dry, but was surprised and became hooked to the four programmes in the series. The presenter spoke about howthe artists wanted to paint the ordinary things.

They were aided by several things

Tube technology for storing paint came into being
Someone invented an easel that you could fold up and take with you
The railways were invented so people could travel to do the Normandy scenes
The brushes changed allowing the daubing to take place.

What is the core of who we are? God the Father, Jesus the Son, work and nature of the Holy Spirit. But John 1 with the word becoming flesh is pivotal. Words capture faith – who we are and what we believe.

How has culture dealt with words, how have Christians dealt with words?
Are we early adopters of technology with words.

Clay Tablets

Or tablets of stone, the 10 Commandments were handed down on tablets and still guide us now. Lots of storytelling was done in hieroglyphics and picture form on clay tablets – much of which we morally wouldn’t agree with; recorded debt – each bit scratched off and then the tablet is broken when the debt is paid is a legitimate purpose but often turned out to be illegitimate; literacy related to the devout who formed schools for children to learn – honey on lips – honey on the tablets for the letters which they picked out with hteir fingers.

Scrolls

The medium for the scene was Jesus picking up a scroll and reading Isaiah saying this is what he had come to do. This suggests Jesus had literacy skills. The children were taught to read so they could read the scrolls – but in reality they were asked to memorise the first five books of the Bible. The oral tradition was very strong – some countries the Christians learn scripture by memory in case they have their Bibles taken off them by persecuting governments.

Paul writes epistles on the scrolls and uses them to help believers.

Mass Teaching Needs

The reformation was important as it allowed dissent from one theological view – John Wesley was key for this and was influenced by Zinserzolf. But Zinserzolf was in rebellion against monastic scholasticism, and wanted ordinary people to meet in homes and begin to understand the Bible. Out of this comes a push for mass literacy. In pietistic communities they start to educate the girls as well as the boys. In general literature we see references to blackboards enabling teachers to communicate on a highly visible surface.

The move to mass literacy needs equipment

Then something happened coming from Wesley based around the Clapham Sect who said they would help Wilberforce to abolish slavery, then led to the formation of the NSPCC and the RSPCA, the Religious Tract Society and the Bible Society. We saw a tension between the Bible, Pilgrims Progress etc., against books on the Occult, witch craft. All of the big publishers came from Christian movements, e.g. Harper Collins, Hodder & Stoughton, Mills & Boons.

Mass literacy through organisations such as the London City Mission breaks the hegemony of a particular view point bringing democracy and equality. This needs tools – clay was discovered to develop pencils.

Tell me a story

Mass literacy is an important aspect in the story telling. Telling the story through pictures came through television and flannelgraph.

There must be an alternative

The CUBE project of the 1950s was The Eagle, started by a Anglican Vicar who believed children’s minds were being poisoned by comics and felt that the church had an inadequate response. The first print run had 900,000 with Dan Dare being a manly vicar or parson. The back page had a story linked to the Apostle Paul.

Tell me the story with moving pictures

Christians got involved in moving pictures telling great stories with good skills, leading to Veggietales in the Charts and films in the Cinema.

Conclusion

The Word is the Word is the Word. Sometimes used for desperately hurtful purposes but equally for building up. We’ve been in the business of using technology from forever. Taking information away from elite groups and onto the wider population.

Digital Children: Learning Spaces

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Chris

Allen Reesor on Learning Spaces at the Digital Children conference:

Jesus said in Matthew 18:3 that we need to become little children but we don’t know who is the child.

Who is a child? Are we becoming like little children?

Who learns from whom? As adults we are not the experts, we come knowing that we don’t know. If you already know everything you need to know you don’t need to do the research! Children strive to know about God, to understand more about God, and they mistakenly believe adults know more. Are we learning from them or are we trying to teach them?

Children learn differently

Want to access not memorise information. They don’t bother with memorisation, they bother with access. Are we giving them the access and avenues they want.
They want access to experience not facts. The Bible doesn’t come at you as a theology text, but as a bunch of people’s experiences.

Children have a new set of values

They are creative not rigid – it is why they play the same level of the same game several times. We have multiple learning styles.
They do not like it when the church is perceived as judging rather than accepting and loving.
Interested in relationship not position – don’t care on title but on whether the other person is interested in a relationship with them.
Children’s engagement related to change
What changes are significant
It is not about simply entertaining. Sometimes when you encounter God you’re not always entertained, sometimes meet him in silence, sometimes challenged and browbeaten etc.

Learning Spaces: Messy Research

Create a Research Hypothesis
Roundtable discussions with theoreticians and practitioners
In UK and USA
Formulate a theory for testing

Test with qualitative research

Focus groups with children (aged 8-11 years old), parents, and practitioners of spiritual formation.

Initial findings

Indicators of Spiritual Vitality
3 possible domains shown in the USA and UK: God, myself and others.

Theory of Spiritual Vitality

Interdependence of domains
What comes first?

Can we quantify pre-teen Spiritual Vitality?

If we were to measure Jesus on this scale we would have three completely over layed circles – completely perfect spiritually. But on the negative side we would have three circles completely unrelated.

“It is not so much that it is a question of spiritual development but the development of the battle for spiritual vitality.”

Next Steps

Define sub-factors
Research review – how do other sciences quantifying such factors?
Create a prototype based on best practices.
Validate assessment results – need to test with children that the model is right. Children have deep awareness of their spiritual life.

Digital Children: Children meeting God – in the digital realm

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Chris

Maggie Barfield spoke on Children meeting God – in the digital realm

“… people with a story to tell are finding: that to tell it, they need not only to entertain their audience, but to involve them, invite them in, let them immerse themselves.” The Art of Immersion, Frank Rose (editor of The Wired), Norton 2011

We have the stickiest story so we need to involve, invite, and immerse them.

CUBE: Working together with the American Bible Society to help 8-11s grow in their faith online.

Doing it because of the Great Commission. Christians have done this for 2,000 years.

Most children aged 8-11s spend 2 hours online a day so if we’re going to fulfil the Great Commission we need to go online and speak their language. Instead of telling them what to do we ask them “what should you be doing?” “What should we be doing to help children meet God through the Bible and prayer?”

Looked at all the areas of child development, in faith and spirituality, ways of handling the Bible, where education and learning styles is going, technology developments – tablets didn’t exist when initial project started, safety and child protection. Digital delivery quite quickly came

Marc Prensky, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants, 2001: “think and process information fundamentally differently from their predecessors … are ‘native speakers’ of the language.

“Digital natives …”

Used to receiving information really fast
Like to parallel process and multi-task
Prefer their graphics before their text
Prefer random access (like hypertext) – finding things on Wikipedia that are irrelevant
Function best when networked
Thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards
Prefer games to “serious work”.

“a new type of narrative is emerging – one that’s told through many media at once in a way that is nonlinear, that’s participatory and often game-like, and that’s designed above all to be immersive. This is “deep media”: stories that are not just entertaining, but immersive taking you deeper …” The Art of Immersion, Frank Rose (editor of The Wired), Norton 2011

Justin Barrett from Fuller Theological Seminary says:

“Children learn things that their minds are tuned to learn more readily than things that go against that natural tuning … children’s minds are not a level playing field. They are tilted in the direction of belief.”

Faith can be …

Shaped by teaching
Enhanced through response
Grown in community

This is all works when we live in a digital age.

Product definition

Our solution is to pursue a site that is child-focussed including gaming, entertaining and information.

“This stage of development has been called by some “the age of the young scientist” in that it is a time when things are either right or wrong. It is also a period of considerable spiritual awareness.” Howard Worsley, A Child Sees God

Everything we are aiming to do through CUBE can be done through a Virtual World, innovations that game writers are surprised by, finding new ways to tell and explore Bible stories with a genuine response in the online environment. Doing some new work on the metrics and indicators of faith.

Matters Arising

How do you “reward” activity in a digital world – it’s normally for shooting or killing something!
Avoiding the anticlimax – revolutionary fun and then the Bible story – interesting and challenging.
Grace – how do you share this concept of God’s grace against the
Moving between game and beyond-game – and back.
Balance between fun and purpose.
Who am I? Is it real or not?

Are we nearly there yet?

Done a lot of research and thinking. Ready to press the button, but there isn’t much to show. Want to have something available to the public in January 2014 to build an audience, and next April launch fully, scaling up the site from then on.

www.projectcube.org

www.facebook.com/ProjectCube

Digital Children: From Guttenberg to Zuckerberg: How Social Media is Changing the Church

Posted on June 11, 2013 by Chris

Here’s my Digital Media PowerPoint and the text from my presentation at the the Digital Children conference:

Of all the messages the world has ever heard from politicians, story tellers, advertisers and more the gospel is still the stickiest. The good news is that God’s message is your message, which makes your presence and voice online and that of the children and young people we work with wholly (and holy) indispensable!

I want to challenge you today as a Christ follower to change your mind-set of the way you spend your time online. I want to challenge you to share new ways to reach a fragmented world for Christ. Together, we can light up the online space. We can “go” and we can “tell” as Jesus asked each of us to do.

Game Changers

Multiple factors can be attributed to why social media has grown so rapidly, including cheaper broadband, a fire to innovate and the global economy shift. As unprecedented economic, political, and social factors continue to fragment continents, cities and even homes, words such as connection, community, and relationship increasingly dominate the conversation.

Broadcast to Social Media

In the 500 years or so between the inventions of the printing press and the Internet, which Dave will explore later, we have lived in a broadcast media environment of books, radio, newspapers, and television. These media served as highly effective platforms for sending a single, well-crafted, attention-getting message out to as many people as possible. But broadcast media afforded little opportunity for feedback or discussion. In the church, we have used this one-to-many broadcast communication model in sermons, printed newsletters, letters from the Rector, and broadcasting worship services on Radio 3 or Songs of Praise.

Social media represents a profound shift in this model. Today, almost anyone can publish a blog, have a YouTube channel, and host their own podcast. Anyone can comment on, extend, qualify, discuss, and share a sermon. With today’s technology, you can reach in minutes, and even seconds, the physical ground that the apostle Paul and other game changers covered in years.

Sheer size of Social Media

The sheer size of social media is huge:

Facebook with 1 billion (and growing) registered users, making it the third biggest country in the world. Interestingly though for us the largest growing segment of Facebook users are those aged 55 years plus.
The average user has 130 friends, spending 24 minutes per day on Facebook, creating 70 pieces of content each month,
Each day 460,000 new users sign up to Twitter
110 million tweets are posted each day
37% of active Twitter users use their phone to tweet.
There are over 150 million blogs globally.
People are engaging video at increasingly higher rates (about 5%) than other social media.
Engagement, with video increases with each subsequent generation – for Millennials (18-33 year olds) watching video is the fourth most popular online activity behind email, web search, and social networking.
YouTube sees 72 hours of video uploaded every minute.
YouTube is also the web’s second largest search engine – people want to see us in action, hear our voice, not just read our words.
The average person will watch 5 hours of video a day.
Whilst at the Third Lausanne Congress in 2010 we were told that 25% of people coming to faith do so through media on mobile phones.

Following all those statistics it is easy to be over whelmed. But as Paul challenges us in 2 Corinthians we need to not lose heart, not be crushed, not in despair, not abandoned, not destroyed, as we’ll hear in a moment, if anything the opportunities that we have to share the Gospel are ever increasing in this digital world.

Practicing Digital Ministry

Jesus: The Master of Buzz

Remember the viral buzz generated around The Blair Witch Project back in 1999? How about the Susan Boyle Britain’s Got Talent audition video? Don’t forget the explosion of the YouTube phenomenon that is now Justin Bieber, or the hilarious viral e-mail sent each Christmas that allows the whole world to Elf Itself.

We each have the opportunity to give voice to the supernatural acts of God in this day and age. Everyday believers just like you are already stepping out and adding to Jesus’ phenomenal buzz.

However you want to look at it, as a resident of the twenty-first century you’ve got the potential to wield some serious digital influence – for Christ. The message is as sticky, as good as it gets. Sticky content is independent of time, change, and cyberspace. The Apostle Paul, no doubt a thought leader of his day, knew the message was unlike anything else the world had ever known, and he wrote: “We carry this precious Message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives.”

Adapting to technology does not mean you change the message to fit the culture. The Word of God stands and does not need to be spiced up or watered down to fit the taste buds of any culture or generations. The Word is as alive and active as it was when God spoke it into existence. The only thing that you must change is your mind-set about how you must now relate to the culture around you.

Writer and theologian Francis Schaeffer said that “each generation of the church in each setting has the responsibility of communicating the gospel in understandable terms, considering the language and thought-forms of that setting.” Whilst the technology that we’re being invited to use might be different, in essence I want to encourage you to rely on traditional modes of engaging with people that have served the Christian community well for generations.

Called to Humility

The online world provides the perfect storm for pride to rise up like a toxic tsunami. To quote C.S. Lewis, “Humility is not thinking less of yourself but thinking of yourself less.” When you think more of yourself, you create a place where pride creeps in, and if you’re not careful, it finds a place to set up permanent residence deep inside you. As I’ve said earlier, we’re not here to focus on ourselves, but instead to be Jesus’ servant, faithfully sharing his message.

Humility has a gentle tone; it doesn’t condescend or diminish another person’s value. It doesn’t ignore, marginalise, or favour. It never criticises or corrects in public, especially over minor things. Just check out the example of Mo Farah, having won the New Orleans half-marathon, Farah was asked by WSDU presenter LaTonya Norton if he had ever run before. Farah broke into a smile and replied that he had run a half-marathon before, but that this was his first time running in New Orleans. Not once during the interview did Norton note Farah’s 5,000 metres and 10,000m gold medal success at the London Olympics, only ever referring to him as the male winner of that half-marathon. Various people in the twitter world criticised the presenter to which Mo Farah replied: “Just wanna say to everyone being nasty to LaTonya Norton please stop!! She made a mistake like we all do!! She didn’t mean anything by it!”

Caring for God’s People

When Jesus started His ministry, He began to call individuals to “follow” Him. We see and hear the expression “follow me” or “I’m following …” a lot in the social networking realm, but to date, no one has yet to offer the return on investment (eternity) that Jesus offered. Once the disciples began following Him, Jesus proved worthy of their trust by being consistently genuine and authentic. Basically, He cared, and it showed as He walked, talked, prayed, ate, and lived out the highs and lows of daily life with His beloved tribe of twelve.

The same trust, built through consistent, real, one-on-one dialogue, is the goal in our online relationships. It will be a steadiness of character, a showing up, and a reaching out with a Jesus brand of compassion that will touch hearts for eternity.

It is a paradox of social media that people will share very intimate and sometimes life-and-death matters in social media spaces, even though such sharing becomes immediately both public and permanent. Today, new loves, breakups, engagements, marriages, divorces, birth and death announcements, health news, and personal locations are all shared online. Social media therefore can serve as a good “leading indicator” that something is amiss with someone.

I see my Facebook news feed and Twitter stream as place of and occasions for prayer. People, regardless of faith, in my experience, deeply appreciate these digital expressions of pastoral attentiveness and concern.

We can also actively solicit prayer requests, something we’ve often done with our youth group, in preparation for Parish Prayers on a Wednesday morning – they see that God answers all knee mails! Interestingly I receive as many prayer request from those who don’t see themselves as Christians as from those who do.

Forming Disciples

Social media is changing the way we learn because it has changed the way we access information and the way we connect with one another. Scott McLeod, a professor of educational leadership describes it this way: “We no longer live in an information push-out world where we passively receive information that is broadcast out to us by large, centralized entities. Instead, we now live within multi-directional conversation spaces.”

The ability people have to find out almost anything on Google, Wikipedia or YouTube necessarily changes the role of the ministry leader as an education. Those in leadership no longer function as “resident theologians” by virtue of any special gnosis or knowledge received in seminary, or from the shelves of the theological books and commentaries in their office. Instead, in a sea of information, they need to help others to become theologians themselves, inviting people to reflect critically upon all the information they encounter and to engage in discussion with others over that information.

Consider the difference between a sermon and the increasingly popular Pub Theology offered by churches around the country. In a traditional sermon, a congregation gathers to hear a vicar impart information. There may be some discussion afterwards in coffee, but the structure of the learning is centred on the teacher who shares their expertise.

By contrast, pub theology is normally facilitated by a “resident theologian” around a table, with everyone having the opportunity to bring something meaningful to the discussion. Social media presents a similar opportunity – a theological conversation happening in a public place, influenced by the life that is all around it. This is, of course, entirely consistent with the Latin root of “sermon”, sermo, which means “discussion.”

Building Community

Many people worry that digital relationships will eclipse face-to-face engagement; however, studies show that people active in social networks are more likely to be engaged in face-to-face volunteerism and faith communities. This is because people who long for community seek it out in many forms, and people who connect in meaningful ways enjoy opportunities to extend that connection in both online and offline settings. Thus, one of the important roles we have on social network sites is to cultivate a sense of community that moves between both online and offline locales.

Making Public Witness

As we end I want to share with you examples of creative ways to share faith using evangelism. First off, in Facebook, someone took the time to create Jesus’ account for Holy Week – I’ve used it a number of times in schools and youth work to help young people engage with the Gospel.

Second, Twitter users followed the Natwivity throughout Advent, when different figures from the world’s most famous story wrote 140-character updates each day. It included Joseph, Mary, the shepherds, the three wise and King Herod. Natwivity was organised by design company Share Creative and the Evangelical Alliance to bring the 2,000-year-old story to social media platforms.

The Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus video has been seen by over 24 million people on YouTube alone. It’s a spoken word, a modern poem by a young man highlighting the difference between Jesus and false religion.

Dibden Youth has created an online community through our Facebook page. We share information on upcoming events with the 96 people who are part of the page, but it goes well beyond using the page simply as a digital bulletin board. We regularly pray for them, we inspire them with quotes from Christian saints, encouraging them to reflect. All of this digital engagement reinforces the face-to-face engagement we have with them. In addition, for example, in Holy Week we saw 21,147 engage in a range of images and videos we shared linked to Easter. For an average church with a youth group we were able to reach a huge number of people.

Conclusion

The possibilities for the Kingdom in the online world are real, they’re here and now. The invitation exists for anyone with access to the internet. Transformation has started, and you are here to be part of it. The testimonies of grace, forgiveness, redemption, and new life are echoing through cyberspace – if you listen.

Studies show that Christians are online, with their shiny gadgets in hand. This is a wake-up call prompting you to get intentional about how you spend your time online – connecting, serving and leading the conversation in such a way that others will seek to know Christ personally.

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