@stickyJesus. Toni Birdsong
that time books, including the Bible, were painstakingly copied by hand and available only to the wealthiest and most educated people. German-born Johannes Gutenberg died without knowing that his invention would spark the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, and the Reformation and catapult the spread of Christianity.
Multiple media, including literature, art, television, film, and radio, have collectively transmitted the gospel message over time. Although their impact has been great, nothing can compare to the mind-blowing—and ev-er-evolving—impact of the Internet, namely, the content-sharing side called Web 2.0 and the spin-off industry of (and obsession with) social networking. No doubt, a monumental shift is taking place around the world politically, socially, and economically. Social networking is consuming the collective psyche and redefining the understanding of words as traditional as community and friends.
a snapshot of influence
The speed of change and the numbers are staggering when you consider what is happening around you. Perhaps you are familiar with some of these statistics.3 If not, be prepared to have your thinking rocked.
It took radio thirty-eight years to reach fifty million users; television, thirteen years; the Internet, four years; and the iPod, three years. In just a nine-month period, Facebook added one hundred million users, and downloads of iPhone applications reached one billion. (That's billion with a b.)
Print newspaper circulation is down seven million over the last twenty-five years. But in the last five years, unique readers of online newspapers have increased thirty million.
Collectively, the television networks ABC, NBC, and CBS get ten million unique visitors every month, and these businesses have been around for a combined two hundred years. YouTube, Facebook, and MySpace got 250 million unique visitors each month after being launched for only six years.
In 2008, Barack Obama leveraged online social networks to raise $500 million and mobilized young voters via social networking at unprecedented numbers. He outpaced opponent John McCain in fundraising online by five times.4
Ninety-six percent of people born between 1980 and 1994 have joined a social network.
Nielsen research reveals that Americans spend a quarter of their time online; a third of that time is spent communicating across social networks, blogs, personal e-mail, and instant messaging. The world now spends over 110 billion minutes on social networks and blog sites.
One out of every five couples married in the U.S. met via social networking.
Still think using social media is a fad or a waste of time? You may soon join the ranks of these leading, albeit well-meaning, thinkers:5
"Everyone acquainted with the subject will recognize it as a conspicuous failure ."
—Henry Morton, president of the Stevens Institute of Technology , on Thomas Edison's light bulb, 1880
"We have reached the limits of what is possible with computers."
—John von Neumann, infamous mathematician and pioneer of quantum mechanics, 1949
"The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty— a fad."
—The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903
"Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, willflop—because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds."
—Time, 1966
"While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility, a development of which we need waste little time dreaming."
—Lee DeForest, American radio pioneer and inventor of the vacuum tube, 1926
"Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition."
—Dennis Gabor, British physicist, 196
what does it all mean?
It means anyone with an imperative message to communicate has to think bigger. People are migrating online. And as they continue to build niche communities, a significant window is open that should have every person who is concerned with the things of Christ sitting upright and being fully engaged.
The Web has a culture all its own.
This dramatic shift in communication and the growing hunger for human connection online have spawned a new mission field unlike any the church has ever seen. This mission field has a language and culture all its own. You haven't trained for it. You're not exactly sure how it works. Its velocity can be intimidating. The reference books and mission training programs tailored to impact a Web-based world...well, they simply don't exist.
You stand here as a Christ follower in a definitive moment in time; you are an ordinary person called to usher a holy Kingdom into an increasingly fragmented world. It's the perfect scenario for God to move in big ways, just as He always has. Just as God called Esther, Joseph, and Paul to go before the world's kings at appointed times to alter history, He now calls you to log on and upload what's critical to today's conversation.
While everything changes at warp speed, the holy mandate remains: to communicate the gospel in the most relevant channels available here, there, and everywhere.even if "everywhere" includes foreign lands with peculiar names like Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Plaxo.
the lay of the land
What does this new mission field look like, and who dwells there? It's unique, a place where increasingly "connected" people can easily become more spiritually disconnected. Amid the urban sprawl of technology, they congregate, shop, work, share, play, and live online. It's a shiny terrain, indeed.
In The World Is Flat, author Thomas L. Friedman asserts that there's no turning back from this "mobile me" era; that the cheap availability of software and broadband Internet has leveled the global landscape, rendering the world more "flat" than round. Connectivity and collaboration have opened the global political, economic, and cultural playing field to everyone previously excluded from circles of wealth and power. The future will not resemble the past; to succeed from this point forward, individuals and companies must develop strategies that fit the global realities.6
So how do you influence this 24/7 streaming global conversation? By doing what you do best—and what human beings have been doing since God established the twelve tribes of Israel—you reconnect to and mobilize the tribe.
In his groundbreaking book Tribes, Seth Godin reconnects us to our human tendency to create tribes. A tribe, says Godin, is a "group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. For millions of years, human beings have been part of one tribe or another. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate."7 The Internet provides the communication channel for the world. Jesus provides the channel and the leadership to you, the Christ follower. Can you hear your Tribal Leader over the noise?
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let's go there... |
It's midday in Galilee. The sun is hot; a blanket of dust covers the weary traveler who