Social Media and the Gospel

The opening paragraph of UT’s official social media usage guidelines reads:

“Social media and social technologies can help you create and nurture relationships, share information, advance knowledge, raise awareness, build support, participate in important conversations and collaborate on new ideas.”

Important conversations? Raising awareness?

As Christians we have the most important conversation to engage people with and the greatest cause to raise awareness about.

We are commissioned with advancing the knowledge of God to every nation until “the earth will be filled with the knowledge of Jehovah, as water covers the sea (Isa. 11:9).” This is quite a task.

As more and more people live their lives online and take the internet as their primary news source, we should take this as a prudent and partial opportunity to flow into these online crevices and inundate the earth. Faithful AND prudent (Matt. 24:45). Certainly this is terrain that needs to be filled with the knowledge of the Lord.

Romans 10:18 likewise presents insurmountable challenges apart from social media megaphones like Twitter.

But I say, Have they not heard? Yes surely: Their voice has gone out into all the earth and their words to the ends of the inhabited earth.

Through Twitter, even the softest spoken Christian voice can reach the ends of the inhabited earth.

Facebook and Twitter are new countries that require no passport, no money, and no foreign language skills. They are the biggest melting pots the world has ever known. And yet you can reach people there every minute who are just as real and needy (at least spiritually) as the people in the most extreme mission field. You can give a message around the world and be back the same day without any jet lag.

Of course this doesn’t marginalize or compete with literal missionary movement. And I am certainly not encouraging us to bunker down in the comfort of our own homes and simply tweet verses all day, patting ourselves on the back for hard work. There are still lots of places the internet can’t go and ways the internet can’t replace the human element. But this should come as a welcomed supplement.

Through the internet we have access to living rooms and smart phones all around the globe. Only in the last few years have John Wesley’s famous words in 1793 become a real possibility- “I look on all the world as my parish.”

Welcome to the new pulpit.