Practices of listening, attentiveness, connection and engagement are at the heart of Elizabeth Drescher’s Tweet If You ♥ Jesus. Encouraging church leaders to adopt these practices by entering the Twittersphere and being on Facebook, she describes “the Digital Age as “a place” where we can wind our way in and out of communities and engage people we might not encounter face to face. Drescher chides, “What if those who might be seeking spiritual engagement in your community started hanging out right outside the doors of your church. Would you squander that opportunity?” (148)
I appreciate Drescher’s challenges to listen, to be attentive, to connect and to engage. Especially on pages like one might have for a youth group or congregation, it is easy to fall into a pattern of using Twitter and Facebook to broadcast news and events and bury dialog under the headlines.
Reading Tweet If You ♥ Jesus. I still bump up against the tension between how I engage those who might be seeking spiritual engagement in my community who really are hanging out right outside the doors of my church, and those who are on my digital front porch. That is, many of the people in my community – rural western North Carolina – are not online but in line at a soup kitchen or the Salvation Army shelter. They are struggling to find work or they are sinking under oil bills from last winter. While Drescher points to the prevalence of social media, and encourages more vibrant conversations, I appreciated her description of Kirk Smith, the Arizona bishop who engaged people in his immersion at the border, but clearly remained focus on doing the work he was doing rather than crafting a message about it.
Yes! These practices are important, replacing the echo chamber of anonymous and empty spaces with the chatter of a campfire or coffeehouse will change how we engage with one another and how we define community, but we also need to recognize when we have made it too easy to engage from our front porch swings and never actually step foot into the world.
2 comments:
Christina,
Thanks for your post on this. I too am troubled by that tension. Perhaps "troubled" isn't the word... challenged. I agree that Facebook and Twitter are "places" where we can encounter the needs of our world and the souls who harbor those needs. But they are by no means the only places. It would be easy to annonymously go about the work of discipleship without entering the more shadowy and unsavory parts of our world(though one must question just how "savory" twitter of Facebook really is). We can not be consumed by the digital world at the expense forgetting where the margins we must go to are.
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