Lausanne World Pulse – Themed Articles – How Technology Is Changing, or Should Change, the Way the Gospel Is Shared

By Dion Forster
June / July 2010

Thus, simply knowing the location of the population5 is not enough for truly effective evangelism and missions. We need to “listen” to the emerging language these platforms are generating. Just as earlier shifts in the gospel (from Jerusalem, to Rome, to England, to America) required a change in language, so this new shift will require the emergence of a new language through which the gospel is communicated. Below are some of the lessons we are learning from social networking tools and platforms.

  • Text remains an important form of communication. However, long-form text (books and articles) is much less effective than short-form text. For example, Twitter allows only 140 characters of text to be posted. Status updates on Facebook are seldom longer than one or two short sentences. The intention of textual communication is changing. Whereas text has always been used primarily as a means of communicating facts (i.e., statistics, ideas, findings, experiences), social networking is showing us that text is transformed from a broadcast medium (i.e., communicating facts) to a mechanism to solicit interaction. This leads to the next important linguistic shift that the new online location is showing.
  • Community is more important that communication. The average user on Facebook is connected to 130 persons. This allows for a far greater reach than was possible in previous generations. Only one hundred years ago the majority of the world’s population would not have had significant contact with a person in a different city or town, let alone a person on a different continent. Today such contacts are common.
  • There is a shift from data to wisdom. According to the “shift happens” team, there are thirty-one billion searches on www.google.com every month. In 2006, there were only 2.7 billion searches. It is estimated that a week’s worth of the New York Times newspaper contains more information than a person would come across in their whole lifetime in the eighteenth century.6 Data and information are no longer a commodity in a world where persons can find facts on the Internet. This has led to development of knowledge engines such as “Wolfram Alpha,” which takes information and applies complex computational processes to extract knowledge.7

In a more organic way, we have seen aggregated search results (such as “trending topics” on Twitter) become a valuable commodity for people to sift through the overabundance of data that is available. Social networking is showing that persons value trusted sources, authoritative voices, and services that can help them find what is necessary and valuable.

Concluding Thoughts
There are many other important things that can be learned from social media and social networking.8 However, it is my hope that these few insights would stimulate some thought around the “language” churches and ministry groups use to engage people with the unchanging and ever-powerful gospel of Christ.

Christians, and the Church, in every age have to make some necessary shifts in order to effectively communicate the gospel to a moving population. Just as Paul’s letters transformed and built the early Church, and the Guttenberg Press transformed the Church around the time of the Reformation, so I believe the Internet, and particularly social media, is challenging us to transform the way in which we engage the world with the love of Jesus.

Endnotes

1. 2007. In Mission Shaped Youth: Rethinking Young People and the Church. Eds. Tim Sudworth, Graham Cray, and Chris Russell. London: Church House Publishing, 11.

2. 2002. The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity. Oxford. Oxford University Press.

3. Ibid, 15.

4. See http://econsultancy.com/blog/5324-20+-mind-blowing-social-media-statistics-revisited for the number of registered users on Facebook as of 9 April 2010. For more up-to-date statistics on registered Facebook users, see www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics. Compare this to the population size of countries across the world at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population; also see this older article on the size of Facebook in relation to population numbers in various countries across the world www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_big_is_facebook.php.

5. Statistics on user numbers for various popular social networking and new media platforms: Facebook (over 400 million users), Twitter (75 million user), and Linkedin (50 million users). See http://econsultancy.com/blog/5324-20+-mind-blowing-social-media-statistics-revisited and www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics.

6. http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2009/shift-happens-updated-in-did-you-know-4-0/

7. See www.dionforster.com/blog/2009/7/13/moving-from-information-to-knowledge.html and www.dionforster.com/blog/2009/7/14/sustainable-economies-world-resources-and-wolframalpha.html for a brief discussion on this tool.

8. I have discussed the application of social media and social networking tools for ministry here: www.dionforster.com/blog/2009/10/27/a-superb-video-how-the-world-is-changing-new-media-and-minis.html and here www.dionforster.com/blog/2009/9/6/using-media-in-ministry-redux-facebook-twitter-blogs-youtube.html.

Dr. Dion Angus Forster is a minister and academic. He is the former dean of John Wesley College, the seminary of the Methodist Church of southern Africa, and a research associate and lecturer in systematic theology at the University of Stellenbosch (BUVTON). Forster serves as a chaplain to the Global Day of Prayer and the Power Group of companies in Cape Town, South Africa. His most recent book on ministry in the workplace is entitled Transform Your Work Life: Turn Your Ordinary Day into an Extraordinary Calling (Struik Christian Books, 2010).