Saddington’s Heroes at 8bit have done it. Someone with a voice in the modern Christian community finally stepped up to the line. Finally, someone with some pull has called out the pink elephant standing in the room for years.

Don't be a Social Media Troll.

Finally, someone has called BS on the Church using Spiritual Social Media, defaming the name of Jesus in the name of being hip, or by creating “Christian-safe alternatives”. Read it here.

Social Media is all about connecting to each other, not a pseudo-identity behind a corporate (or nonprofit) name. There is something inherently wrong about jumping on board with a concept just because it is the newest fad. When a company or nonprofit (or worse yet, church) uses their Social Media presence to simply market themselves in a new way instead of as connecting point, it’s BS. If you take the social part out of Social Media, it’s simply media.

Here’s a great example of Social Media like it should be. A couple weeks ago,

Not too long ago, someone posited me with a question: “What is an online/digital church all about?” What a great question! Out of the conversation that followed, I developed what I now call The Digital-Church Manifesto, my personal collection of convictions about what the Church should look like online.

(Credit: Bridge Element, CreativeMYK)

Before you go any further, you need to understand something about my personal theology about the Internet. The Internet is not a “parallel universe” in which some people live a life that does not intersect with the “physical universe.” In other words, your life online is not separate from your life offline. For more on this, you should read this and this conversation from earlier.

The Niche of the Digital Church

What I see as being the killer app for the Digital Church is the fact it can be used by God in many ways that physical churches and ministries cannot. Of course, the opposite

Here is an interesting bend in the conversation of online ministry: techno-hypocrisy. While that may in fact be an unheard of adjective at this point, let me introduce it. So what is techno-hypocrisy? Let’s break it down.

(Credit: Evan Courtney, CreativeMYK)

Techno: Having to do with, or pertaining to technology. In modern colloquial vernacular, we can assume it specifically pertains to modern technological developments.

Hypocrisy: The act of outwardly proclaiming or speaking out against a perspective, stance or action; while inwardly or covertly holding that same perspective or action. In the words of the great theologian, Phil Collins, “do as I say, don’t do as I do.”

Let’s put it all together now,

I have been saying for a while that the Church is seriously lacking men’s groups. So I was really happy to see that others feel the same!^[1] I think there are many reasons men have a difficult time connecting into groups, some great ones are mentioned in this post at my friend’s site. Here are some great excerpts from that post.

(Credit: Jacob Abshire, CreativeMYK)

Christine said, [her] “husband attended a men’s small group and in order to participate he needed to leave our home at 5:30am to get there by 6:00. The time was inconvenient for him so he stopped going.”^[2] I’m not an early riser, and a 6 AM group will convince me

1. A very special shout out to my friend Richard, the McProdigal! His original post put a lot of things I have been brooding and praying about for months into words, and was the basis for this post. Thanks McP! [↩]
2. Christine Smith, comment on “What I Hate About Men’s Groups,” the Prodigal Returns! Blog, comment posted September 15, 2010, http://mcprodigal.prodigalreturns.com/what-i-hate-about-mens-group/ (accessed September 17, 2010). [↩]

In an interesting turn of events, it appears that the people growing up in “Generation @” actually prefer to not be online.

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Does this mean that, at any moment, Chicken Little will come screaming, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” causing a great alarm? Of course not! (But, if the news media finds itself with a slow news day, don’t be surprised if they start yelling it!) What this really means is something we’ve known for a long, long time (like 10 years now): some people are online a bunch, some are not.

Let me point out some things that may not sound profound, but will get you thinking. In the 90s and early 2000s, the techno-crazes were:

The other day, I wrote about 5 Core Elements to Be a True Online Expression of Jesus. I’d like to think it was a good article, and you should read it and leave a comment. Now. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Jane Jetson's all over telepresence!

All caught up now? Good. One of the terms I threw around was telepresence. While I would love to say I coined that word gilded in its shiny pants goodness, I did not. The first time I saw it was in SimChurch by Douglas Estes. In the book, he describes this theological concept of togetherness as described in Acts 4:32, but in the context of doing it online. His summary of the concept of telepresence is thus,

Today is a vision dreaming sort of day for me. The worship gathering with our local church body was fantastic and intimate. I even had the pleasure of doing lunch with a good friend afterward. All in all, it’s been a pretty good day if you ask me!

At lunch, we chatted about the upcoming Online Campus we’ll be launching. Since the gears are turning, I’ve been mulling over a few elements which I believe define an Online Campus. While this is not a conclusive list, it is the very bare minimum five requirements to become a functional, biblically ecclesiological expression of Jesus.

(Credit: Doug Shelton, CreativeMYK)

1. Be in sync with the church’s vision. Habakkuk 2:2f

This is the first and foremost requirement. If an Online Campus is not

How much thought has gone into your church’s website? Aside from the original though, “Hey, weneed a website!” has any thought gone into your church’s website? There is a harking reality that most church websites are a hastily-posted page (or group of pages) built by someone with just enough experience to be dangerous. Not to discredit the efforts of those who donated their hard-earned free time, but we do need to face reality here; those dated and shoddy websites “looked bad then, and they look positively prehistory by today’s standard.”^[1] If your website looks like it could be a Sega or Super Nintendo game, that’s NOT good, and you would be more effective by taking it down.

(Credit: Bridge Element, CreativeMYK)

Most websites used by churches today do little—if anything at all—to serve the community the church resides in. Think about it like this, the Bible clearly tells the church to serve where they are, ergo; all extensions of the church should as well (James 1:27, 1 Peter 4:10f, Romans 12:1f). This means the website, or online presence, of the church should serve the people just as the church should be. (Now, if your church isn’t serving the community to start with, that’s another conversation altogether.)

How does a church website serve its community? Simple! Who is

1. Douglas Estes, SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009), 177. [↩]

In reading the articles posted on this site, it’s pretty hard to miss the fact that God has called me into online ministry. What that looks like exactly is, well, figuring that out is half the fun! If you want to join me on this adventure, why not subscribe to my RSS feed, or contribute through the comments below.

(Credit: Todd White, CreativeMYK)

As part of my serving at our local church (and I am strongly convicted that any believer should be part of a local, physical expression of the Church), is working with the Media Arts Team. Specifically within that Team, I am helping to birth a fully functional digital campus for the church. While thinking about what that may look like, and thinking about ministry in general within the local church, this thought came to mind:

When you spend a lot of time finding people to attend your ministry, you are really putting on an event. But when you put on an event to fulfill the needs of your people, you are then doing real ministry. (Tweet this idea!)

Let’s unpack that a little bit.

(Credit: myklroventine, Flickr)

So I was lying in bed last night, and checking Twitter before falling asleep. This is pretty normal for me, checking Facebook and Twitter one last time to make sure I didn’t miss any earthquakes or funny goings-on. I did do something different last night though.