Before I begin my thoughts I need to make a disclaimer. I asked various people from my congregation to post an invite on their Facebook walls. This was a very short while ago and therefore this post has nothing to do with whether they did or did not do it. This is merely an observation.
As most people who know me could tell you, I am a huge social media geek. Now I’m not an expert and I don’t use every service that exists but I feel I can hold my own when it comes to the bleeding edge of these various resources. Today I made a request to everyone from LifePoint to post an invite for an upcoming series that is beginning this Sunday. Once I did I started looking around Facebook and seeing what kind of things people post and consistently post and what I’ve discovered was interesting. At least to me it was.
Facebook is a place where friends share their lives or at least little portions of their lives with each other. Those things that make us laugh or even challenge us. All there for our friends and family to evaluate and possible be impacted by as well.
Church, for these purposes, is the community of faith that one associates with. It’s the group where one shares their journey with God. It’s most likely a place of great importance to those who attend because of the relationships that have been formed and the way God uses that specific community to make us laugh and impact us.
What I noticed on my little journey through Facebook is how little these two communities paths cross. I rarely see any status updates about my friends communities of faith. Never an invite to their Facebook community to join them in what is a key part of their lives. Accept for my pastor friends and they don’t count in this rant.
In the last 24 hours what I have seen the most is references to Farmville or Mob Wars. The latest important thing in my friends lives is “Team Coco”. To be honest, I don’t care where you stand on the late night talk show host wars. What I want to see is what’s really important to you. Then again, maybe I am.
I’ve been thinking about this more since we talked about it yesterday. If, in fact, church is just not important enough to people for them to post about it on Facebook, I have been asking myself WHY that is the case. And then I asked myself, “Well, how often do I post about church in a specific way?” The answer was, occasionally, but not frequently. So I asked myself why that is.
I’m not trying to defend myself, but I do want to offer my perspective because it’s possible that this is true of other people besides myself.
People learn and process information in different ways. For me, honestly, sitting and listening to someone else talk does not help me process information. I hear and understand what’s being said, but in the moment it is difficult for me to internalize it to the point that it is meaningful specifically to my life.
For a while now, I’ve realized that I hear God best through reading, writing, and conversation. Often I will come away from church with a few things from the message in my mind, and I will talk my thoughts over with Clark, or write about them in my journal. At other times, God speaks to me when I read something that really makes an impact on me; this is often connected to writing as well, because when I write, I process information and relate it to my own life. The spoken word reaches me best in conversations, not in sermons (or, when I was a student, in lectures). There is something about the give and take, and the exchange of ideas, that helps me internalize things, and by nature sermons don’t do that.
So, when it comes to church, it is meaningful to me (otherwise I wouldn’t go!), but it is not where the processing happens. Many, many times, I write about or post things that have their origins in something that was said at church, but it is not about church specifically because that is not where the actual processing and internalizing happened for me. Does that make sense?
And, just to be clear, this has nothing to do with you. I enjoy hearing you speak, and I think you’re an excellent communicator. It’s not you; it’s me. 😉 Someone who is an auditory learner probably would have a very, very different experience than I do.
So maybe, for some people, it is not that church isn’t important to them; maybe church itself is just not where they hear God best. Not because of the church, but because of how they are wired.