The Rev. Heather McCance of the Church of St. Andrew, Scarborough and regional dean of Scarborough Deanery in the Diocese of Toronto, has written a thoughtful essay on God and Social Media.
My question is whether social media really does level hierarchies in as thoroughgoing a way as some of its most ardent theorists suggest. Any number of public figures use Facebook and Twitter as part of a strategy that fosters visibility for their ideas and initiatives, and only a minimum of interaction around very safe sorts of ideas. And I am not saying that is a bad thing.
McCance writers:
Websites, or at least the vast majority of church websites, are of the stuff of Web 1.0; we put information on the Internet, a person goes and finds it. Email is often the same; the weekly email I send to members of our parish to keep them informed of happenings and to offer prayers are just this. This does not make them wrong, of course; we still invest money and time on the signs in front of our churches and our church newsletters, because there are people who are looking for us and we need to make it as easy as possible for them to find us.
Social media on the other hand, Web 2.0, is far more interactive. A blogger says something in her post; I respond with a comment, someone else chimes in. I post a link to a website on my Facebook page; someone comments on it, and the conversation continues. Someone makes a video about how a church might be more welcoming; someone else makes another, and posts it as a video response on the original video’s YouTube page, and the comments weigh the pros and cons of each approach.
If the question facing us is only, “How does social media form a part of the marketing strategy of the church?” then the suspicion and concern with which it is clearly viewed by some is understandable. (Mostly this criticism is from those who are not themselves participants in that world, and it is unclear to me whether the lack of participation bred the suspicion or vice versa.) Social media is free flowing, radically democratic, unpredictable, impossible to control. In this sense, it is far more like the children’s talk than the sermon, more a conversation than a professorial lecture. More the realm of the Holy Spirit, one might say, than the purview of the levitical priesthood.