Saturday, February 26, 2011

Meeting Every Day the Social Media Way

We tend to be a busy culture. Even in our rural area of western Kansas the pace is busy. Families are busy many days of the week with various activities. During the school year the activities may center on school, but even in the summer the activities don’t seem to lessen.

Busyness has eroded the opportunities for families to sit down and eat a meal together. Anymore, one or more of the family members have an activity or work so that the family meal seems to have become less of a priority. It is good for any family to meet together on a regular basis – to have “family” time – whether that family is a biological family or spiritual family.

Focusing on the perspective of the spiritual family, I want to remind you that the early church, in Acts chapter 2, met every day, at least initially. This type of lifestyle is such a challenge for us in the 21st Century that we dismiss it before we consider how we can model the practice.

The principle of meeting together was to encourage each other as they were in this new lifestyle and under environmental stress. Stress causes discouragement and discouragement causes burnout. While burnout was not a product to be desired, church leaders needed the church to continue meeting together in order for positive outcomes to take place. Living in today’s setting we find it difficult to even come close to meeting together regularly, despite the fact that we are in a society infested with discouragement and environmental stress.

If the concept worked well for the early church, why, even in busyness, do we not look for ways to get together?

I think that even in a lifestyle such as ours there is a way that we can “connect” with people on a daily basis, one answer – social media. Social media has sprung up very quickly over the past few years and there are millions of people using this medium.

One of the neat things about social media is that it does allow for people to interact with each other on a daily basis. Facebook is a very common form of social media. It allows people to be connected and to update what is going on in their life...some on a daily basis. Twitter lets you “tweet” what you are doing, but in less words than Facebook. Both, through the technology of some mobile phones allows you to “check in” to various locations and report where you are at – both arrival and departure. People will know where you are at and what you are doing.

Letting people in your life is one of the advantages of the spiritual family. You get to lean on and rely on each other as you go through life, not to mention tell where you’ve been that day. We may not be face to face, but you will still know what is going on in the life of various people who you know and care about. This allows you to strike up a conversation with that person the next time you are seeing them in person, thus getting to know them deeper. That is definitely an advantage to taking advantage of social media.

One of the outcomes social media has allowed me to do was to connect with cousins. It had been over 15 years since seeing most of them, so I was thankful they were on Facebook. I would have never guessed that it would have happened that I could keep up with biological relatives in this fashion. I also have connected with past classmates from grade school to college to preaching school, all through this form of social media. Along with that is the ability to keep up with friends I’ve made throughout life.

So, even though our schedules may prevent us from meeting at a given location on a daily basis, we still have social media. With social media we can meet at the location we are at and still be in the same “location” as our friends and Christian family. Though it does not take the place of person-to-person contact, it is still a great way to stay in touch!

Who will you “connect” with today?

No comments: