Facebook Faith

Brian Draper has written about Facebook in this week’s LICC Connecting With Culture column. Dave Warnock has recently written two posts on the phenomenon.

Recently I too, succumbed, and set up a profile. I’m too old for MySpace, whose grotty layouts seem to reflect the acne of its most avid users. I only like checking out bands on it, because it’s a great way to preview their music (that’s how I recently got into Duke Special). Facebook seems a little more grown-up, which may be surprising, given its origins among students. Expanding beyond the American student communities and opening up its API to outside developers to produce new applications have both been significant ‘growing up’ actions. Linkedin seems too much about CVs, job hunting and head-hunting – which makes it inappropriate for my particular calling/profession.

For me, Facebook is currently functioning like a broader Friends Reunited. I’ve belonged to that for a few years and made contact with some old school friends, but it’s limited by needing to know the school/college/workplace someone was at. They joy of the last few days on Facebook has been to find again old friends I worked with, especially from ecumenical youth ministry in Hertford in the mid-1990s. I have to remember it isn’t the same as face-to-face contact. It’s a helpful second best to meeting up again with these people who meant the world to me. I’ve never had friends like I had there.

Draper talks about how Facebook could prompt us into strengthening (or renewing?) friendships in their proper sense. He also talks about how well we know ourselves and are known by ourselves and God. Disclosure is an interesting theme for faith and the web. There is the question of how much self-disclosure we engage in online, and open ourselves to the risk of identity theft. It becomes a parallel to the way we fear to open up face-to-face with people, perhaps due to bad past experiences of the wisdom of caution. Jesus didn’t entrust himself to everyone, because he knew what was in their hearts. But – as we know increasingly these days – ‘story’ is vital. Our story and its part in God’s great story is significant, not least because it touches others. In this sense ‘testimony’ is of course much more than a conversion account (as it always should have been).

But Draper’s other comment about how well we know others is one that hits me as a minister, especially in a week when I am consumed with funerals. Whenever I take the funeral of someone I knew in a congregation, I always learn things from their loved ones that I never knew before. That happened to me on Wednesday. I conducted the service for a saint who, in the two years I had known him, had been ravaged by Alzheimer’s Disease. In the address I pointed to 1 Corinthians 13:12, where Paul says that now we look through a glass darkly, but then we shall see face-to-face; we shall know, even as we are fully known (by God). God doesn’t need Facebook; we have his profile elsewhere: Jesus said, if you have seen me, you have seen the Father, and even then, there is more to know of God. But for dear David who died, the Gospel is that not only is his knowledge healed back from the distortions of what it was before Alzheimer’s caused its two deaths (the death of his personality and then the death of his body), he now knows better than he ever did. He knows ‘as he is fully known.’

Facebook can’t do any of that for us, but whatever its faults I am convinced it can be a kingdom of God tool. I don’t mean that we just post a Christian application on our profile. I mean that it can help us get going on that process of knowing one another’s story in the great story of God. That then has to be followed up, and that has to mean incarnationally, in flesh and blood, not the ones and zeros of the digital world.

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