Pete Cashmore of Mashable wrote an interesting column at CNN this week. He talks about the new “Facebook killer” on the block, Diaspora. Specifically, Cashmore says that Diaspora will be no threat to Facebook for one simple reason: it is foundationally an improved Facebook clone, not an innovation. I think he is right, but even if you don’t care about such things, there is a huge lesson to be learned here for the Church.
The Christian Church has always been good at mimicry. We can take just about any successful technology, idea, method, or style and create a Christianized version of it. Ever hear of GodTube? Yeah. YouTube + Jesus. Christian search engines? Wouldn’t want to come across any sinners, right? The problem is that as long as we are mimicing and not innovating, the Church will be an obscure, parasitic sub-culture instead of becoming the transformative counterculture that Jesus called it to be.
