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.

I’m not calling for a re-creation of the wheel, nor am I saying that history cannot teach us.  Rather, I’m saying that history DOES teach us.  It teaches us that it is the innovative thinkers that in the end lead the culture into the future.  Innovation changes the culture, not parasitic mimicry.  This is the potential danger that I see in the current push for cultural relevancy.  It’s not just that we could lose the message of the gospel. We must be careful to not only refrain from compromising the message, but we must also refrain from falling into the trap of cheap mimicry that seeks to beg, steal, and borrow the most superficial aspects of current culture.  In the end, it just comes off as, well, cheap.

We should be students of culture so that we can see the holes in it where innovation needs to happen.  Cultural savvy is important not only to help us communicate in the vernacular, but more importantly it should give us insight into how those who worship the Creator can enter the culture and transform it with ideas born in the mind of God.

I’m praying that we all learn to be led by the Spirit.  When we mimic Him, we will tap into the ultimate Innovator and we will cease to be irrelevant.

This is the 4th installment of a series of posts I’m doing to help pastors get themselves and their churches online and plugged in.

VIEW THE ENTIRE SERIES

“Are you crazy?  I don’t have time for a blog, Facebook, and Twitter!”  ~ You

Yes you do.  I’ll show you how to leverage Twitter and your WordPress blog to get your feet wet in the social networking world with minimal effort.  Read on.

What is Social Networking?

I mentioned in my first post of the series that we are now living in a global culture.  Everyone is asking the question “Where do I fit in this new global world?”.  The internet, to a large degree, has been the arena in which people have sought to answer that question.  We’ve seen a shift in the past 10 years or so.  Around the new millennium, people were just trying to make money with the internet.  Since then, the big innovations have been centered around people connecting with other people.  This is social networking.  People finding new ways to connect to each other on the global stage of the internet (at least, that’s how I define it…)

There are a dizzying array of social networking options out there.  Feel free to explore them, but I’m going to focus on the two big ones:  Facebook and Twitter.  (forget MySpace – it’s been thoroughly trounced by Facebook at this point).  Let’s take them one at a time.

Twitter – Beautiful in It’s Simplicity

So be careful not to underestimate it.  Twitter began as a simple question, “What are you doing?”  Not very impressive.  What’s impressive is how the “hive mind” of the web took the simple idea and used it to redefine social networking.

This video might help with the background:

I was very skeptical of Twitter at first. It all seemed very narcissistic to me.  But I finally got convinced to try it and I’ve never looked back.  I’m meeting people that I never would have met any other way, and it’s one of the few social networking tools that I have tried that actually improved my life.   If you need more convincing, here’s 12 more reasons to start today.  For the rest of you that are ready to dive in, here’s what you need to do:

1. Get your free Twitter account.  Choose a username that makes sense and can be remembered easily.  Resist the temptation to give yourself a goofy nickname.
2. Use their tool for adding anyone in your contact list to your follow list.
3. Search for anyone else you want to follow.  You can search by name, topic, whatever.  Check out people you like and see who they follow.  This really is the key to enjoying twitter.  Following people in whom you are interested.
4. Get a desktop twitter client.  The web interface is ok, but Twitter will really come alive for you when you get a nice desktop app for it.  I very highly recommend Twhirl for beginners.  Try Tweetdeck when you get the hang of things.
5. Start by listening and making note of how other people use twitter.  When someone says something you think is interesting or entertaining, Retweet it.  Reply if someone asks a question.  Take your time, ease into it.
6. Remember that Twitter is about adding to a conversation.  Don’t let it become all about you.  Use it to point out interesting things on the web.  Use it to share thoughts, quotes, etc.  Think of Twitter as microblogging. The more value you add, the better your experience will be.
7. Tweet your blog posts.  Every time you publish something on your blog, announce it on twitter and provide a link to the post.  This way you are leveraging your twitter following to your blog.
8. Use your phone.  You can send tweets by text message and use the mobile version of the Twitter website.  Blackberry and iPhone also both have some nice twitter apps.

If you need more help with Twitter, try this collection of resources.

Facebook

I have to confess.  I don’t really like Facebook and I don’t go to it very often.  But, no one really knows it.  If you go to my Facebook profile it will look like I’m there all the time.  It’s not so.

Where Twitter is like a focussed, short, and somewhat controlled connection tool… Facebook is like trying to drink from a fire hose.  It’s overwhelming to me at times.  I’m certainly a minority there… Facebook is HUGE and most of the people in my church are active there.  Here’s how I maintain visibility on Facebook without letting it rule my time:

1. Install the Twitter Facebook application.  It will tie your Twitter messages to your Facebook status.  Once you’ve done that, every time you send a tweet it will show up on your Facebook profile as a status update.  2 birds with one… tweet.  ;-)
2. I use Flickr to share photos with family.  There’s a facebook app for flickr too.  Every time I add a photo to my flickr account, it shows up on Facebook.  2 birds again…
3. Google Reader has a facebook app.  If you use Google Reader to manage your RSS feeds, you can install the GR app and every time you “share” an article in Google Reader, it appears on Facebook.  Notice, all this Facebook activity and I haven’t gone to the FB site once.
4. Now the only time I have to go to Facebook is when someone emails me from there (rare for me because I don’t send emails out from FB) or does something on my profile that warrants a response.  SHhhhhh…. don’t tell.

As you can see, Twitter really is at the center of my social network.  I suggest you set yourself up the same way.

The next, and last, installment in this series will be a guest post from Trendsetting Design to help you use the power of graphic design to enhance your ministry online and offline.