By Mary Fauldsstaff writer

August 2010 – They have become media buzzwords: Facebook, Twitter, social networking. According to its own statistics, there are more active users on Facebook than the entire population of the United States. Facebook also says users spend over 500 billion minutes on the site every month. Each month, more than 25 billion pieces of content (Web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) are shared. Meanwhile, Twitter is growing by nearly 300,000 users per day.

With all this social interaction available on the Web, it would seem logical to think that people are having an easier time with relationships and are more successful in them. However, Jesse Rice, author of The Church of Facebook, disagreed. He said, in fact, people are lonelier than ever. AFA Journal interviewed Rice on how social networking has affected Christians and the church.

AFA Journal: How connected are people today?
Jesse Rice: Over a billion people are involved in some sort of social network, whether it is Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, etc. It definitely seems like we are more connected than ever. I use the term “hyper-connected.”

We are just linked in as never before to people from our past, people from our present who we wouldn’t normally associate with or we haven’t even met. Maybe we have a common theme, like neighbors on FarmVille.com. We call that social gaming, where people are connecting via a virtual game.

AFAJ: What kind of trends can you see being caused by this connectedness through social networks?
JR: What I see is tons more connectivity, and research is showing that as that connectivity grows, the people with whom we share the deepest parts of ourselves is shrinking. For example, we have fewer confidants, people we really trust, people we really look to in a time of need, than we used to. That connectivity is somehow kind of blocking our ability to go in depth with each other, and I think that’s just because we’re finite people. When we have so many resources, we get spread thin. As we know, relationships take a lot of time and a lot of energy, and it takes history to build those things.

AFAJ: Is that surprising? It seems that many people use these social networks to deliver the details of their lives.
JR: Yeah, I think that with that shift, it is almost like we have the relational consumerism going on. So we are all sharing more little tidbits or sound bites about ourselves and kind of consuming each other’s sound bites, but that doesn’t necessarily translate into a trusting, growing intimacy with someone.

We can even have the experience of, “Hey, I saw that on your Facebook page, and I’m thinking of you or praying for you. Sounds like you guys are having a hard time.” Then we assume that we know the depth of a person’s experience, yet that doesn’t necessarily mean that at all. It just sort of means that we’re kind of in touch with their headlines, not necessarily what’s behind the headlines.

AFAJ: That is interesting, the relational consumerism. Are we using these social networks to basically market ourselves?
JR: I think that is a potential danger, for sure. Certainly, that form of communication is encouraged. I talk about that in my book, that this is an environment that another writer calls “a culture of status.” By that she means, the more you participate, the more you are posting stuff or sending things, the more your status within that environment goes up.

So people are encouraged to post constantly and to be reading each other’s information. That’s one of the things that promotes relational consumerism and then promotes our emphasis on self expression, and especially on being clever, funny, or deep. We have to do something that grabs people’s attention, so then it becomes really a performance kind of persona. We start to really think hard about the things we post.

AFAJ: Celebrities try to get a bunch of followers on Twitter. Random people try to rally others to whatever bizarre group they have on Facebook, and people try to outdo each other’s witty status updates. Has this turned into a competition?
JR: I think that’s a great example because it does set up that comparison thing then. So rather than relating to one another, we are now kind of keeping an eye on each other and what people are doing and keeping tabs on each other.

The whole culture of status just kind of feeds our ideas of inadequacy, insecurity, and then overcompensating by posting the most interesting aspects of our lives versus just the very ordinary things, which most of life is.

AFAJ: What challenges does the church face with this new way of interaction?
JR: I think one of the big challenges going forward, especially for the church, is in this very disembodied environment where a lot of human communication is happening now. How do we get back to some form of high-touch communication? For example, sharing an e-mail is a different experience than sharing a text. Both are good, both are fine, we need both; but just to say we’re going to have to be all the more intentional about developing places where we can be together and be face to face and even cultivate that desire again in people who don’t even necessarily want that. We have to do that in an invitational way, a very engaging way, a way that really listens as well. The more the external noise grows, the more we’ll be tempted to keep shouting at each other, but the more it’s going to become necessary to be fully present to one another. We have a God Who became God in the flesh, and we need to find a way to continue to enflesh these expressions of community.

AFAJ: How should the church change in order to engage this new kind of culture?
JR: First of all, it is a matter for churches to get engaged with social media and plenty of churches now have their own Facebook pages or things like that. But it isn’t just having a Facebook page, it is a different way of operating. It is interacting with people’s comments and it is commenting back, sharing thoughts and links and ideas and pictures. It is very interactive. I think that is a big piece, especially in a very low-touch kind of world where we are interacting so much in a disembodied way.

There has to be a lot of back-and-forth, a lot of exchange. I really encourage churches not just to have a page of some kind, but to be really in conversation with folks they’re connected to and members of their congregation.

It is usually a great touch-point, especially for youth ministry folks. If you are talking about it and using it as a basis for conversation about “What does this mean? What are the larger themes? How should we be living?” I feel like that’s just a great thing.

I think the second thing is that churches especially can, but shouldn’t, approach this with a sort of marketing atmosphere. Evangelical Christians, myself included, have been sort of notorious about approaching people from a marketing standpoint, like, “Here is our information. If we package it just right, they’ll buy into it and life’s going to be great.” That’s not at all what we need to bring to the table. When we ask those marketing questions of how we use Facebook to get people to come to our church, etc., then we really get marketing answers in return, and people are consumers or products. It is about having to shift our definition away from that marketing thing to what it means to listen to each other in an environment like Facebook or Twitter. Giving each other our full attention and our full presence, our full embodied presence, is probably one of the greatest gifts we can give one another.

AFAJ: How can that be done on social networks?
JR: I think we have to look or listen for the themes behind the posts. Not just reading each other’s headlines for entertainment. We need to be thoughtful and engaging in meaningful conversations with people.

In the last chapter of my book, I pulled three themes from the story in John 4, the woman at the well. In the way that Jesus interacts with that woman, I see three attributes that I think can help us at least frame that conversation:

1. Intentionality – focusing on a select few people. I think in a place where we are so connected, we have to be intentional; we have to be selective. We have to choose a handful of people to focus on in the midst of all that noise.
2. Authenticity – being congruent on the inside with how we express ourselves on the outside. We cultivate a persona online, but it could be a very different person than who I am in real life.
3. Humility – thinking rightly of oneself, not thinking too highly or too lowly. Jesus engaged the woman at the well as a peer, not condescending. He’s listening, He’s present, and that kind of humility opens up conversations that wouldn’t otherwise happen.

People desire connection, and I feel like that’s one of the biggest ways we represent the image of God. Here we have this Three-in-One God who lives in perfect community and invites us into perfect community. I think we as Christians need to be like that in our social networking.