Читать книгу Click 2 Save - Keith Anderson - Страница 13

When we started this project, we talked a lot about what the word “save” in the title meant to us. It’s a tricky word for mainline Christians, who have had—at least since the end of overt colonialism—less evangelically oriented, less proselytizing traditions. We tend, that is, not to announce our faith too loudly lest doing so impinge on the beliefs of others. We don’t generally call out the personal sinfulness of others and offer absolution within our churches. We don’t make a point to articulate, often even privately, the distinctiveness of our denominational traditions.

Elizabeth tells the story of her grandmother, who, as the family passed the churches of other denominations in her small town on the way to “the true church,” would sigh and say, “I don’t know why those people even bother to get up early on a Sunday. They’re all going to damnation anyway. May as well sleep in.” (She said that in the car, of course, not on the sidewalk.) The fact that mainline Christians seldom even think such things anymore, focusing more on our commonality as Christians than theological differences across denominations, is surely all to the good.

But it also seems to be the case that our understandable embarrassment over the demeaning and divisive dismissal of other faiths that was tolerable in earlier times has turned into a stultifying silence about who we really are as mainline Christians and how our faith allows us to live with others in the world in remarkable, loving, and healing ways. This has only been exacerbated by what many see as a co-optation of the word “Christian” itself by more fundamentalist believers, whose often condemning approach to sharing the faith has sowed disdain and outright hostility toward all Christians. As a result, many people who believe in God and in fact participate in Christian communities prefer to identify as agnostic, as “spiritual but not religious,” or as having “no religious belief in particular.”³

Our perspective is that new social networking platforms enable us to extend the love of God to others in ways that make our mainline Christian traditions more authentically present in the world. This may not “save” other believers and seekers in the sense of converting them to our particular denominations, and it may not “save” our churches in terms of numerical and associated financial stability. But, as you’ll see in the Conclusion, we think our participation in the new media landscape has a profoundly salvific effect nonetheless, saving God’s church from a marginalization and irrelevance that prevents us from doing the work of love, compassion, and justice to which we are all called.

We began this chapter by noting that this book itself began in digital conversation. It might almost go without saying that this conversational mode continued as Keith and Elizabeth worked on the book, the ideas in each chapter being shaped through email, Facebook posts, tweets, documents swapped on Dropbox, and Google+ video chats. However, in order to manage the work and avoid creating a schizophrenic tone, we divided the chapters between us, and shared comments after each draft. This process has allowed us to produce a book that is very much a collaborative product, drawing upon something of a single authorial direction in each chapter, but nonetheless expressing a shared vision and voice.

Still, because we each also bring unique perspectives to our shared project, from time to time you’ll see call-out boxes with short comments from one of us. Likewise, you’ll find notes on terminology that might be new, and tips on practices and resources that can make your digital ministry easier. And, you’ll find profiles of digital ministers we interviewed during the course of writing this book. What can we say? Keith is a digital native, and Elizabeth is pretty fully naturalized. Like more and more of the people you encounter in church and other ministries, we roll through the Digital Reformation with a lot of other voices and information in tow. We hope it’ll make for lively reading that supports your developing digital ministry while modeling the modes of communication current in the digital domain.