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Even if you happened to be off on a remote, Wi-Fi-disabled island vacation in the summer of 2011, by the time you sailed back to reality you surely caught the news that Facebook had grown to more than seven-hundred-fifty million users, eclipsing all other social networking communities. The surge in Facebook membership (which topped eight-hundred million as we were sending this manuscript to press) and the way it has begun to change our view of the world brings to mind the shift in mapmaking in the sixteenth century, after wider global travel and mechanistic mapmaking altered the reigning perception of the world. In the ancient and medieval worlds, a map was less a representation of geopolitical reality than it was an expression of the cultural terrain from the perspective of the mapmaker and his patrons. For example, the famous Hereford Mappa Mundi (or “map of the world”) situates Jerusalem in the center, the Garden of Eden at the top (which is east on the map), and a variety of other biblical locales—Noah’s ark, the Red Sea, Babylon—along with England, Scotland, and Ireland all out of geographical proportion to Asia.¹ And, of course, medieval mapmakers made sure to indicate the dangerous waters leading to unknown territories where “thar be dragons!”—signaled by detailed illustrations of dragons, sea monsters, and other mythical creatures who stood for those locales we know are somewhere around the bend but whose inhabitants we do not know or understand.

A medieval mappa mundi, then, marked not national boundaries or natural terrains, but rather spiritual and psychosocial ones—worldviews, we would call them today. They told stories about how people imagined the world and themselves in it.

While we’ve come to make maps with greater geographical accuracy, we fool ourselves still if we believe that our modern maps reflect any uncomplicated, uncontroversial reality. This is because the nations and the borders we now recognize through the boundaries drawn on modern maps are political ideas rather than geographical facts, the results of negotiated histories and relationships. Ask the people of Tibet where China really is (or vice versa), and you’ll come into a swirl of contested history, tradition, and politics. As the saying goes, what you see really does depend on where you stand. Likewise, of course, the lines of longitude and latitude found on some maps don’t exist in any physical form. They merely mark a system of vertical and horizontal coordinates used to identify the precise location of any area on the earth for the purposes of navigation and geographical identification.

Though it may be the case that it is far easier to navigate across the globe with a modern, geopolitical map, it is no less the case that such maps also chart a modern worldview, which assumes the idea of separate nation-states and global navigation along gridlines that make the globe into manageable quadrants. Indeed, most modern maps make the assumption that few of us will travel by foot or otherwise on the ground, generally eliminating the challenges of mountains, lakes, and rivers as other than properties of this nation or that state.

This is no less true in maps of the evolving digital world, where social networking sites have allowed people to cross all sorts of boundaries, setting aside traditional and/or political notions of nation, ethnicity, class, ideology, and so on—including religion. Hence China’s tight control of social networking participation that could—would likely, if we read the 2011 revolution in Egypt through this lens—introduce ideas into the culture that might challenge or override the official narrative. While China holds a remarkable advantage in terms of global capital and geographically located population, a new mapping of the world that highlights the population of just the Facebook social networking community tells a very different story.

The dark areas on the map below are where Facebook is the dominant digital social network. Outside of Brazil, where Google’s Orkut social network dominates, the areas not covered by Facebook are often the territories of more repressive regimes in which the networked, relational, sharing and co-creating of new knowledge is seen by government leaders as a threat.The remarkable fact is that if the population of people who participate on Facebook across the globe were a nation, that country would be the third most populous—just behind China and India, and having more than twice the population of the United States. What’s more, if territory where Facebook dominates were ceded to this new digital nation, it would have as much land mass as North and South America combined, with Africa thrown in for good measure, making it the largest continental territory in the world.²

Of course, Facebook doesn’t exist geopolitically (yet), but a map of the world drawn on the basis of social media participation surely opens a whole new worldview—one in which modern constructions of national identity that are often tied to religious identity are thrown into flux. This blurring of boundaries that for generations we believed were fixed spills out of the online world into physical reality, were people increasingly question cultural constructions of things like gender, race, sexual identity, class, social status, and vocation. We live in a world that is now characterized by the confluence of ideas, collaboration among those separated by time and distance, and the convergence of written, visual, and auditory media across a less and less ideo logically and geopolitically partitioned global landscape.

What this means at a minimum is that, despite our local, sometimes parochial, orientations, we always conduct our ministries in a global context that extends far beyond the expanse of the Christian colonializing impulse of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—certainly well beyond the doors of our increasingly empty churches. What’s more, the political and economic power that funded Christian colonialism has shifted in the new digital world order, giving everyone with access to a computer, a laptop, or a lowly smartphone the opportunity to enter, reshape, and even dominate conversations about faith in everyday life. Thus, whether or not we choose to bring our ministries actively into the world reshaped by social media, citizens of that world always have the opportunity to draw us into it by sharing commentary, images, and other content about us and our churches or organizations.