So many people participate in forms of online community much more than they do in their church community. What are today’s churches missing?

It’s 11 am Sunday morning, and the pastor is preaching. Around the congregation, people are following along in the Biblical text, several with beautiful, leather-bound books, but many are reading the Scripture through their devices – phones mostly, with a few tablets scattered about.

Five years ago, that would only be the scene in the most affluent of congregations. Now, it’s starting to become normal. And what is changing is not simply a shift from one tool to another, but rather, this shift is emblematic of a more profound shift in the ways that people create, sustain, and participate in church community – away from the analog, toward the digital.

The advantages of digital, internet-connected engagement, especially to a millennial generation of digital natives, are as obvious as they are ubiquitous. Millions of pages of Biblical texts, commentaries, and study materials, all in the palm of your hand! A steady pipeline of informational access to people, either one-on-one or en masse, 24/7/365. Endless throngs of cute babies and dancing cats. What’s not to love?

As it turns out, plenty.

As a prelude to writing this piece, I launched a series of questions into my Facebook feed:
• What are the ways in which your church experience is like social media?
• What are the ways in which your church community is different from social media?
• How should they be similar? How should they differ?

My respondents, all of whom identified as Christian who regularly went to church, gave a variety of responses that landed all over the map. Some people were like, “Yeah, church needs more LOLz like Facebook!” Other people were like, “Please GOD no, I go to church to get AWAY from you FB people.” (I’m exaggerating… but not by much.)

The lack of consensus is, in my book, actually a good sign. It means that, overall, we as Christians (and especially church leaders) are grappling with these questions, instead of passively allowing the societal shifts to shape the ways we do—and are—church community. The million-dollar question (which is also the million soul question) is how can we can we use online tools like social media to increase the quality of church communities without falling into the pitfalls of online communities?

Because the pitfalls are numerous.

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SOURCE: UrbanFaith