Executing Ideas

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak at the University of Buffalo about why human trafficking exists and why Christians care about it.

Take a listen, and let me know what you think.

Click here to listen.

I’ve not blogged here much lately. I have good excuses:

• This fall our book, This Ordinary Adventure: Settling Down Without Settling, came out.
• Chrissy and I started a new blog related to that.
• We wrote a column for six months for Relevant, and you can read them here.
• And I worked on InterVarsity’s huge Urbana Student Missions Conference.

I have been part of the 10-member leadership team for Urbana. During the conference, I led our social media efforts and live stream content for the 16,000 people on-site (and everybody else who couldn’t be there).

We had not done either of these before. It seems like we did a pretty good job.

Here’s one article written about what we did, and here’s another. We had a lot of people tweet things to us like @amybethritter: “inspired and fired up by your approach to social (media).”

And to get down to results, we had nearly 40,000 tweets on our hashtag (#u12) or about seven tweets per minute around the clock for the duration of the event. My team tweeted over 3,000 times (with a large percentage being interaction with individual participants) and we were retweeted 6500 times.

We posted over 300 photos on Instagram, with over 6,000 likes. Another 6,400 photos were posted about the event by people using our hashtag (#u12).

Our live streaming content had over 10,000 viewers on YouTube. We posted individual videos and segments on Urbana.org, as well as on Vimeo, with total views passing 15,000 during the conference, including 5,500 of David Platt’s message and another 1,000 on a powerful and eloquent call to faith by Ram Sridharan. DJ Chuang also wrote a liveblog for us.

At Urbana 12, we had about 3,700 people recommit their lives to Jesus, 6,500 people commit to study the Bible with friends who aren’t Christians, and a staggering 4,000 people commit to long-term service in God’s global mission. Think of what 4,000 leaders can do in the coming decades!

I wonder if in some small measure God used the efforts of my team to connect participants to the content and to each other in a stronger way than ever before.

How did we do this?

Who really knows how to facilitate social media interactions amongst 16,000 participants, including over 260 organizations, and hours of diverse content from 150 overlapping seminars? This week, I quoted Indiana Jones to a reporter on this topic, “I’m making this up as I go.” Here’s what we did…

Assemble a large, diverse, skilled team (the “social squad”) of people—different experience levels with Urbana and missions, different involvement with social media, different ethnicities, from different parts of the country.

Set vision. Our aim was to “be a conduit for God’s action to move upon as many people as possible as deeply as possible through Urbana content and related conversation to help compel our generation to give our whole lives for God’s global mission.”

Enable others. Our main job was not to push content, but to interact with people. We answered questions, we shared their observations and stories, we connected them to some of the 250 mission organizations on-site.

Listen well. We knew what was going on with participants in way we haven’t in any previous Urbanas (and we’ve been doing this since 1946). We captured important quotes and stories from students that otherwise we never would have found.

Learn as you go. I explained to my team from the beginning that we’d be experimenting, measuring, evaluating, and innovating again. With social tools, feedback is very fast, so you can morph in the midst of a long five-day conference like Urbana.

This is ministry. I kept our focus on facilitating what God was doing in the lives of people at the conference. I stressed the need to be pastoral for participants, to help them process as they drank from the fire hose.

Share great content. This was easy, as the Urbana program team brought together leaders from around the world who are very gifted. We used as much visual content, strong quotes, and student stories as possible.

Coordinate. If there was an area we missed, it was this. We used the @UrbanaMissions and @InterVarsityUSA accounts, but lots of other parts of our organization were also actively producing content. I’d like to pull us all together a little bit more next time.

Did you follow along during Urbana 12?

What was good?

What could have been better?

Leave a comment below.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about why we wrote our book. Today, I want to share how I think about self-promotion, about marketing a project that’s very much about my wife and me.

I’ve heard people say…

“I’m just can’t talk about myself like that.”

“I’m afraid of rejection.”

And most damning, “It feels icky.”

I’ve been a writer for six and a half years. (Well, at the start, I said I was a writer, but I had no evidence of that fact for editors.) I started off in motorcycle travel photojournalism, telling stories about traveling across southern Africa when we lived there. I had no name. I had no sponsors. I had no publishing credits. I didn’t even have very much skill. But I am very good at the key to good self-promotion:

I find out what people need and help them. 

You’re an editor of a small magazine in California about on-/off-road motorcycling? I’ll write you a story about my similar experiences in South Africa.

You publish a motorcycling magazine in South Africa? I’ll give your readers a piece on an American’s view of the riding scene, from the inside.

Your magazine covers living with a faith perspective for young adults in the U.S.? I’ll tell you the story of finding out Chrissy was pregnant and how we freaked out.

You are struggling with living out the extreme teachings of Jesus in middle-class America? We’ll tell you about the journey and struggle of re-entry after our years overseas, with insights from friends there, in This Ordinary Adventure.

All along the way, I listen to people, love people, and seek to solve their problems. This is the most natural and effective self-promotion possible.

So when I share one of our columns in Relevant with my Facebook friends, I use a quote that might be challenging or encouraging. When I tweet about my work for Urbana 12, I share student ministry insights from my InterVarsity colleagues and the excellent work of 250+ international missions. organizations. When I speak on campus about our book, I will first find out where students are at, what issues they’re dealing with, and what they need.

Even this post is an example of this commitment. If I wrote a post today called “Why Our Book is Awesome,” no one would read it. But I’m solving your problem of needing to promote your work but feeling uncomfortable about it and so here you are, at the end of the piece, with a little encouragement, maybe a new idea, and a general impression that I’m a happy, helpful guy with an interesting book coming out. See what I did there?

Love people and solve their problems. That’s the key to self-promotion.

And that’s not icky.

Did this post address your misgivings about self-promotion? Why or why not? 

Over the last thirteen years, we’ve lived for a total of nearly a year in a few different chunks at Jubilee Partners, an intentional Christian service community east of Athens, Georgia. We returned there on vacation last week. Each time we go back, we are challenged to live more simply, more passionately, and more thoughtfully. Here are some of the biggest insights…

This is hard. Over the past decade or so, intentional Christian community experienced a bit of a boom, it seems. Shane Claiborne and The Simple Way in Philly made brought a lot of attention on different ways to structure our lives. Jubilee is over thirty years old and is still going strong, making it a grandmother community of sorts in the U.S. But no one who has lived in community for any amount of time keeps the romantic, folksy view of it. It ain’t easy.

You need to talk. Communication matters tremendously. Doing it well requires a lot of commitment, time, and honesty.

Give it up. Intentional community is sort of like marriage. You need to put others’ needs and even preferences above your own. If community members aren’t willing to do this, none of you will last long (and neither will the community).

Systems matter. At Jubilee, there are signs on everything. How to recycle. No guns on the property. How to connect to the internet. No swimming without a staff member. Close the door when you’re on the phone. This can sound a bit draconian. But having good systems in place and submitting to your fellow members make life flow much more smoothly.

You’re not better than anyone else. This was brought home by my friends Don and Carolyn who are two of the founding members of Jubilee. Don said that it’s harder to faithfully follow Christ with a job and salary and mortgage, in a typical North American context. Having a counter-cultural living arrangement (even if it facilitates faithful living) does not make one better than others with different callings.

Pray. At Jubilee, there’s an optional morning prayer time for 30 minutes. You head into the community library (one large room), grab a seat on a couch, and pray in silence for about 25 minutes. Then a leader shares a passage and opens up group prayer aloud. This simple pattern helps us to consider our failings, pray through our worries, and be comfortable being together.

That’s just six things. I think I’ve absorbed a lot more that I can’t even name or notice.

How have you experienced Christian community, both good and bad, intentional and not-so-much?

There is a quiet movement afoot.

Last week, 120 younger leaders in the evangelical movement got together in Madison, WI. I was privileged to be one of them. This was the first of several “younger leader gatherings” that the Lausanne movement is pulling together in each of the regions of the world. We started from the Cape Town Commitment document and broke into working groups that included business as mission, leadership development, unreached people groups, cities, theological education, and arts and media, where I found myself.

Tom Lin and the rest of the steering committee brought us together to consider how we see the work of the church from our roles with our churches and organizations. But the real beauty of this was the connections that formed in the hallways, during breaks, late at night, and over breakfast.

I met fantastic people. Bryce is leading a church way up in Canada and doing some cutting edge research. Chris is facilitating a conversation about who we are and who we should be. Bethany is making the case for justice work from a biblical framework. Matt is gathering together first hand observation and analysis from people on the ground all over the world. Emily is mobilizing people to care for vulnerable children. Jonathan is re-envisioning the church as gospel communities on mission, with a network of others. J.R. is leading a conversation about what our church cultures do to us and the potential of that, in his new book. And Tanya is traveling and teaching about God’s character to young adults.

I met people from the Ecclesia Network, Soma Communities, OM, OMF, Compassion, IJM, The Traveling Team, Wycliffe, 24/7, and a heap of other great groups.

These leaders—and knowing gatherings like this are happening around the world—give me hope.

What gives you hope for the next 40 years?

I aim to live life without regrets.

My high tolerance for risk typically leads me to jump into things kind of brashly. Not many good opportunities drift past me unexamined or unexploited.

I finished college a while ago, back in 2000. I had started following Jesus in high school. Already, I was passionate about living the right life and making the right choices, wanting other people to experience truth, freedom, happiness, and love. International issues and other cultures fascinated me, starting with watching Gandhi in my Cultural Geography class in high school.

During my actual college years, I got involved with a church full of very smart folks, mostly involved as grad students and faculty at the University of Wisconsin. I was also involved with a campus ministry eager to share the great news about Jesus. I ended up majoring in Spanish with a minor in Religious Studies.

I took a trip to Guadalajara, Mexico, to help build houses and teach kids about Jesus. I spent a week in Valencia, Spain, living on croissants, espresso, and prayer. Back on campus, I met this woman as passionate as I was about justice and poverty issues. Chrissy and I got married after my junior year (and no, I don’t regret that). We graduated and started years of service in Nicaragua, China, and South Africa.

Sounds good, right? Well, it was. But I have a major regret.

I never went to Urbana.

Chrissy and I never quite fit anywhere. We were pretty intense, once voted Most Likely to Give You Their Last Dollar by our campus ministry. We wrestled with what this crazy Jesus had said:

• Blessed are the poor.
• No one who does not give up everything they have can be my disciple.
• Go and make disciples of all nations.
• If anyone loves me, they will obey my teaching.

We wanted to follow well. We wanted to go. We wanted to live lives that mattered, that honored Jesus. We wanted to be a blessing to people in hard places.

But we didn’t know how. We didn’t have role models. We didn’t know what opportunities were out there. Our church was kind and supportive but didn’t really have the wherewithal to train and send us. Our campus ministry had a particular model of overseas work that wasn’t what we were called to.

I wish I’d known about Urbana.

Held for five days every three years, Urbana is a huge gathering, with 18,000 people, 250 missions organizations, hundreds of practical seminars, multiethnic worship, in-depth Bible study, and leaders from around the world. It is the best place to consider what and where God is calling you to, whether Azerbaijan or Tallahassee, sending or sowing, boardroom or slum.

I missed out. Urbana 96 was after my first semester of college, and I’m not sure I even heard about it. The next one was pushed back a year (Y2K!) and by then I already was in Nicaragua, with giardia in my guts and a brave bride at my side. Years later, we went to Urbana 06, to network for an organization we were serving with, and then Urbana 09, to volunteer.

At one point, we stood in the back of the Dome during a main session, with hard truth being preached, the God of grace being worshipped, and practical insight being shared. “It would have been so good for us to have come to this…” Regret.

Urbana only happens every three years. This year, it’s December 27-31. And it costs real money—$339 for students, plus travel and hotel. That means for some people it ends up costing close to a thousand dollars. Every time I hear people question the cost (and InterVarsity, the ministry that puts on Urbana, is not making any money from it), I want to ask a couple questions.

• How much do you spend for tuition for a single college class?

• What would you have to do to find the money to get there?

• How are you asking God to “send out workers for the harvest”? And what are you doing about it?

• What is it worth to you to know your calling, find the ministry God wants you in, or get on the right trajectory for the rest of your life?

I missed out. But you (and others wanting to live for Jesus and the good of others) don’t have to. The early-bird price goes up June 30^th (this Saturday!), so sign up, sponsor a student or twenty-something to go, and spread the word.

Or you’ll probably regret it.

From Len Schlesinger at the Willow Creek Association’s Global Leadership Summit:

Here’s a summary:

“Global poverty is unacceptable. Our failure to build logistics system means we produce too much food, and we can’t get it to people who need it. This is unacceptable. Millenials can’t look forward to a better life than their parents’. This is unacceptable. The absence of opportunities for our young people is unacceptable.

Now what am I going to do about it?

Entrepreneurship can go a long way toward providing the kind of world we desire. We need to believe in the future by creating it first. Entrepreneurs are always doing what they want to do. Given your capacity, what kind of step do you want to take?

Entrepreneurs often just launch from “We like each other, and want to work together” with NO IDEA of what they will do.

But what keeps people from doing it? They get caught up in defining what they’re trying to do! They get stuck in the definitions. It is important to start thinking about just what you want to do next. At the end of the day, entrepreneurs just need to act like Indiana Jones! If the future is unknowable, what good is thinking?

So, just take small steps with what you have.

Start with what you care about!

Remember, failure is just an opportunity to start with experience.

And little bets and baby steps are the key.”

Now it sounds a bit squishy to me—not exactly expositional preaching or top shelf lecturing, you know? But what he said resonated a fair bit with me. It helped knowing that Schlesinger is no slouch. Everything he said springs from proper and rigorous research.

We often feel like we need to have some huge, comprehensive vision. But successful entrepreneurs sometimes launch with little more than, “Let’s go do something. We’ll figure it out as we go.”

Do we wrongfully discard our own desires, how God has wired us? How many people feel they should be in vocational ministry and how many simple must be serving that way? We’d be better off with more of the latter. It’s like that Buechner quote: “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

And why do we fear failure so much, even when the actual cost of the failure is low? (How’s that pride working out for you?)

Finally, what are the small things we can do today? What’s the mustard seed of faith for today?

Gotta run. But my brain feels like it’s gonna pop.

Rev. Dr. Brenda Salter-McNeil at the Willow Creek Association’s Global Leadership Summit:

God convenes God’s people.

Prayer: Thank you for bringing us here. Business leaders, academic leaders. From every sector!

Kingdom come, will be done. Asking you to speak boldly and clearly.

Derek and Brenda in England from Fuller, talking on experience in African American church. Trying to figure out redundant churches. They wanted to learn from the US Black church. Jamaican woman met her, and rather than being overjoyed, she angrily, “Where have you been? Didn’t you know what we were experiencing here? We’re foreign in Jamaica and here in England. Classism isolates us.”

I had no idea. Pastors, academicians, none of us knew enough about what was going on around the world. A defining moment for me about how uninformed I was.

It was a catalytic moment. God used that experience in my life to broaden, my experience to humble me, to expand my worldview.

Catalytic moments are never nice and easy and comfortable. It’s like flying in an airplane, and when those little yellow bags pop down during sudden loss of pressure, we would grab on for dear life! That’s what a catalytic even feels like.

Because words fail, I asked for help from the Willow team to create this video to help you experience a catalytic event. One man forced himself past where others had given up, changing our world forever. He broke the speed of sound! He blew out the windows! In 1947, Capt. Chuck Yeager proved that it was possible. People thought it would make the plane break apart. When the shaking was most intense, he resisted the temptation to pull back and he moved forward.

Most of us have been impacted by economic, demographic and cultural shifts. Who could’ve predicted the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, and through social media?

This next generation of global leaders have grown up with this under their feet. They’re experiencing more ethnic and generational diversity than anyone ever before. They are global by default, and they know it.

How have you responded? Has it shut you down? Has it made you want to retreat? Or like Chuck Yeager has it inspired you to push through to a new kind of leadership?

Those have challenged me for a year.

In Acts chapter one, I realized the initial catalytic burst happened in the beginning of the birth of the church. Acts 1:8—you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses…all around the world!

It went to the Jews, to the Gentiles, to the whole human race. That’s our mission, to be the kind of leaders who lead the Church forward beyond the sound barrier, to the globalness of what God calls us to be.

There’s a movement outward. We have to move past one barrier after another. We must begin in Jerusalem. This represents our home turf, our comfort zone! People laugh at our jokes and understand our language. It’s where people are mostly like us. It seems like any decent leader could make a church work in their Jerusalem. It takes courage to be a catalytic leader in Jerusalem. Gotta face our own bigotry and ethnocentricity.

You can get your “Amen!” in with me. You can practice with me.

We gotta face some stuff in ourselves in Jerusalem. Gotta confront the people who look like us, in our own family, on our local church. Challenge the practices and policies of our churches and systems.

There’s a VP of Finance at a university in Indiana, and she is passionate about intercultural competency. She gets it on her president’s desk. She pressed on a committee that didn’t want to celebrate MLK Day! She takes on Jerusalem.

Now, onto Judea—it represents the place that’s close to home but not quite home. It’s kind of familiar but there are some subcultural difference. We can look alike but have different political views. It’s like denominational differences. Somehow we’re not quite speaking the same language. Ministry in Judea is not easy. It requires cultural translation. It’s like and elderly woman being preyed upon by a lender. She was getting foreclosed on, but the church heard about it. They bought that woman’s home and sold it back to her for $1! That’s the kind of ministry that happens in Judea.

But next, we need to go to Samaria—this represents people who are hostile to us! They are foreign, totally other. It’s the neighborhoods that we just drive by. Like District 6 in Cape Town or the garbage communities in Manila or India, prisons where people are locked away and forgotten. It’s the place of sex trafficking. It’s the place of child soldiers. It’s the place of corporate greed. Somebody profits from this stuff, it’s environmental injustice. That’s what happens in Samaria.

You will be my disciples in Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria!

It takes a Chuck Yeager to head into Samaria! You will receive power, not just intellectual power but spiritual power from God! It will really be tested in Samaria.

Gender and class and tradition—you don’t have to talk about it in Jerusalem. You can’t avoid it in Samaria! It’s like my friend who’s a priest on the Southside of Chicago! He was concerned about how advertising was affecting youth in his neighborhood. So he painted over it!

We need catalytic moments! We’ve got to have something that pushes us!

Acts chapter two pushes them past the sound barrier. Pentecost came and suddenly a sound came and filled the house. Tongues of fire rested on each of them and they were filled with the Holy Spirit. Others were amazed and perplexed.

Have you ever been in a prayer meeting and you look over at your brother and he’s on fire! If you catch on fire, someone’s gonna come and watch you burn!

The Church is intended to be a global movement. It’s both amazing and confusing. The Church is supposed to be so utterly and completely countercultural, so others are scratching their heads at how the Church lets their differences go!

What do the catalytic events mean in our day? The Spirit is ready to move just like at Pentecost in Acts 2! Peter interpreted it in 2:17-18. For us, instead of being scared of the rhetoric we’re hearing. Maybe God is doing this so that people who have been isolated from each other have to partner with each other. Maybe just maybe God is moving!

The question is, are you ready? Are you ready to break through your sound barrier? If so, I have some dangerous things for you to do.

You need to pray for a divine mandate. Catalytic events are something we can’t conjure up—God needs to break in. We can do something. God, what things do you want my org to address? What are you calling us to do? The most dangerous prayer you can pray is to take your people to a part of the city where you serve and lead and ask them to walk around, “God break our hearts for what breaks your heart.” Pray it over and over again. Multilingual, multinational—it’s not a good idea. It’s a God idea!

If you still have courage, name your catalytic events. Stop walking by. Stop tsking and saying the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Ask God how the Spirit is moving in this context, in our country. We’re looking for people who are looking at catastrophes and seeing catalytic events. Summon your courage! Interpret for people that God’s not dead! God’s still alive! Jesus said the Father is always working. Our job is to look around and find what God is doing!

After you ask God for a divine mandate, something that doubles you over, something you can’t stand, then look for the catalytic events that are setting you up for success. Mobilize people to go! Faith without works is dead! We’ve got to move outside of our Jerusalem to our Judea. We need our cross-pollination there. Convene people to talk about sexuality—that’s a Judea move. Try to understand their perspective! Talk to some cutters—hear them.

And don’t stop there—push past the sound barrier into Samaria, where we’re culturally, socially not in control. I’m not looking for people to just help. I want people who will go learn. Go find your Mrs Jones like Cory Booker said who will lead you to success. Learn the language of the people. Immerse yourself in the culture, even when you want to run back after checking off the box. Brenda is learning Spanish and asking for God’s help in Spanish.

It’s unacceptable, like Dr Schlesinger said. That’s where God is calling you, even out to the ends of the earth! I pray that like on Pentecost, God would rattle you. I want to know what Pentecost feels like in our life! You may be lost up to this point. But may I submit that this moment may be your catalytic moment? This spark might light a fire under the people you lead, your whole Church.
Breathe on us, Holy Spirit! Let God give you the courage you need to lead past boundaries that have held you back! Come Spirit of the Living God, fall on us, fired up! God, make us the Church, the Global Church, every ethnicity, every cultural.

I wish I had a witness who would stand up and say, “AMEN!”

Dear Nick,

I saw your op-ed that came out last night.

First, I will say something that’s difficult for me to acknowledge:

I am an evangelical.

I try to not use vocabulary that is so squishy, used very differently by different people. I also never really say I’m “saved” to my friends who don’t follow Jesus, and I never use the term “born again.”

I self-describe as a “Christian” because it’s broad and invites further conversation:

“What church do you go to?”

“What denomination are you?”

“What kind of a Christian are you?”

“You mean like Falwell?”

And however the conversation goes, I’m sure to explain my words by telling a bit about what I believe and how I live as a result. I want to make sure I’m not lumped in with the reactionary, myopic, anti-intellectual and immoral “evangelicals” that you mention. (And yes, I know they exist. In fact, having acknowledged my own failures, weaknesses, and need for Jesus, I likely am one of “those” evangelicals on certain days.)

When meeting people, I explain that my wife and I went to live in a mountainous village in Nicaragua—without water or power or transportation—to figure out what Jesus meant when he said, “Blessed are the poor.” We lived there for a year and tried to help. We taught English in China for two years. We got additional degrees in international economic development. We directed a pilot microfinance project in South Africa and taught local church leaders about leadership, intercultural communication, and development.

I am compelled to tell people all this, as it opens a space of respect from the most skeptical people I talk with: “If you’ve done that, you’re probably not ‘reactionary, myopic, anti-intellectual, and immoral.’” I’m one of your “tens of millions of (evangelicals) who have actually become increasingly engaged in issues of global poverty and justice.” You write of John Stott, to whom I’m connected through my work with InterVarsity and Urbana.

We evangelicals give money to some projects that resonate with you. We sacrifice to make good things happen. We “go to the front lines, at home or abroad, in the battles against hunger, malaria, prison rape, obstetric fistula, human trafficking or genocide…some of the bravest people you meet are evangelical Christians (or conservative Catholics, similar in many ways) who truly live their faith.” It’s immensely encouraging to hear from such a public figure that I deeply respect that this has not gone unnoticed. Thank you.

But I’m writing because of the end of your piece:

“Because religious people and secular people alike do fantastic work on humanitarian issues — but they often don’t work together because of mutual suspicions. If we could bridge this ‘God gulf,’ we would make far more progress on the world’s ills.”

Yes, we would. I’m hearing and having conversations daily with people who note the shift in the past fifteen years in the evangelical churches—justice is on the agenda that God has set for himself and therefore for us. More and more of us are seeing our faith to include working on justice issues like you mention. And a lot of us are thrilled to work together with secular people on the issues mentioned above (and others). And like you, we are “sickened” when we are mocked or sidelined because of our faith.

However, we are bound and compelled by our ancient text. We know that some parts are anachronistic, and (truth be told) we might prefer to excise some bits. But our integrity demands that we be obedient to the God of the Bible.

And here’s the rub—Jesus is our king, not all our orthodox doctrines are politically correct, and yes, we want you to believe in and follow Jesus, too. The living God who we have met and know calls us to do the good that you admire and also work toward. But this same Lord calls us to proclaim the truth we have in our ancient text. This is not because we’re mean or bigoted. Rather, that is the logical result of concluding the Bible actually is true and that, crazy though it seems, we believe Jesus was dead and raised to pay a punishment that we will pay if we do not accept his sacrificial love. We need to be able to talk openly about our worldview, even as we collaborate with you on justice efforts. But we promise to listen to yours, too.

If secular people doing good work can be tolerant with our attempts to be faithful to our King, I’m sure the collaboration we both love will increase. The “God gap” will not disappear, but if we can have open and caring dialog, we will be able to do more that both helps others (and honors our God).

Grace, peace, and joy to you,

Adam Jeske

No one doubts the prevalence and therefore the importance of social media generally and also particularly in college culture. A few of my notes, observations, and questions from the World Assembly of the IFES:

1. Data Dangers. Some people are deeply concerned about the security of our data, especially how it’s used by governments and corporations. While most nod a bit, we mostly scoff. In a generation, we may herald their prophetic attempts to get us to see what’s happening.

2. That’s a problem. Social media (@jamesdoc on Twitter called it “immersive media”) can be problematic for some people. It may be that someone has an addictive personality, as one person I chatted with mentioned. Or it may be that such a medium can release internal and social sin in a way that is unique in human history. Or maybe there’s nothing new under the sun.

3. Some students are well ahead of older leaders in their media savvy, management of different relationships and spheres (or acceptance of the impossibility of doing so), and theology of socially mediated relationships. One student pointed out how many more relationships one can begin and even maintain well with Facebook.

4. Social media permit us to put out soft and intriguing invitations to dialog, through quotes, observations, links, and the like. The “weak links” of social media are wide (and yes, often shallow), but they can lead to significant conversations both online and face-to-face.

5. With Skype, Apple FaceTime, and Google+ Hangouts, what does “face-to-face” mean anymore? There’s general agreement that there is great value in actually being in the same physical space, but why exactly? People have flown in from 130 countries for this conference. What is it about being together that makes it worth such a significant investment? Further, we have commented dozens of times how amazing it is to sit with biblical texts in the middle of ten people from ten countries here at the World Assembly, hearing different perspectives brought to bear on it (and being born by it). We can do this every week online if we so choose. That didn’t exist at the last World Assembly in 2007.

6. “We have lost control. And that is good.” @Andy_Shudall said this during his presentation, explaining that it is no longer possible to moderate—let alone manage—any large, long discussion online. The question was raised, with concern, of starting students in discussion online and then not being able to be there, with the result being wrong answers given, hurtful things said, and (in this case) the Bible being misquoted. I found myself explaining the two options in this scenario. First, you don’t facilitate it and make it happen. It either occurs elsewhere and you may not even know about it, or it doesn’t happen at all and you can’t ever deal with whatever would have surfaced. Second, you facilitate it and deal with all the wonkiness that arises. The latter is preferable for the student ministry that IFES does.

7. It’s not so different. Several times in the social media sessions, we found ourselves talking about new scenarios and saying, “But hold on—how is that different than this analog situation?” For example, the conversations and the lack of control is no different than those had after an event by students as they walk back to their dorms and apartments. Technology gives us an illusion and expectation of control, and it scares some people to release that.

8. We value being together more. Andy Moore, acting head of communications for IFES (@lovingmercy on Twitter), opened the plenary session on new media by having us turn to our neighbors and acknowledge how good it is to really be together. By having socially-mediated relationships, the contrast of our incarnate friendships makes us cherish the latter, perhaps.

9. Nothing is private anymore. And maybe that’s a good thing. Someone raised a question about online deception and false identity. I suggested that it’s actually harder to deceive others on Facebook than real life, given the interconnection evident through that medium. (Andy Moore recommended the movie Catfish.)

10. The potential needs our attention. While concerns and questions arose in abundance, I really wanted more careful thought and discussion of the potential of social media in the work of the IFES. Who are our best thinkers on relating well to people on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the rest? What are the bleeding edge students trying and is it working? How do we share insights between Brasil (Portuguese), Hong Kong (Cantonese), and the South Pacific (several languages)?

It’s here and we’re going to be surfing for a while, just barely staying up on an unstable but exciting platform.

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