A week of conversation about community, social media and ethics

Dr. Margaret Mohrmann
at our Lenten Luncheon;
photo by Lori K. Richardson

We got back to Charlottesville Friday in time for a Lenten luncheon at St. Paul’s featuring a talk by my friend Dr. Margaret Mohrmann, who is a professor at the University of Virginia in both the medical school and the Department of Religious Studies.

Dr. Mohrmann is a long-time member of St. Paul’s and she has a passion for ethics. She challenged us to think a little more deeply than we might otherwise about what it means to live a moral life in community. As she reminded us, the ethical choices we make have a great deal to do with not only our personal lives, but how we live together on this planet.

One of the underlying conversations at the Episcopal Communicators national conference that we attended this week in North Carolina was about how our use of communication tools represent moral choices about living in community.

The ethical questions were not confined simply to when, or how we lift photos off the Internet, though that issue is certainly important.

Nor were the ethical questions simply about institutional transparency, as important as that is (we can easily think of churches that have covered up pedophile scandals).

The ethical question is bigger than all of that.

As Bishop Stacy Sauls reminded us at the conference, the word “communication” comes from the word “communion,” and so we must ask: Does the sheer volume of information build communion or tear it apart?

I don’t have an easy answer.

But I believe the Church – especially the Church – must engage with that question, both concerning its own practices and in the wider trends in our culture.

All of our workshops had something to do with the uses of “social media” – these rapidly evolving Internet tools like Facebook and Twitter that enable people to form vast networks with each other using personal electronic devices.

As several speakers noted, if our church isn’t using Facebook we are signaling that we are saying we don’t care about the people who are.

We have seen recent examples of how Facebook has the power to knit people together all over the world, and how it can change political structures and shape events. The “Arab Spring” that brought down the government in Egypt was organized through Facebook. Both the Occupy Movement and the Tea Party owe much to social media.

At our Episcopal Communicators national conference, we were given reams of ideas for how we can use social media to draw people into our churches. Some ideas were better than others. One speaker told us how a church encourages its congregation to use Twitter and Facebook to message the preacher, and each other, about what they think of the sermon – during the sermon.

I would prefer to avoid that one, thanks.

We also heard how we could use these tools to find out a great deal of information about the demographics and personal characteristics of the people who go to our churches, and the potential “market” around us. Businesses are doing this, and so should we, or so we were told.

All of this got me thinking: How ethical is this? When does social media become anti-social?

We, as the Church, must pause to ask: Are we building community or contributing to the cultural forces that are fracturing community? Just because we can flood you with information, tailored especially for you that might attract you to our church, should we? Is evangelism simply brazen marketing by another name?

And when does Facebook, Twitter, blogs (oh please, not this one) feed an addiction that isolates people from real relationships with each other?

One of our speakers, a professor at the University of North Carolina told us how her students have said they would rather talk by social media than to have face-to-face meetings with her or each other. “That’s scary,” she said.

Don’t get me wrong – I am fascinated by social media, and intend to keep writing this blog and exploring others ways of connecting with people through social media. These tools have an amazing capacity to reach people in new ways, and reach people who we are not otherwise reaching. We can use these tools to bring the Gospel out beyond the confines of the physical walls of the Church. And I am continually awestruck by how many people read this blog all over the world.

Yet I also think it is incumbent upon us as the Body of Christ to continually ask the ethical question: Is what we are doing here in cyberspace building the Body of Christ or tearing it apart? This seems a ripe area for inquiry by moral theologians, and all of us.

As Dr. Mohrmann reminded us Friday, we should be careful to not settle for simple or quick answers. I would appreciate hearing your thoughts here on this blog, or in person.

By James Richardson, Fiat Lux

Stacy Sauls: "You are the keepers of our stories"

Bishop Stacy Sauls;
photo by Lori K. Richardson

KANUGA, North Carolina – Here at the Episcopal Communicators national conference, the conversation today shifted away from nifty Internet tools to the mission of the Church.

We were treated today to hearing Bishop Stacy Sauls, who is the chief operating officer of The Episcopal Church and is lately in the line-of-fire with proposals to restructure and trim the bureaucratic structure at the top. He left his position as Bishop of Lexington, Kentucky, to take on this job at the Church Center in New York, serving at the behest of Presiding Bishop Katharine.

Sauls, by the way, is a graduate of the University of Virginia, and he went to St. Paul’s Memorial Church when he was an undergraduate years ago.

Sauls talked with us for two hours about how the mission of the Church is to feed the hungry, free the captives, and heal disease – to be the incarnation of Jesus in the world. To do that, he implored us, we must continually “remember God” in their work.

“I believe we are at a time when we are beginning to remember,” he said. “We are beginning to remember who we are… This is one of the most hopeful moments the Church has every experienced.”

Sauls gave a short history lesson on how the Church lost its way beginning with its compromise with power in the 4th century and how it connects with our present predicament as a church (the video below has a segment of that portion of his talk). “We got into bed with power and power has thrown us out.”

Sauls then asked the Episcopal Communicators to be in forefront of telling a different story based not based on power, but a story based on the mission of Jesus to feed the poor, heal the lame and free the captives.

“We have an opportunity to remember who we are,” he said. “Communication exists to promote communion.”

Our church, he said, needs to reclaim the language of God and Christ. “We have ceded a lot of good stuff to the crazy people,” he said. “You are the keepers of our stories,”

“This is the most interesting, rewarding time in the history of the church.”

The video below was taken by Lori:

By James Richardson, Fiat Lux