We are facing a transformation of how human society is organized

that is as revolutionary in its implications

as was the invention of the printing press over 500 years ago.

~ Philip Clayton

 

We usually begin worship by asking you to silence your phones. Over the last three Sundays in the pulpit, I conducted an experiment: I told you that your phone didn’t need to be off: you’re free to text, tweet, or post during worship. I wanted to see whether anyone would use coffee hour to question me, challenge me, or start a Scrabble game with me. Nobody did.

 

Perhaps this is what I should’ve said: as far as I’m concerned, this worship space is “social media friendly” – which means that if you have a smart phone, you’re welcome to check in on Facebook, tweet to your followers, or otherwise merge your virtual community with this one. “Minister said I could tweet during her sermon! I ! #UU!” (Don’t forget the #.)

 

I have questions for you, which will quickly make evident a vast diversity among us – a diversity that’s usually invisible: In the past week, how many of you have tweeted?¹

 

How many of you IM’ed or Google-chatted this week?²

 

Raise your hand if you’ve ever posted a video on YouTube, FB, or a blog.

 

How many of you have ever written a review on Amazon, Yelp, or other website? (How many of you knew that this church has a Yelp listing? It has 5-star reviews!)³

 

Raise your hand if you’ve ever communicated by text message.⁴

 

How many of you are willing to admit that you spend at least an hour a day on social media sites or apps?

 

Notice, before I go any further, notice how much emotion and judgement (of self or others) we have around questions like these – especially when we have little familiarity with the widgets and gadgets that do “those things.”

 

My task this morning is to explain to you why I embrace, use, and encourage others to use social media – a label that includes everything from YouTube and Facebook to texting, to sites like Meetup.com, Flickr, and Tumblr – and why these tools are especially valuable to religious communities like ours. My task is a challenging one: a portion of  you don’t need any convincing (you’re tweeting already); some of you are ambivalent or nervous about social media; and others of you are pretty sure that your life would be complete without understanding any of this.

 

Before we go any further, then, let’s make a deal: if you promise to dial down any overactive defense shields, I promise not to “should” all over you. You don’t have to change any of your current habits based on what I’m about to say. And: I am going to make some assertions about social media that might surprise you.

 

If I sound a bit passionate, it’s because I’m an early adopter: curious and awed enough by technology to want to dive in, even if it means that “early adopter” means “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’ll figure it out somehow.” (See chart, below.)

 

Not only do I use social media all day, every day, but I also track research and conversations about how social media technology is shifting the way that we live our lives, how we “do” church, and how we might grow this Unitarian Universalist faith. I’m a so-called “God Geek.”

 

We human beings are social animals; with very few exceptions, our survival and happiness depend on being connected to other human beings. In this decade, the ways we relate to one another are undergoing an unprecedented transformation, thanks to social media: the ability to connect to almost anyone, almost anywhere, with near immediacy.

 

That transformation is, in part, quantitative: With over 800 million users, if Facebook were a nation, it would be the third largest country on the planet (after China and India).⁵

 

More importantly, social media are qualitatively “changing the nature of human existence and human social connection.”6 We UU’s talk a lot about our “interdependent web, of which we’re all a part:” for the first time in any of our lifetimes, technology reflects that Principle:⁷ we’re as interconnected and engaged with each other than has ever been possible. Thanks to sites like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, new expressions of community are arising – not the illusion of community; not new Imaginary Friends; but genuine ways of knowing and trusting one another. As my colleague Pat puts it, these sites are “the new neighborhood, the cybervillage where we bump into each other over the fence or on the street and connect.”⁸ I believe that these tools are changing us, deeply social beings that we are, and changing the shape of religion... for the better.

 

Whenever we get our hands on a new technology that we don’t quite know what to do with, our instinct is to apply it to our existing paradigm; we try to make it work in the way that other things work. In my opinion, the biggest misunderstanding about social media is that these are new tools to apply to our current paradigm of “church.”

 

They’re not. Social media like TwitterChats, Joy & Sorrow apps, and video podcasts are forcing a lot of congregations to redefine and reformulate what “church” means. These technologies are creating an entirely new paradigm, whose culture is still under construction and whose rules are still being created.

 

Here’s an example of what I mean: a lot of congregations (UU and otherwise) are interested in attracting visitors and building their membership. Sometimes, church members point to social media like Facebook and Twitter and say, “We should use those sites to get more people to come to church.” A suggestion like that comes from a genuine desire to help and reflects a nice openness about technology... and it assumes that, beyond our widgets and gadgets, we’re still doing business as usual. (The implication is that we want to get people inside of our sanctuary on Sunday mornings.)

 

Who says that “business as usual” is what we ought to be doing?

 

Who says that people should physically come to church, instead of a congregation going, virtually, where the seekers are?

 

Why do we assume that sitting in a sanctuary counts more than someone watching a sermon online?

 

Who says that sermons should be the Sunday “main event”?

 

Who says watching fire catch in a physical chalice is less meaningful than lighting a chalice app?⁹

 

Do we really believe that a congregation is defined by being localized within its walls?

 

Most of us have trouble imagining what religious community would look like in the cybersphere – the digital landscape. Most of us can’t grasp how or why the biggest buzz at our UU General Assembly last June was around “redefining congregations... to...no longer specify that UUA member congregations be ‘local’” – that is, “brick and mortar” institutions.¹⁰

 

Imagine this: UU’s are surveying the changing digital world, with its growing online communities of Unitarian Universalists, and are forming congregations that don’t physically exist. Toto, We’re not in Kansas anymore. Most of us can’t wrap our heads around it.

 

Most of us are not Millennials.

 

“The Millennials” – also called Generation Y – are the cohort of 80 million young adults in the U.S. between the 18 and 30-ish years old.¹¹ (For the record, I’m Generation X – I missed Generation Y by a few years.) Unlike previous generations, Millennials don’t “know a world without technology and media.”¹² They’re “technology enthusiasts;” to them, social media is “more than a bottomless source of information and entertainment,

and more than a new ecosystem for their social lives.” Instead, it’s “a badge of generational identity.”¹³

 

Here’s where it gets interesting: besides being more wirelessly connected than anyone in America, Millennials are decidedly liberal14 and are the “least overtly religious... generation in modern times”15 – they don’t experience spirituality through the lecture of a sermon; they hunger for “an embodied, spiritually alive, growth experience,”16 even if it’s virtual. And three out of four describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”

(SBNR, if you’re saving characters on Twitter).

 

Just to drive the point home, the Millennials are the generation missing from our UU congregations. They’re not here. Oh, there are some... but not nearly as many as there could be. Not as many as there ought to be, given that “spiritual but not religious” is another way of saying “seeker uncomfortable with doctrine and creed” – which is us.

 

American religion is in an interesting place right now. (“Interesting” as in that old curse, “May you live in interesting times.”) Few denominations are “planning for and investing in new forms of church for this brave new world.”¹⁷ Already, denominations of many stripes are watching their numbers atrophy, and “if the decline of traditional churches and denominations continues,” says one scholar,¹⁸ “by 2025... up to two-thirds of

mainline churches may have closed their doors... others will struggle on without a fulltime pastor.” The churches in question are the ones that “deliver [their] message using technologies that date back to Gutenberg: books, ...sermons, and so forth.... When it comes to effective communication of message, the Religious Right is running circles around us.”¹⁹

 

I’m not cynical or hopeless enough to suggest that Unitarian Universalism is on the decline – yet. Our UU Association is putting more resources into our cyber-communities and our social media. As a religious movement, we’ve shifted somewhat nimbly, if erratically, from “church 1.0” to “church 2.0.”20 And I have no doubt that this church will continue be a thriving, transformative congregation; that your best years are in front of us.

 

Still, it’s time to start talking together about how we, as a congregation, are going to first imagine and then respond to the changing world – because social media aren’t just “neat” gadgets that entertain; they’re not a passing phase. Social media are the new face of all things, including religion. They’re rapidly becoming a central vehicle for our bold, lifesaving good news of Unitarian Universalism. Social media are inviting us to re-imagine

how we live in Unitarian Universalist community.

 

Here are some steps towards imagining that:

 

First, we have to ask new questions. I’ve begun to question the assumption that people – like young adults – need to come to us, and do worship our way, to participate in congregational life^.21

 

Second, we get to consider what we’re willing to do – video podcasts? A smart phone app? a “virtual” worship service online? – to make Unitarian Universalism accessible to eople who, for whatever reason, “click” rather than travel across our threshold.

 

Finally, we have to adopt a curious, experimental mind – a ‘beta’ mindset.

 

 

 

Endnotes

1. To “tweet” is to post a message in 140 characters or fewer on Twitter.com.

2. IM stands for “instant message,” and (like “chat”) is a generic description for real-time typed online messages between two or more people.

3. Yelp.com is a free “online urban city guide” that helps people find cool places to eat, shop, drink, relax and play, based on the reviews posted by users.

4. Text messages are usually sent between cell phones. If you have my cell phone, you’re welcome to text me instead of calling or emailing.

5. After China and India.

6. Philip Clayton, in “Theology and the Church After Google: How This New Age Will Change Christianity.” February 1, 2011, Princeton Theological Review.

7. Rev. Meg Riley (minister of our UU Church of the Larger Fellowship, in her GA 2011 Workshop on social media, June 2011.

8. Pat McLaughlin, commenting on my Facebook post.

9. Try “Quest for Meaning,” the app by the (UU) Church of the Larger Fellowship.

10. See http://blogs.uuworld.org/ga/2011/06/24/talking-about-bricks-and-mortar/ – GREAT video!

11. Depending on who’s defining the generation, this age span varies.

12. From The Millennials by Thom Ranier and Jess Rainer.

13. Pew report, p. 25.

14. See for example

www.beliefnet.com/Entertainment/Books/2002/07/Spiritual-But-Not-Religious.aspx?p=2

15. Pew Research Center. See

http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1501/%20millennials-new-survey-generational-personality-upbeat-open-new-ideas-technology-bound.

16. Abbey Tennis, UU young adult extraordinaire!

17. Clayton.

18. Clayton.

19. Clayton.

20. Clayton.

21. Comment by Joe BW Smith on TribalChurch.org. See http://tribalchurch.org/?p=2064.

22. Clayton.