The Body of Christ Extended
I’m sitting in a café where old brick walls are proudly exposed and tall industrial – sized windows pull in all the light the winter’s afternoon can give. Across the table is Dr. Timothy Epp, sociology professor at Redeemer University College, Ancaster, Ont. Bespectacled couples hunched over MacBooks surround us.
“It might seem a little too obvious, but when I think of social media I think of [communications theorist] Marshall McLuhan. He talks about extending our senses, our abilities through technology, but he warns the overreliance on technology will begin to cut some things off.”
Regardless of how familiar a person is with McLuhan’s ideas, (particularly his infamous claim that “the medium is the message”), I think we’re all aware, on some level, that technology both extends and limits our bodies. If cars extend our legs, they can also amputate them simultaneously. We understand that to completely replace walking with driving would cause our muscles to atrophy.
“When we use social media we need to remember our communication is mediated by an apparatus that has its limitations,” says Epp.
“Like email, there’s a danger of assuming what you intend to say, what you say, and how it’s received are all the same thing. But right now, you and I talking—we’re in context,” he says, looking me in the eye from across the table, emphasizing the last two words, smiling.
“Our conversation includes body language, our voices, proximity and so on. Even Skype can’t capture this context. It can’t replace the person; it’s only a digital representation of a person,” he continues.
“If we unthinkingly assume social media will replace embodied presence to each other then we’re in danger of amputating a part of ourselves.”
But, like cars, social media are not only useful, they can be transformative. At their best, social media extend the love of Christ into a more dynamic time and space. Christians living in any part of the world can connect 24/7.
If church is the body of Christ gathered, then once again the church’s doors are open day and night. When distances, disabilities, social anxieties or access to transportation make it challenging for believers to connect in person, social media presents a more accessible space.
Inspired by such possibilities, Rev. Rafael Vallejo, pastor of Queen Street East, a “brick and mortar” church in the Leslieville neighbourhood of Toronto, helped plant Casa, an online church with digital roots in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.).
In early 2012, the PC(USA) launched an experimental online church. Created by a former moderator and a core group of facilitators including Vallejo, each leader focused on a key theme. For Vallejo, his focus was social justice. The experiment lasted eight months. It seemed the church would collapse—the online conversations disappearing into cyberspace. Some members decided to form a physical community; others were unwilling or unable due to geography.
On Reformation Sunday in October of 2012, Vallejo launched Casa, which means, “home” in Spanish. He says he envisions Casa as a new version of the previous church experiment—a 2.0 if you will.
“I like to think about Casa in terms of a campus—it’s a virtual location where people extend the church by creating multiple communities of intention,” says Vallejo.
Casa encourages its members to reclaim the practice of morning and evening prayer. Each week a different member commits to posting prayers on Facebook, the church’s principle online platform.
“We’re encouraging people to intentionally log in to Facebook to pray—not to do the other stuff, but to linger in that place and not be in a hurry.”
The use of technology may give the Casa experiment a modern veneer, but underneath is the millennia – old idea of the Church universal. The seemingly horizontal nature of the internet complements this idea, where we are all equals, servants to God, to each other, regardless of our location or cultural background. Isn’t it fitting to imagine the church as one expansive social network, a web of interconnected communities, extending to the far reaches of the globe? After all, our churches are meant to be more than insular communities, exclusive members – only clubs, or disparate tribes.
Like claiming a glass of water contains drops from each of the Seven Seas, it may seem audacious to try and represent global Christianity on a single Facebook page—imagine each believer as a digital drop pumped through distant servers into local Wi – Fi and displayed on our laptops and smartphones. Yet, increasingly, Casa is becoming a global church, says Vallejo. It has over 700 members. Most of the original members are Presbyterian, though now it’s expanding to include people of other denominations, other faiths and other countries.
If Casa is an example of the global being overwhelmingly present in various locales, other Christians are using social media to explore micro – universes in their own backyards.
“Ten years ago I wouldn’t have known what other church leaders in the city were thinking, but now I can. Because of social media you know what they’re up to and what they’re thinking. And that develops things on the relational side of things,” says Matt Thompson, part of “the cohort” or leadership team at the Commons, a Mennonite church in downtown Hamilton, Ont.
“Social media used to engage the local community opens up a new level of transparency. Plus it widens public dialogue. One thing I’ve noticed in Hamilton is you consistently have church leaders showing up and in dialogue with people who have nothing to do with church.
“At the Commons we try to use social media to reinforce our immediate geographical connections. What we do online primarily reaffirms and maintains existing relationships. So when a lot of people come out to an event that’s on Facebook or Twitter, that’s social media, sure, but it’s nothing if there isn’t already face – to – face relationships that are being built.”
Though their leaders use various forms of social media daily, the official online activity of the Commons is streamlined: email threads, Facebook updates and a WordPress – hosted website where members post reflections on services and events every few days. Each Sunday their pastor shares photos and event posters pulled from Facebook and their website as he gives the congregation updates. While referencing the website and Facebook he is careful to emphasize he has hard copies of the next month’s events and dates for those without internet access.
I ask if the Commons will eventually expand their online presence, posting on various platforms, tweeting multiple times a day.
“We need to realize social media is a tool and it really comes down to how the group values it or how they want to use it,” says Thompson.
“Social media is still that ‘next big thing.’ And like any next big thing there’s going to be a lot of hype around it being the thing that fixes the problem—or we find problems for it to fix.”
The Commons is still a relatively new and modestly sized congregation, he explains. At this point, nurturing the core group and getting to know what they value is more important than getting caught up in building an online reputation.
The Body of Christ AMPUTATED
Casa and the Commons demonstrate how social media can extend the body of Christ into communities, but how might the same technology limit the body of Christ?
“We can’t pretend we’re filling the gap and meeting people’s needs only through communicating through Twitter and Facebook,” says Epp. “When ‘friending’ is sharing little bits of information about ourselves online, we’re not going to find real fulfillment. Knowing someone isn’t just knowing what they’re doing, it’s knowing them as a whole.”
While we need to take responsibility for the choices we make online, we also need to carefully discern the nature of the technology we choose to use. Marshall McLuhan’s famous axiom, “the media is the message” is a reminder that social media can never be entirely neutral. It’s rare for a particular piece of technology, and its makers, to be held responsible when a person abuses it; even so, the technology’s design says a lot about how and why it will be used. The developers of Facebook or Twitter may have better intentions for their products than say, manufacturers of hollow – point bullets or landmines; but the Calvinist in me can’t help but think even at our best our fallen nature can corrupt the most altruistic of inventions. Technology, like the rest of our world, will be marred by sin until Christ returns.
“The movement of God is toward deeper and deeper incarnation, enfleshment. It appears that the glory of our existence as beings created, redeemed and blessed by God is a tangible, physical existence, in which we live together and love another in an embodied way,” writes Mark Galli in Christianity Today.
The movement of sin, on the other hand, undermines embodied love. Sin separates us from God, yes, but while that may sound abstract, imagine any sin that does not separate us from others, from sharing in full, embodied presence with our neighbours. Whether it’s insidious sins like addiction to pornography, gossip, jealousy or more overt sins like murder, hate speech, or adultery—the eventual outcome is the same: a deeper and deeper alienation from our loved ones, from our Maker, from the people we were created to be. It’s alienation that manifests itself in a very physical way, separating us from true community.
The Body of Christ RESTORED
(a work in progress)
“The more we wed ourselves to social networking as a strategy for building community, the more we risk forgetting that the problems in our communities do not hinge upon lack of access to shared information about each other’s lives,” writes Matthew Lee Anderson, also in Christianity Today.
He argues we need to be careful our use of social media isn’t born out of a reluctance to share physical spaces with each other. We need to make sure online socializing isn’t masking a form of cowardice, a fear of social environments and situations that require our embodied presence. Our online socializing occurs when and how we like, embodied social time is much more awkward and requires more grace.
“We are embodied beings. I believe our calling in the world is to show love to each other by being fully present to each other. And in social media there isn’t that physical element of being present,” says Epp.
Social media may give “the appearance of intimacy and community,” warns Anderson, but all it can really deliver is “a short – term, technological solution to deeper, more fundamental problems.” In short, online connections cannot replace the substance of embodied friendship.
In the digital age it’s easy to forget we engage the world through our bodies. Still, we become aware of the importance of embodied interaction as we notice the gaps social media can’t fill. The ubiquity of social media reminds us how, at our core, we are social creatures; yet it also distracts us from how important our bodies are as we create our social environment.
Social media isn’t necessarily better or worse than other technologies we create. As Galli points out, “Every technology has the ability to enhance embodied life or to subvert it.” But if God’s primary intention for us (read: His greatest law) is to love—God above all, our neighbours, ourselves—then we have a benchmark to test our use of technology, whether it be automobiles, cellphones, or social media apps. Does it affirm embodied love or sabotage it?
