Social media

I will soon qualify for my personal pocket protector.  It seems I become more of a geek every day.  A few months ago I joined Facebook, and this past week I got on Twitter.  I'm now a Twit that Tweets or is that a Tweet that Twits?  Anyway, I'm now posting and reading messages on both.  Besides that, I finally convinced my wife to get her a cell phone which she had resisted doing.  She wanted a less expensive phone, but after sending 2-3 text messages to grandkids she asked if she could get an upgrade.  I THINK she was joking. 

The day after Thanksgiving I noticed that while I was checking e-mails on my I-Phone, our son who was in for the holiday was responding to an e-mail on his I-Pad and my wife was sending a text to our daughter who had returned home earlier that day.  Everyone was communicating, but none of us were talking to one another.  That bothered me.

Social media, cell phones, and computers are all great tools to increase personal productivity, and I believe they can be very helpful to promote church activity, but the danger is that they can take the place of human touch.  Smaller churches, in particular, are all about relationships, and while electronic tools can help communicate they cannot develop the kind of relationships that are most needed in the small church.  That still requires the human touch, the sound of a human voice, and the assurance that you are loved by someone who walks with you in both good times and bad.  If we lose the human touch we will have lost something very important to the community of faith, so I urge you to not let that happen.

In the meantime, feel free to follow me on Facebook and Twitter.  At Twitter you'll find me at DennisBickers.  If you are not receiving the free monthly e-newsletter that goes out to bivocational and small church leaders, send me an e-mail letting me know you want to start receiving that.  I just sent out December's newsletter to over 600 people, and I would love to add you to the mailing list.