SPIRIT AND TECHNOLOGY
(Posted 2007-08-21 13:27:17 by ArchPaladin)

Our church has had an intern over the summer, and within the past couple of
weeks (starting during VBS, incidentally) I've had some conversations with
him about coming here to New England (he's from AK) and some of the things
that brought him into ministry and what he wants to do with his ministry
now that it's developing.  He is apparently involved in something that he
calls "street evangelism", which from what I understand basically involves
getting to know random people that he meets in public places and uses the
friendships he develops there to witness to them and others.  I have
thought the ability to do that was rather interesting, and very valuable
when it comes to making good impressions on people that you are just
meeting, so I offered to tag along a couple of times when he goes out.

Being something of a technical person I decided that l should find some
forums that discussed subjects in Christianity and lurk around there a bit.
 After all, if I'm to be going out and meeting people, I should probably
catch back up on some of the current questions that people are asking and
some of the arguments that are proposed to answer them (both good ones and
bad ones).  What I found there was rather obvious, and interesting when you
think about it for a couple of minutes: people's discussions were directly
tailored to the subject they came to the forum to discuss, and the
discussions could be very polarized.  There wasn't much in the way of
relationship or friendship building at all.

In a technical arena, people's conversations are often a lot more directed
and can easily become adversarial.  If you engage in online discussions, no
one really knows each other personally, so everyone defaults to pushing
their viewpoints rather than trying to find common ground between people. 
This is not to say that in real life people don't do this (or that people
always default to view-pushing in cyberspace), but it seems that during
real life discussions that have the potential of getting touchy, people are
a lot more likely to tread carefully so that they can help maintain a
friendship rather than start an argument.  Online, I think people aren't
inclined to do that.

And because we live in a technical world, this raises some serious
questions for modern evangelism and the role that technology is to play in
it.  Social interaction online is growing, and while it isn't going to
completely replace real life interaction, it will take up a greater
percentage of our social lives.  Good evangelism, however, requires a level
of personal interaction that is hard to obtain in online discussions, which
means that what exposure people do get to Christianity in an online setting
may not be as beneficial to them as what they could get when speaking face
to face.   For example, if people are meeting over lunch to talk, a lot
more gets shared than just the main topics of conversation that the people
met for.  There is body language, the food itself, and tangent discussions
that arise out of circumstance (traffic, temperature, a crying child
elsewhere in the restaurant, etc.)  These little things provide an
opportunity for people to establish a friendship far beyond what occurs in
an online space, where none of those factors are present.  In turn, that
friendship is what helps cement a relationship enough to provide space for
discussion of spiritual matters.  Thus, anyone who seeks to evangelize
online has to take extra care to build a personal relationship with people
that wouldn't otherwise come naturally in online discussion.

It will be interesting to see how this changes down the road as social
interaction in the online world becomes increasingly the norm.

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