Insights from Always On

Angela Gorrell's book, Always On, provides useful tools to help us understand the world of social media and engage it faithfully, constructively and pastorally. She advocates that "If you want to be attentive to what is impacting people’s lives, critical and theological reflection on new media development and engagement is essential.” Through this book, she helps church leaders to:

•  Reflect on new media’s possibilities and its brokenness,
•  Traverse the new media terrain.
• Shape stories that examine the cultural stories we share.
•  Imagine Jesus’ life and ministry in order to articulate how a representative of Christ’s kingdom would act and feel online.
• Discern ministry through the lens of media, and
• Develop hybrid Christian practices and design a rule for life in a new media landscape.

Angela invites Christian communities to encourage members to be invested in thinking critically and theologically about how they will use new media, in being open to God’s invitations in our new media landscape, and in regularly examining how God has been present to them in the midst of their hybrid lives. Below you'll find a few of my insights, takeaways, and questions after reading Angela's book.

1 | Interested Conversation

• Be interested in what God is up to in this new media landscape and interested in reasons why new media has the possibilities for living into the kingdom of God. 
• Be attentive to how media is impacting people’s lives, include your life, particularly around critical and theological reflection.
• Recognize how media affords us connect with long lost friends, people from our past, and strangers across the miles, that all can a source of joy and wisdom.
• Recognize that social media can be source of pain, anxiety, frustration, and jealousy. It can surface the longtime realities in new ways that are forcing us to feel them and confront them (i.e. BLM, equality, politics, etc.). It can diminish our humanness, increase our loneliness, provoke fears, and lead to fruitless conversations.
• New media enables conversation can be facilitated by people who have a lot or little experience.
  
  

2 | Traversing the New Media Terrain

• The connection between faith and new media is not always immediately obvious for
  some communities. It's easy for leaders to dismissing new media and people’s engagement with it as something unnecessary, or as a step-child to in person conversations.
• Social media engagement requires people to constantly and unconsciously answer difficult questions that reveal a person’s beliefs, values, desires, and judgement. Questions might include:
  • Whom should I interact with?
  • When should I speak and when should I listen?
  • What should I click?
• Theology is to be embodied, exercised, and practiced in ways that acknowledge ourselves as  hybrid versions of in-person and online living.

3 | Shaping Stories

• New media is designed so you will desire to be always on and connected to a device.
•  New media wants to not only get your attention but hold it (likes, badges, etc). New media makes money off of our attention and creates a cultural narrative that is often counter to what Jesus has called us to be and do.
• New media has not only adopted the convictions of our culture’s main story and subplot;
  it has added malformed convictions to the story. New media associates authentic self-expression and pursuit of your desires online with accumulating attention and accruing social capital. You become a brand rather than pointing people to Jesus.

4 | Online Jesus

• Jesus’ life and ministry help nurture our imaginations to see the glorious possibilities of
  human relationships. It helps us discern Christian norms, and navigate social and power structures. It provides a window for how we connect with God, each other, and the world.
• Seeing the world through the lens of Jesus helps us recognize and challenge various forms of inequality, injustice, and hardship in people’s lives.

5 | The Convergence

• We need to gain skills for practicing discernment about new media that lead to grace-filled connection, increased understanding, and love. - avoiding the tendency to allow new media to be used in passive, unreflective, and negative ways that stir up:
  • Envy
  • Impression Management
  • Harassment
  • Cyberbullying
  • Empathy Burnout
  • Transparency issues
• While Christians have limited control over the new media design, they have more control over the kinds of media they personally use, how they use it, and why.
• Seek to understand rather than seeking to be understood. Be genuinely interested in what others believe, and how they perceive the world, and how they might server as a teacher to you. Be okay with living with the questions and not always having the answers.
• Discussing our feelings is vital. Make storytelling a regular practice.
• Become comfortable with doing ministry in both physical and digital spaces. Share in ways that allow you to be Christ-like, fully present, and the embodiment of a healing community, 
• Engage in spiritual practices that help us to model Christ-likeness wherever we are present. This may include:
  • Hybrid Christian rractices
  • Rhythms of rest
  • Mercy and compassion
  • Advocacy
  • Truth-Telling
  • ○ Peace making

Angela Williams Gorrell is assistant professor of practical theology at George W. Truett Theological Seminary, Baylor University, in Waco, Texas.