As we approach 2020, there is a need for greater clarity in areas of Christian formation than we have had in the past. 

In decades past we saw a need to transition from a Christian education based model of discipleship to one that was more formative.  We recognized that discipleship that was simply content based and not taught in the context of community was insufficient.  But what is community anymore?

The world is shrinking and people are becoming more selective with the communities that compete for their time.  There are no established criteria yet, taught either by the Church or by society in general, regarding which communities are most helpful for us in life and why.  Therefore, we find technologies and services that aren’t necessarily helping foster true community getting everyone’s attention…

•According to a recent survey among students today, the main form of communication among 97% of those surveyed is not face to face, but rather texting.

•Facebook, which is just six years old, now has nearly a half billion people using it.  If it were a country, it would be the 3rd largest country in the world.   By 2012, estimates are it will hit 1 billion users.   People now spend 7 hours a month on average on the site,  and in all likelihood the time spent in Facebook world will continue to rise.

Traditionally, as technology has developed over the last century, the approach of the Church has been to be apprehensive if not defensive.  Each time that this has been our approach, the Church has fallen behind culture at using the medium to its advantage of making and deepening disciples.

As we head toward 2020 and communication tools are developed and implemented at an even quicker pace, this trend must change.  The Church needs to be thoughtful in embracing and innovating with technologies used by the masses to communicate, and how it chooses to do so.  This involves a two-step process:

1.Creating an understanding of true, formational community, and how it differs from other forms of pseudo-community;

2.Innovating using social media and other communication tools to foster and reinforce formational community.

Understanding formational community

Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Second Life, Loopt, Yelp and Foursquare are all examples of foundational communication tools which in themselves create pseudo-community, though not formational community.  What is the difference?

True, formational communities are communities that draw people into deeper, more personal relationships — where people are invested in each other’s lives.   For starters, if a person were to leave the community, would the others notice that he/she is gone?  Would there be hole left, a sense of loss?   If not, then it is not formational community.

Formational community is distinctive in that, as Paul describes in 1 Corinthians 12:12-27, we need each other to live and to grow.  As a result of these relationships, a space is created for people to disciple others with Scripture, through the lens of personal experience.

If we rise to the challenge of educating our congregations on what true community looks like and how it benefits our congregations in making and deepening disciples, we will be able to counteract other forms of pseudo-community that are soaking up people’s time.

Innovating for formational community

In our information age, books and blogs abound.  Wikipedia can teach us almost anything we want to know.  People are numb to content-based information sharing that isn’t framed within the context of personal experience.  The transition from Christian education to Christian formation style approach to discipleship in many church settings today has further proven this to be true.

We can relegate all such community to time spent within the four walls of the local church each week, and continue to defend why the masses should turn their TV, computer and phone screens off to join us.  Or we can think outside the box by innovating technologies that use these tools to direct them toward formational community and bridge the gap when people are away and unable to attend our weekly gatherings.

Some people are resigned to the belief that these new technologies can never create anything beyond pseudo-community; yet larger local congregations like lifechurch.tv are questioning those beliefs through innovations like online churches.

Case in point:  Hope Covenant Church, Chandler, Ariz.

Today for example, we recognize at our local, mid-sized congregation in the greater Phoenix area that we had no good ways to communicate with our attenders outside of verbal announcements on Sunday mornings.  Bulletins have been revamped and simplified, weekly website emails go out in droves, yet these are seldom read.  What’s more, none of these forms of communication foster an environment for people to know the important things that are going on in each other’s lives.

The website communicates events going on in case someone misses a weekend service, but who then knows how to pray for that person and supports that person during the week?  While we continue to push the importance of small groups, we find ourselves unable to get beyond 50% participation.  Those who need formational community the most are the very ones that aren’t attending.

While still in the discovery process, we have begun to use Facebook and Twitter as places to help people stay in community during the week.  The Facebook page is open for anyone to post their struggles, their prayer requests, their tangible needs.  In essence, its purpose is to become an online dinner table conversation among the church family.  To help people connect to Hope’s use of these tools, we integrated feeds from them onto the bottom of every page of our website.  We now have half as many on Hope’s Facebook page as we do attending on an average Sunday morning, and we continue to explore these questions.

Conference and national offices of denominations would be of great help to churches in coming years by building awareness and discussing these trends in how people communicate and gather, as it has become far different in this generation than any other time in human history.  There is also a need to help church communities understand how to teach the importance of formational community amidst all these pseudo-communities.  

Central and regional offices would also be of great help, especially to mid-size and smaller congregations, by educating their staff and lay leadership on how to begin to use these other communication tools more effectively on a budget to draw people into true community where it traditionally happens — e.g., in our worship and small group experiences each week.  When one church has an innovative idea, how can other churches learn about it and leverage it contextually for their own communities in a matter of months, rather than years or decades?

In the days of the early Church, thousands became disciples of Christ as church leaders pushed the envelope in how they communicated to spread the Good News.  May we not lose that passion and sit on our laurels as culture redefines how we communicate and therefore disciple!