By Jonathan L. Walton

Last year, a dear friend invited me to present my work at a conference that gathered together seminarians and church leaders from across the country to discuss how to think theologically in the post-Google era. The conference theme was timely and dovetailed in interesting ways with my own research at the intersections of religion, media, and culture. During my lecture, screens were hoisted along both sides of me in the theater. One displayed the live feed of my image being streamed on the campus website, and the other was the live Twitter feed. The majority of attendees either had a laptop open or a smart phone in hand, since many participants were blogging during the proceedings. My initial intellectual excitement turned increasingly to moral ambivalence. As I stood before the assembly, my physical image was circulating throughout cyberspace, and my words were being typed into the blogosphere nearly the instant they left my lips. I could not help but feel as if my message about media sobriety was being ignored and that my humanity, as an intellectual interlocutor and conversation partner in the room, was wholly invisible. The game that some attendees played with each other may also have contributed to that feeling: whenever a speaker made what was considered a poignant yet practical point, attendees would yell out, “Tweetable.” I guess they were both endorsing and celebrating my lecture, not unlike someone in my own faith tradition yelling “Amen” during the sermon—though I’ve never experienced congregational “call and response” being mediated by a laptop. Times are indeed changing.

My research has examined the ethical impact of media and social media and their effects on and for Christian ministry on an institutional level—i.e., televangelism, megachurches, mass-produced expressions of faith—but this experience and others have made me pay attention to the emerging paradox that all of us must begin to wrestle with: “What does it mean for us to be human, in a media age?” Within just a few years, due to the accessibility of the Internet and the emergence of Web 2.0, new media technologies and social networks have seemingly democratized the tools of mass connectivity. What once required access to studios, satellites, and/or publishing houses now can be achieved with a desktop computer and smart phone.

With every technological innovation, dating back to the phonograph and radio in the 1920s, preachers have used new media to build ministries, command authority, and both establish and market a particular brand of ministry. My message at the conference that day was that it is dangerous to employ new methods or technologies—as have all Christian ministries dating back to Paul’s epistles—while remaining coy at best, and willfully ignorant at worst, about ministerial goals. Be it radio, television, or the Internet, none of these mediums is a natural tool that we use simply to broaden the audience of our otherwise “divinely animated” ministries. Rather, these are tools that speak back to us, and, in the process, inform, determine, and even dictate the form, function, and scope of our ministries. And until we are brutally honest with ourselves about why and how we use varying media forms, we will not be equipped to be self-critical about how media are always amplifying, altering, and encoding our messages with unintended or open meanings, and thus we will not be able to assess whether media have actually assisted us in fulfilling, or have frustrated, our ministry goals.

To illustrate my concern, I want to provide three ways that I believe jumping on web technologies too quickly and uncritically might negatively impact ministries at the local level. First, social networks create a false sense of familiarity with individuals. Lee Siegel argues, in his book Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob, that social networks and the oxymoronic genre of “reality television” have turned privacy into performance art and created a culture wherein we take ownership of each other, without even knowing each other. I have heard many pastors and faith leaders suggest that blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media help them to be in multiple places at one time and connect with the community. This makes sense, as the raison d’être for such tools is to increase “connectivity.” Yet, what does it mean to “connect”? Is this really about connecting with faith community members on an intimate level, or more about projecting a ubiquitous image via incessant status updates, tweets, and random musings? Moreover, what does this mean in the context of faith communities where there is already a cultural pull toward charismatic authority that is cultivated by hypervisibility? Media amplify personas. Media make people familiar with a particular person, lend authority to a voice, and thus cultivate heightened levels of allegiance. This allegiance, however, is often not predicated upon the success of a ministry on a community or an institutional level. Rather, it often can be reduced to the powers of a gifted personality and persuasion.

Consider the implications of such a lone-ranger, entrepreneurial model of ministry. When faith leaders offer themselves up as the focal point of ministry, can they point to something greater than themselves and contribute to a larger institution in a sustained and effective manner? Or might media exacerbate the narcissistic impulses that, whether we like to admit it or not, are often latent and even sometimes inform our vocational choices to enter the public service arena in the first place? What is more, should we encourage faith leaders to carry the associated professional burdens of personality-dependent ministries? As Paul Vitello reported in “Taking a Break from the Lord’s Work,” in The New York Times in August 2010, being a member of the clergy in America has become an increasingly “unhealthy and unhappy” vocation. Clergy suffer from higher rates of obesity, hypertension, and depression than most Americans. So why would anyone want to establish a ministry that depends on the false feelings of comfort that come with charismatic appeal?

Second, but very much related to the previous point, intimacy without contact and familiarity without interpersonal exchange fosters false expectations of the other. As faith leaders become little more than living avatars, they are even more at the personal disposal of those who already have overblown expectations of their time. This, in part, is the by-product of living in a mass-networked world. Media foster an insatiable appetite for more. The first rule of social networking is active updating. To remain relevant on Facebook, on Twitter, or in the blogosphere is to remain active. To maintain this social authority, one must continuously feed the appetite of consumers (I mean “friends”). And if faith leaders offer themselves up as the transubstantiated bread and wine to be consumed by the networked public, they must keep giving for the ministry to thrive. What might this mean for the faith leader’s own soul? Spouse? Children? When we belong to everybody, we belong to nobody—including ourselves.