It’s Monday morning and time for an easy to start to the week. Check out a lovely bit of media for you viewing pleasure…

I love this as an example of what the church should be like. The way that it draws people in and connects people. Passers by don’t like incredibly uncomfortable or out of place instead they become involved and enjoy the creativity of the moment.

Let me know what you think…

I was reading over at Mashable a great article by Brian Solis the author Engage. He was giving 21 rules for Social Media Engagement. I spent sometime this morning reflecting on them. Me and my friend Huw Tyler over at ShareCreative have been considering and discussing Social Media and the pros and cons of it for a while now. Mainly because we feel the church has a massive opportunity to engage creatively in a medium that is spreading content like wild fire throughout the world (remind you of anything).

Social Media has become seen by organizations as a rich channel for them to connect with their markets. As I ready this article ’21 Rules for Social Media Engagement’ by Brian Solis I was struck by a few things.

1. Social media engagement is the ‘in’ thing to do be doing at the moment. Churches and Christian organizations are flocking to Twitter and Facebook in there droves, to engage better with there people.

2. Brian points a few key things that Church could consider before it engages with this medium. Firstly he says its ‘the intentions that motivate engagement’, if we motivated to engage just because everyone else is then social media becomes pointless and we won’t grasp the rich value that this engagement can have. Secondly he says ‘It’s a simple investment in visibility or presence’, this has been the issue in the church for way too long. We have not invested in getting out there and being involved in the great life that takes place in our communities. Social media doesn’t give complete this part of our calling it

only enbables to have a platform to being a deeper engagment with the culture and communities we all seek to bring the good news too.

more thoughts to come…

As many of you may have seen I have working on super exciting project called EasterLIVE. A project that is really centred around creating a way for people to really grapple with the beautiful truths that live behind Easter. And also creating away for people to use this powerful platforms, in Facebook and Twitter, to share the gospel with people who they are in relationships with. I wanted to post some of the most amazing ones for some reflection…

• Christopher Chiu-Tabet Before I think of my own definition, I’m reminded of how J. R. R. Tolkien described Easter as a “eucatastrophe”
• Andrew Horton God often works behind the scenes; this time he was centre stage.
• Andy Frost they thought it was all over but things were actually starting over…
• JohnSentamu Remember God’s Son was raised 2new life so that we might live. We are an Easter people & Alleluia is our song!
• TweetingKirsty Easter Is gods way of saying ‘I love you so much that I will repay your debts at any cost.
• Superdwayne It only takes one person to change the world and how we leave our daily lives
• JesseRice Easter is like a paparazzi-snapped picture of the God who is playfully unpredictable
• jonnylikes2rant We are owned twice over by Christ. He made us and at the cross He paid for us. Salvation is a free gift, but it came at a cost

The hyperconnection we are seeing creates for us a massive amount of choice, which, in turn, has an impact on our relationships. How many of us have been frustrated in a conversation with someone who’s picked up their phone to check a text or an email that has just arrived? Hyperconnection is the experience of having too much control, literally too many choices, in our interpersonal connections. If a computer is overloaded and running too many applications or programmes it will grind to a halt. Human hyperconnectivity has a similar effect as we become lost in a sea of connections. Many times our relationships fail due to our inability to be cautious about potentially unhealthy voyeuristic connections. This hyperconnected state makes relational focus a massive challenge.

One of the dangers of living in the hyperconnected world is our friend’s turn into our audience members and we turn into performers. Self-exposure is the currency of Facebook, twitter and other social networking sites. Although there are clear dangers of this hyperconnectedness, there also are some unique opportunities for us to share the gospel in new creative ways. An exciting project took place over Christmas that told the nativity in a 140 characters, called “the Natwivity”. The story of Joe, Mary, the Wisemen and the rest of the characters was an intriguing way of communicating the gospel to a new and varied audience. Social networking sites allow us to be connected in a way that has never seen before. We should be aware of the challenges but also aware of the fantastic new opportunities of communicating the good news of Jesus. But challenge is not supposed to be ignored. Jesus was the master of relationships. He seems to have this incredible ability to speak so clearly and simply and yet sometimes in these incomprehensible riddles. A clear trait of Jesus’ ministry was His complete understanding of connection. We see him speak honestly into the lives of all he met and make these immediate, life-transforming connections in a short space of time. He pulled and drew people in rather than pushing them away. A great example of His holistic understanding of relationships can be seen in His interaction with the woman at the well. This interaction sees him speak powerfully into her life and build a lasting connection in a short period of time. A challenge that Jesus’ life has given us is that connections with people are paramount to living a successful Christian life. Hyperconnection allows us to have connections with large amounts of people but also allows for us to be less committed to genuine connections. Jesus challenges us to care about the quality of our connection and not about quantity.

A college student, when I asked her how she was, responded by saying “check my Facebook status”. We live in a ‘hyperconnected’ world, a world in which many different means of communication are used; more specifically social networking sites. You are never more than one click or tap away from millions of people all over the globe. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Emails or some other form of connectedness, we are bombarded with connections. We are famous in our own world. We want people to ‘like’ our statuses, retweet our tweets and reply to our emails, in a way that has never been seen before. With the rise in smart phones our level of connectedness is only going to increase. We live in a ‘switched on’ ethos and rarely take ourselves offline and never consider the impact of our hyperconnected society on our lives. Facebook gives us a stage, a microphone and a spotlight to perform to an invisible audience. It allows us to live out our teenage desires where the world is watching and listening to our life and beliefs. Cyberspace allows us to have a platform to voice our life to our followers; those who will listen. The effect of this hyperconnected culture is to transform our relationships from friendships to audience members to whom we perform.

Everyone is searching for an authentic connection. In connection we find safety and comfort. Most people aretrying to find a nurturing space that allows us to develop as a whole person; maturing inwardly even as we develop outwardly. Henri Nouwen once said “Probably no word better summa

rizes the suffering of our time than the word ‘homeless.’ It reveals one of our deepest and most painful conditions; the condition of not having a sense of belonging, of not having a place where we can feel safe, cared for, protected, and loved.” Nouwen describes a

systemic problem within our hyperconnected culture, a problem we see littered throughout the history of time. We are all looking for a place to call home, a place where we can be ourselves, with people who love and care for us. When we look for a best friend, we go looking for home. When we look for a partner, we go looking for home. We see clearly in Genesis the emergence of the human need for genuine connections when God says “It is not good for man to be alone”. The fullness of humanity can only be expressed through relationship. We are not made to be alone: we are creatures of relationship.

During the past 2 years Facebook has exploded. During the first quarter of 2009 it had 5 million followers joining every week. By the end of 2009 Mark Zuckerberg sent a message to all users informing them that there were now over 350 million people using Facebook, worldwide. In a short period of time (6 years) a massive percentage of the world has been harmonized on the same web based platform. What gravity has enough pull to bring the world together under the banner of Facebook? The human need for Home. We all require authentic connections and a place where we can be liked for who we are. A place we share common interests, interact with like-minded people; a place where we can get the adulation that we all so crave.

Today I am going to take a quote from a book that I have been reading for a while now called Re Jesus. Amidst all the latest fads and “movements” within contemporary Christianity in the West, Frost and Hirsch’s “ReJesus” is a clarion call to recalibrate our lives to the one that gathered us together and sent us out in the first place – Jesus. I love this quote and think its a worthwhile read if you want to get back to the our first love and invite Jesus into every area of lives. In their own words, “this book is dedicated to the recovery of the absolute centrality of the person of Jesus in defining who we are as well as what we do.”

“The process of reJesusing the church will begin with a rediscovery of the fierce and outrageous life of Jesus. Too many people have become turned off to the church because the object of our faith seems bland and insipid. It reminds us of the quip made by the archbishop who is reported to have said, “Everywhere Jesus went there was a riot. Everywhere I go they make me cups of tea!”