Which happens when we slide back in to “normal” modes of operation.  It happpens at every renewal in church communities and movements.  It’s a glimpse we get when we discover or experience the power of “social” and then try to package it.  The church has fallen into this trap (again) as it attempts to pick up the ball and run with it.  More….but this thought was planted by a Gillmor Gang guest Estaban Kolsky from the 12-29-11 special installment.

Where he speaks of the higher calling to use social as a “tool for business” rather than an extension of the hype,  we also,  in our “business”  (and I hate using business analogies to forward church mission conversations,  but I can focus on the “tool” aspect.  To actually IMPLEMENT social in the theological/church setting is a matter of integration and not imitation .

Just as churches cannot settle for sermons and brochures,   but to adopt/adapt/customize/envision “social” into the “way of being”.  It’s not just an “investment” in a new means,  but needs to be a transformation/re-orientation of communication toward “the social”.  The idea of koinonia,  and also of “ecclesia” is an “Ancient-Future” idea.  It’s the church that Jesus established because he knew the power of what the secular can only call “the social”.  What we need to seek and to enable is the theological social.  The recognition of the intensity of the live, real time  communication,  as well as the expansion of the asynchronous into the “streams” of all our friends/followers/circles,  has always been there for God’s people.  Having this constant “prescence” of one another in the prescence of those constant streams from Twitter, Facebook, Plus, Youtube, Live Streams is something that has yet to be truly leveraged by the church.   It has to do with learning to be curators.   I just read a post by Steve @Knightopia Knight that focuses on curation  ( http://ht.ly/8dCO4 )

Just as a church tends to more valuable to us when they hook us up with important resources (the people in the fellowship,  the resources from our tradition and our story tellers and theologians,  etc.),  than when they spend inordinate amounts of time focusing on how to get people in the door,  the strategy for Social needs to be focused on the curation of the resources.