Facebook is a dangerous thing.

I had a pleasant surprise one day in the office. A retired, rather conservative, male pastor from the community dropped in to encourage me and let me know he was praying for me. Specifically because I am a woman pastor, he wanted to encourage me. This is a man I deeply respect and it meant the world to me.

So I posted about it on Facebook. Many people cheered. One person did not and made it clear why.

The one who did not is a “friend” from the community. Our daughters are in the same class. We enjoy a rather congenial relationship centered around our children, who are raised with the same values and so they/we get along quite nicely.

In a time before Facebook, Twitter, blogging or immediate digital reactivity, she and I would most likely be great friends without question. Between our children and our common interests and aspirations, our relationship would grow. Over time we would gain each other’s trust to the point where we could test the waters of difficult conversations. We would lead in, judge whether our relationship was strong enough to talk about hard things and if not, because we valued the time and effort put into the relationship, we would back off until a later date.

Communities are built on this delicate dance of building trust and being vulnerable and stepping down when we don’t agree so that our relationships can be preserved.

But in our world of digital reactivity the niceties are skipped. The label “friend” immediately gives us permission to tell each other what we think about everything. And if we are not necessarily expecting to have to live in close proximity with each other afterwards, we can be our most blatantly honest selves, because there is no follow up expected in our “relationships.”

We are only beginning to see the effects social media has on society, on communities and the church. (

I am so impressed with my friends who have the ability to not respond to what they see on Facebook. I try really hard, but then I just can’t help myself. Eventually I have to speak up and I almost always regret it. Because sadly, there is no nuance in a written format.

It takes me back to acting class in which we had to see how many different ways we could interpret the line, “I ate the cake.”

I ate the cake? I ate the cake! I ate the cake! I ate the cake. I ate the cake!

We all interpret what we read based upon the preconceived storyline we already have in our heads.

Online, there is no tone, inflection, or body language to help communicate to others what, exactly, we are trying to say. And so, if we are expecting a harsh word from someone already, the word we see becomes even more harsh because all of the other social cues we normally would use to buffer our honesty in order to make the comments productive and to maintain the value of the relationship are gone.

There is no font differentiation on which we can rely to interpret the written word. UNLESS WE WANT TO SHOUT! And we can’t use “emoticons” with everything we write.

In order to be effective communicators, delivery is everything, and sadly, most of what is being delivered these days is more destructive than necessary.

There are things I just don’t outright say to my husband even though they are what I really think and feel at the time. I know in order to preserve our relationship I need to carefully discern my honest feedback.

The church needs to figure this one out. How we communicate in a digital format may be the most pressing question for the Christian community today.

We need to consider well Paul’s admonition to the church in Corinth: “All things are lawful, but not all things are beneficial.” “All things are lawful,” but not all things build people up.

There are a lot of tremendously worthy, important and essential things we as a church need to get right, but at this moment in the Church’s history, we need to be aware of how destructive our methods of communicating with each other have become and how detrimental trying to keep on business as usual can be to the future of the Church.

Once upon a time, working on joint statements of churchwide clarification was a powerful action the church could do together, but in an age where we honestly do not trust one another and when we honestly do not trust anyone identified in a leadership position, we need to stop. This isn’t working.

The best athletes know how to rest their body. Smaller injuries, when properly rested, can prevent even bigger problems.

We have a big problem in our church. Nobody trusts anybody. We all expect the worst of each other and keeping on the way we have been keeping on is just going to tear the body apart.

I was a part of a small group of young leaders who were brought together to imagine what the church could do together.

We were by no means a representative body of any particular age group, political leading or ideal. We often disagreed with each other about a lot, actually, but we disagreed face to face (by realtime video streaming of course). We represented a spectrum of hopes and dreams and imperatives for the church, but by and large we shared an enthusiastic passion for Anabaptist theology and the mission of the church. We also shared the strong sentiment that we can’t keep doing what we have been doing and expect a different result.

We need to decide together if being Mennonite Church USA is really something we value. If it is, we need to stop what we are doing and how we are doing it, regroup and work at rebuilding our vision for healing and hope.

Living into a vision of God’s mission in this world doesn’t just plant a stake in the ground to note where we stand on any particular issue, but it points us in a direction that we can go-. It moves us along together, even if we start in different places. It gives us a mission to rally around. It gives us an ideal that we can all proclaim:

God calls us to be followers of Jesus Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit to grow as communities of grace joy and peace, so that God’s healing and hope flow through us to the world.

Can we believe that the only hope for this world is Jesus Christ? Can we commit to being his body together? Though terribly broken, we are his and through the power of the Holy Spirit, we believe he is able to work through us still.

If this is indeed our hope, our dream, and our vision, then we need to commit to finding grace-filled ways of communicating with each other in a way that builds up the body of Christ.

We need to covenant together to practice positive communication habits. We need a new way to talk to each other. W

e need to find ways to value those we may not agree with.

We need to love one another and demonstrate it through all modes of communication.

Let it be so.