Social media is more than a tool

The biggest question about
social media and the church is not how the church can harness the power of
social media for good ends while safeguarding against bad ones (useful as such
discussions may be). It's how social media is changing what it means to be
church. The rise of social media brings up ecclesiological issues that
challenge the very assumption that it is a tool for a separate entity called
the church to control in any particular way.

Two recent posts shed light on
this point. Over at the New Media Project at Union Theological Seminary, Jim
Rice brings up Avery Dulles's influential book Models of the Church, which proposes
five basic paradigms--overlapping, not mutually exclusive--for understanding
the church. Rice suggests that social media might point to a sixth:

We now have vivid examples of the "universal body
of Christ" that never before existed. These instantaneous global interactions
made possible by new media offer analogies of God's transcendence and immanence
that have the potential to lead to profound new insights and understandings
about the very nature of God and God's realm on earth. . . . While the evermore
interconnected nature of our world doesn't change the nature of God, it
provides new models that can enrich our understanding.