January 31, 2012 | Mainline churches were never a good fit for broadcast media, but they are ideally suited to take advantage of the new world of social media, said Elizabeth Drescher, the author of “Tweet If You ♥ Jesus: Practicing Church in the Digital Reformation.”

To Drescher, social media offers a chance for the mainline to recover long-lost practices in which faith was embedded in every aspect of people’s lives, visible for all to see.

“There’s an incredible opportunity to participate in making more public and visible what for the last 500 years has been a largely invisible, privatized practice of faith,” she said.

Social media is similar to how people connected and related to one another in the medieval church, ways with which mainline Protestants are still comfortable, she said.

“Digital ministry allows us to do a similar thing,” she said. “The power of new digital ministry practices is that they are networked, relational and incarnational.”

Drescher studies and writes about the spiritual practices of believers, past and present. She has a Ph.D. in Christian spirituality from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley and is on the faculty at Santa Clara University. Her next book, “Click 2 Save: The Digital Ministry Bible,” co-authored with the Rev. Keith Anderson, will be published in May.

She spoke with Faith & Leadership about “Tweet If You ♥ Jesus” and the implications of social media for the church. The following is an edited transcript.

Q: “Tweet If You ♥ Jesus” seems as much a how-to book about church as it is about social media.

Absolutely. The book is kind of a digital ecclesiology. Social media is different from broadcast media and even from the way people previously used the Internet. The book is about the implications of that, particularly for mainline churches.

People ask, “Why do I need to be on Facebook or Twitter? Why does my church need to be there? Why does it matter?”

Well, this is where people are engaging and connecting their lives in important and meaningful ways. It turns out that social media is a lot like the ways we connected, though on a smaller scale, in the medieval and pre-modern church.

Q: Give us a brief history of communications and the church. Why does the mainline often lag behind evangelical and nondenominational churches in the use of communication technologies?

Mainline churches come directly or indirectly from the medieval church, and medieval or pre-modern communication was highly relational. In its own low-tech way, the medieval church was networked. People created and shared knowledge and shaped their practical theology or their spirituality by sharing stories.

Before the printing press, reading was social. Somebody in the neighborhood had a book -- which by the late medieval period had become less expensive but still not widely available -- so that person would be the reader for the community. That meant sitting around with a group reading a tale or theology or Scripture and people having conversation.

The modern period changed that. The printing press distributed knowledge and allowed the Reformations to happen, but it also privatized reading. As everybody became able to afford books and literacy increased, they went off privately to read. Reading was not done in community anymore, and that changed the relational nature of communication.

Later, the way knowledge is distributed also changed. In the broadcast media age, people who had access to the means of distributing information controlled the message. Books and TV allowed more people into the conversation, but only in a narrow way.

Social media changed that. It democratized communication, giving everybody access to all kinds of information. It also gave people access to the means of creating, sharing and collaborating on information.

That collaboration is much like it was in the pre-modern time, but on steroids. With social media, communication is amped up and widely distributed.

But that’s a comfortable place for mainline Christians, who were never comfortable in broadcast media, unlike evangelicals and nondenominational people. Their churches, polity and history developed out of that very modern, very American mode of one-to-many broadcasting.

Q: So broadcast media was a perfect fit for evangelicals.

Exactly. The evangelical traditions came up at a time when newspapers, radio and television were developing in America. They were born out of that environment, and so their polity and their spirituality is focused on a charismatic leader with a compelling message that is sent out to the faithful.

The focus is on how to make the message engaging, how to make it shinier so people will get it.

Pre-modern and now postmodern digital communication, however, isn’t about the message per se. It’s about the message in the context of relationship. It’s about messages of developing community, which is what Paul’s letters were about.

We read Paul as though we’re listening directly to him. But those letters come out of vast conversations across communities, and we’re only seeing one version of a final product.

I call Paul the proto-blogger. This was a guy who’s going around the new Christian community listening, attentive to their questions and problems, applying his keen mind, and giving people whatever he can to engage them with one another, using the latest media.

Paul’s got his issues, but his point is never entirely, “Hey, I’m Paul. Listen to me, because I have the best message.”

Instead, he’s putting people into relationship. The letters always start with, “Hey, I heard Phoebe saying this, and you need to think about that, and take this to your friends.” That is non-digital, networked, social communications.

Paul wants these communities to be the body of Christ, to incarnate the faith in the world. Digital ministry allows us to do a similar thing. The power of new digital ministry practices is that they are networked, relational and incarnational.

There’s research that says, for example, people who use social media regularly are more likely to volunteer. They use social media to connect with other people and to things that they’re doing in the world. Social media mediates their relationship when they’re not physically present to each other. But it doesn’t replace face-to-face engagement, which is the anxiety that people have.

What’s interesting is that broadcast media does tend to replace face-to-face media. We see repeatedly this phenomenon of “believing without belonging,” with people who “go to church” sitting in their living room but never connect their faith in a face-to-face community.

Social media tends not to do that. Evangelicals tend to use social media as though it is a broadcast media. But others are starting to understand what it means for being networked, relational and incarnational.

They are moving digital ministry from “I’m going to pray with you online” to “We’re going to pray together, and then take that connection into a face-to-face engagement,” in church or a prayer group or another way of being together. That’s happening across the social media world.