Is electronic fellowship better than no fellowship at all? Is face to face in person eye contact necessary for fellowship? I'm not sure. But I think we (I mean the followers of God) are gonna have to answer that question soon. Because people, at least those people with www access, are building electronic social networks. Maybe I could talk MTW into letting me be an internet missionary!!! (BTW I'm listening to Prince's new cd and he just sang 'turn off your cell phone....' LOL And you know what John Mayer says, 'Why does everything I need come with batteries?')
Yeah... electronic fellowship IS better than none at all, EXCEPT for the fact that when a person has no face-to-face fellowship, electronic fellowship can prevent them from establishing the face-to-face kind.
That's why when I'm doing cross-cultural stuff I really have to limit my phone/email/blog/whatever time.
But you know... every MTW team has a pastor who usually lives here in the States. That's the closest thing I can think of to being an internet missionary. Hmmm...
*wink wink, nudge, nudge*
Posted by: bob at May 11, 2006 03:36 PMExcerpt from a certain internet fellowship
"Even though this blog fellowship is really unconventional, I think it is awsome. We are always saying "Ya I wish I kept in touch with those friends I used to have, but our lives went seperate directions." Well in the Purpose Driven Life's Day on Love I realized that loving people is what counts in life. Love comes before life, Love is why we are alive, so we shouldn't let life get in the way of our Love. We can use the constructs of human technology that have the tendency to depersonalize and seperate towards God's purpose of Love, Fellowship and Glory to Him."
Posted by: J at May 16, 2006 12:45 PMKeeping up with people you don't see very often ... that's better than not seeing them at all. Substituting online interaction for person to person contact ... that, I fear, is a bad idea. I have struggled with the same questions as yours for a while. I recently came across an articulation on the matter that seems to make sense of the jumbled mess of thoughts in my head. Below is an excerpt from a book I just read by Lynne Truss called, Talk to the Hand.
"... Bill Clinton famously said in a State of the Union address that the internet was the new town square. Kate Fox calls it the new garden fence. It isn't, though, is it? It's people sitting on their own, staring straight ahead, tapping keyboards, often in dim light, surrounded by old coffee cups and plates with crumbs on. True, each of us has a virtual social group in our email address book, but the group has no existence beyond us; it is not a "group" at all. True, hot information whizzes around the world with the speed of supersonic gossip, but, crucially, we can choose to ignore it. Many aspects of our screen-bound lives are bad for our social skills simply because we get accustomed to controlling the information that comes in, managing our relationships electronically, deleting stuff that doesn't interest us. We edit the world; we select from menus; we pick and choose; our social "group" focuses on us and disintegrates without us. This makes it rather confusing for us when we step outdoors and discover that other people's behaviour can't be deleted with a simple one-stroke command or dragged to the trash icon. Sitting at screens and clicking buttons is a very bad training for life in the real world."
Posted by: Scott at May 16, 2006 02:09 PM