"4 social media shifts the church should know about" w/Ian Harbor on ERLC.com

Kicking off a return to regular writing with a co-authored piece on the shifts to the Second Age of Social Media

You’re reading “Passing Through Digital Babylon”, a newsletter of insights and reflections from the digital empire while journeying towards the heavenly city. If that sounds interesting to you, please consider subscribing!

Back in the Spring, I announced a hiatus from writing so I could focus on resuming my seminary studies. Unbeknownst to me at the time, this planned hiatus wouldn’t be a hiatus at all; my writing actually shifted into high gear over the summer, and into an even higher gear in August. I’ll explain more of what I mean by that at the end of this post, but the best starting point is with my newest piece for ERLC.com with writer (and now friend) Ian Harber.

In February, I told my church leadership that I likely wouldn’t have a job as an institutional social media manager soon. I pay extremely close attention to the social media industry and the legal/regulatory pressures surrounding the major platforms, and I could see the writing on the wall: Meta would soon need to pivot Facebook and Instagram to being a TikTok clone if the platforms were to survive. When that happened, several major shifts would happen that would make my job obsolete, and we needed to begin preparing for that.

Over the summer, while working on a massive writing project, I continued to flesh out what these shifts would be if Meta began consolidating its platforms around short-form video and a cloned TikTok algorithm. I assumed (and had told my leadership) that this pivot would likely happen within the next two years; not even four months after that meeting, Meta began openly declaring this pivot was coming, and while that transition hasn’t fully consummated yet, the Facebook and Instagram of today look nothing like they did a year ago.

Normally, with a shift like this, churches with larger social media budgets can adapt with little issue; medium-to-smaller sized churches tend to get hit harder and struggle to adapt. But this time, things are different. We aren’t talking minor algorithmic tweaks here; this signaled the end of what I’ve now (half jokingly, half seriously) called the “First Age of Social Media”; the “Second Age of Social Media” has begun, and no church, regardless of its size or resources, is immune to these changes.

I wanted to write something that pastors and church leaders could use to help make sense of these shifts and how this would impact their churches, and I wanted to be able to get it where the clarion call could be heard loud and clearly. But, I didn’t know how to do that, and didn’t know where to start. But, in the providence of God, I got connected to a guy that I had been following on Twitter for a while, and one incredible phone call later, we had a plan for publishing “4 social media shifts the church should know about”.

I cannot speak highly enough of Ian. He has spoken with courage, kindness, and conviction on deconstruction in the church for several years now, and is a leading thinker on the intersection of faith, discipleship, and technology. His Substack, “Back Again with Ian Harber”, ought to be a mandatory subscription for anyone looking for a North Star on how to respond to deconstruction and crises-of-faith in a constructive way. Working with him on this piece has been an absolute delight and has to us collaborating on even larger projects together, and I have been immensely refreshed and encouraged by his wisdom and humility. This piece would not have happened if it weren’t for him.

Over the next four weeks, I will be writing some additional commentary and notes on each of the four shifts outlined in this article, and I will be opening up Substack Chat to talk about them with reader; Ian will be joining me for these as well. It’s normal to for authors to ask their readers to share their writings with others, but with “4 social media shifts the church should know about”, I really do implore you: please pass this along to your pastor and/or church social media manager. This was a labor of love written for their benefit, and Ian and I both want to help churches steward their social media presences well in this Second Age of Social Media.

Now, about those other projects…

I can’t even wrap my mind around all that has happened in my life since my last Substack, and I want to briefly mention two giant projects I’ve been working on in the interim.

My supposed hiatus actually turned into a summer of writing a draft manuscript for a book. Tentatively titled Faithful Exiles in Digital Babylon, it is my attempt to sketch out the “Digital Babylon framework” to its fullest potential. At the moment, the first draft is roughly 80% done, and while I intend to have a full draft in hand before I begin pitching the book to publishers, I have already received some encouraging feedback and interest from a handful of leaders who were kind enough to give my work an early look.

But, as crazy as this sound, the book isn’t even the biggest project of the two: in August, I pitched a project to an organization called American Values Coalition, and later that month was hired as the producer for something called “Mending Division Academy”. I’m not going to go into too much detail on what Mending Division Academy is here because I plan on writing more about this in January, but it’s far and away, by a million miles, the largest media project I’ve ever worked on, and I cannot wait to begin talking about it more in-depth. I cannot stress this enough: it’s gonna be big.

Thanks for reading Passing Through Digital Babylon. I’m eager to begin writing regularly again and I look forward sharing more about Mending Division Academy, Faithful Exiles in Digital Babylon, and more over the coming weeks and months. Check back in next week for the first commentary piece on the first shift in “4 social media shifts the church should know about”: from social-media-as-newspaper to social-media-as-television.

Together, we are passing through Digital Babylon,

Austin.