Many of you (if there are many of you) will know that I am more than a bit of a Technology Jones.  I Twitter.  I’m on Facebook.  I blog, I podcast (ok, sort of).  One of the reasons behind this is I love gadgets.  I like my phone.  I’m fond of my MacBook.  Some folks tinker with cars, I’ve always been interested in making connections with folks.

The convergence between my Techno-Jones interests and my desire to connect with folks and to connect folks I connect with has taken an interesting turn.

I want to share with you this blog post from a friend of mine that summarizes the current state of explosive growth on Facebook.

More than a year ago I reponded to two clergy colleagues who asked me to join Facebook.  For a time I resisted and then I looked in on it.  I liked the folks who asked so I gave it a shot.  After spending some time doing little with it, I dutifully updated my profile, started to add some of my background information about Schools and where I’d been and what I’d done.  After a bit I found that there were other folks doing the same thing.  I remember clicking through to my High School Class Group and finding that I was the 3rd of my graduating class to join a group on Facebook of folks admitting to having graduated in 1978 from Fairview High School in Boulder, CO.

One of the other guys I found there I hadn’t seen since we graduated HS some 30 years ago.  We started to exchange messages and found we had common interests.  I had managed to become more ‘friendly’ with him over 3000 miles of the country than we’d been in the same town and HS of 2000 students.  But, the circle was still small.

Once in awhile I’d stumble upon new ‘friends’ or more accurately ‘friends of friends’ or acquaintances of people and I began to be aware of how thin the separation between folks can really be.  I remember wondering if I’d ever amass as many as 50 ‘Friends’ on Facebook.  This week sometime I’ll likely pass the 400 ‘Friends’ threshold.

The connections continued and I’d check through my email address book every so often with tool on Facebook to see if folks I knew otherwise were in the FB world.  I’d come up with 2 or 3 every so often.  Last night I did it again and the tool came up with 67 ‘hits’.  It confirmed something I’d suspected.  Namely, that folks FB is getting older and it’s reach is getting broader.  People I hadn’t thought of in 30 years, much less talked to, are seemingly excited about making connections that they’d forgotten or at least put away.

So, where’s the connection to the Gospel?  it’s this.  Somehow, through people reaching out and carrying a message to other folks, connections are being made.  A community, albeit a virtual one if you will, is forming and the growth is geometric not simply arithmetic.

Simply put, the Good News of God in Christ has always grown and spread in exactly the same way the FB is exploding.  Someone tells someone else, who invites them to look and see and then the decision is made as to whether the relationships made possible give life or not.

FB is not the point…the point is this; we were created for relationship and we’ll suspend our disbelief and skepticism at times to take a chance on connecting with ‘the Other’.  If we can regain the sense of wonder and excitement of talking about Jesus as much as we do about saving the Rainforest with’Green Patch’ or playing the latest iteration of ‘Scrabble’ on FB then just like Facebook with it’s millions of users, the Gospel can go viral again, just as it did in the first centuries after Jesus’ death, resurrection and ascension.

We can hope and we can invite! Wanna be Jesus’ friend??