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Nov
17
Written by:
host
11/17/2009 7:00 AM
The web makes it very easy for people to do a bit of good each day. Sites like The Hunger Site have been encouraging people for years to just click on a button each day to donate a bit of rice to impoverished people. Some churches urge all of their members to use GoodSearch.com as their search engine, because doing so can generate revenue for the church or for another organization the church supports. Sites like these are proliferating rapidly as nonprofit organizations try to reach new audiences by blending a bit of education with a simple-to-do action and the power of social networks.
 The latest of these sites to cross my path multiple times is Help From Home, which provides information about websites devoted to making a difference and ways to take action in as little as one minute. Frequently, the actions involve such low-effort tasks as digitally adding your signature to a petition, tweaking your email signature, or taking part in a project that uses your idle computer time to process data. In other words, these actions are gateway actions; they introduce people to issues of concern with the hope that people will gradually become more and more interested in the cause. A term has of course developed for this type of social action: slacktivism.
Now I don't think there is inherently anything wrong with these types of websites, but I do think that Christian educators need to call people to participate in the twin streams of the spiritual disciplines known as compassion and justice. Clicking on a website so that a donation will be made to a worthy cause is great; giving of your time, money, physical effort is far better, and advocating for justice requires more than a few clicks of a mouse.
In the spirit of the idea of quick actions, though, here are 5 of them you can take now to explore this topic further and to engage others in conversation about these websites. None of them will take any more than about 7 minutes. I hope, though, that you'll see these as gateway actions to further and deeper conversations and actions down the road!
- Listen to or read the transcript of this recent NPR story, "Are You a Tweeter or a Slacker?" Then, think about web actions you have taken in the past which required almost no effort on your part. Why did you take the action(s) you did? How did you feel afterwards? How much real engagement with the issue did you have?
- Email this article to a few individuals in your congregation who are frequently engaged in social action, and start a conversation about how it relates to your congregation.
- Read (or re-read) my previous article about types of mission engagement in the church, and assess your own congregation's activities.
- Poke around Help from Home for a few minutes, paying close attention to the types of activities there.
- Think of ways to think add a link to a "click to act" site in your church bulletin or newsletter, your facebook page, an email list, or your Twitter account. Then, ponder how you could do the same thing but highlight a simple way people can help with a denominational or ecumenical ministry your church supports (e.g. a camp, a mission project, or a soup kitchen.)
~ by Tim Gossett
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