Do Your Facebook Friends Know You’re A Christian?

I’m currently reading “The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World” by David Kirkpatrick (2010).  It’s a far better “movie script” than anything Hollywood has written for a long time and the best part, it’s all true!   What studio would make a movie about a 20 year old college kid that creates an online service in his dorm room that makes him the world’s youngest self-made billionaire within TWO years?  This “kid”, Mark Zuckerberg, is now 26 years old and worth over FOUR billion, yes, BILLION dollars!  His service, Facebook, now has over 500 million members all over the world and it can be argued that Facebook has changed the way the world communicates forever.  Mark Zuckerberg, now a college dropout, has changed the world!

As with any new invention, Satan finds a way to use it for his purposes.  Satan has so bombarded the internet with pornography, that it’s now a multi-billion dollar industry.  Mark originally created Facebook, as a way for introverts, like himself, to meet girls for dating.  In the early stages, the service asked you how you knew a person that you wanted to connect to as a Facebook “friend”.  One of the answers was: “We hooked up!”  Now, obviously, Facebook has “grown” and “matured”, much like its billionaire founder. 

Facebook is still growing and evolving as this article is being typed.  It has opened doors or better, windows, into peoples lives like never before.  It has been called by critics as a way to be a “stay-at-home” voyeur or worse, stalker.  You can learn things about people with a few key strokes that would have been impossible in the past.  Is such transparency good or bad?  Well, it can be both.  I give a lot of credit to Mark for insisting that people use their REAL names on Facebook.  Other social media websites, such as MySpace, encouraged you to create an online persona, much like a masquerade costume or online avatar.  These services allowed you to create a totally new, totally false you!  Your Facebook profile represents, in theory, the real you.  People who follow you, hopefully real friends, can follow your life on a day-to-day or even hour-to-hour basis.  Who did that in the past?  Who wanted to?

This service has connected people around the world in ways that were never dreamed of before.  It has been instrumental in uniting people of all types, not only just Facebook “friends”, for almost every known cause or social alliance.  Simply, connecting millions of humans in millions of ways in a speed that was never before possible.  If every Christian, now on Facebook, were to boldly proclaim their faith in Jesus Christ as Lord, we might see a media event that would rival the one a so-called “Christian” Pastor pulled off by threatening to burn the Koran.  Christians – Let your Light shine on Facebook!  Let the world know who you are!

Bill Murray