In the song Jesus Christ, Superstar, lyricist Tim Rice wonders if Jesus couldn’t have come at a better time in history. As he points out, “Israel in 4BC had no mass communication.” But of course, this is not entirely true. At the time of Jesus, the Roman Empire was at its height and its levels of organisation enabled travel and the sending of letters more efficiently than had ever been seen before. Arguably, Jesus came the earliest he could in order for the message to spread to a global audience.
However, it is also true, that we have at our disposal methods of communication that go way beyond anything Paul or any of the disciples could have dreamed of. One of the ways in which this happens is via social media, a network of computer threads linking friends with friends of friends and with people who have expressed an interest in things that we are interested in. For example, someone looking for a Methodist Church in Windsor can find, not just our website, but also a Facebook page. The way search engines work, the more people use a website or the more people who like and contribute to a Facebook page, the higher up the list they appear when people search for them. Someone putting in “Churches in Windsor” to a search engine, will get a list that is headed by Windsor Baptist Church. We are sixth in that list. Similarly, if you put that search term into Facebook, various churches come up, of which we are one.
If we want people looking for a church in Windsor to find us first, we need to increase the number of times we engage with our Facebook page (Windsor Methodist Church) and website (windsormethodist.church). Philippa and Sue do a lot of work on these sites to keep them up to date, so do keep on checking them, engage with them (you can talk back on Facebook!) and let’s keep our friends of the future in the loop. Tell your children and grandchildren to like the page and post things for us to enjoy, whether that be messages, pictures, prayer requests or prayer answers. Bear in mind that these are public fora so you won’t want to put everything up there, but in these difficult times, they give us the opportunity to stay in touch, to share our experiences and to remember that we are not just a church in Windsor, we are a family of people who have come to share a love and a real relationship through Christ Jesus.