The Social Network

In 1998 my boss at Ford Motor Company presented me with an opportunity that would change my life forever. He asked me if I was interested in learning how to design the web pages for Ford’s Market Research Office (MRO), where we worked. At that time he also helped me to get my very first email address – rjohns80@hotmail.com – the one which I continue to use as my primary email address, to this very day.

I became addicted to the Internet, to the extent that it was the first thing I went to when I got to my office each morning; and the last thing I looked at in the evening. That same year I created two online Ministries, “XJW-Central,” and “ERAJEMI” (Elder Raymond Allan Johnson Evangelistic Ministries, Inc.).

The following year, the world gasped in nervous anticipation of “Y2K”, and at Ford I became responsible for communicating with the heads of the 100+ companies that supplied services to the MRO. Some of these companies were industry giants, like Milward Brown, Ogilvy, and J. D. Power, and as a result I got to know some very important people in the business. But that wasn’t the most important thing that happened in 1999.

As I thought about the approaching new Millennium, and how the Internet was already making it possible to talk to people from all over the world, I realized that soon a church could expand its horizons to a global audience, without needing to have the multi-million dollar budgets that until now had made it possible for only the so-called “mega-churches” to reach out so far. It dropped into my spirit that this is truly “ ... an AMAZING time to be alive!”

My students at the university think it’s hilarious that there was ever a time when mobile phones, and video games, and portable computers didn’t exist. Every semester I try to show them in classroom lessons how many of the devices and applications that we take for granted today didn’t exist on the day they were born. What they can’t appreciate is the pace at which technological development has accelerated in the past twenty-five or thirty years: truly for somebody like me an awesome testimony to the intellectual gifts that our great God has given to the world.

But I digress from the reason I am writing this particular blog.

It’s now almost twelve years since I made the declaration about our place in history. Five years afterwards a young man at Harvard launched Facebook. I was excited about being able to reach across the globe by email and web pages, and even the earlier iterations of blog pages; but Facebook has opened a whole new door.
Today I remembered a dear brother in Ministry from whom I first heard a phrase I’ve used often in my own Ministry – “The Least, The Last, and The Lost.” So many times I’ve tried to remember back 30 years, wishing I could find him. Today, I found him on Facebook.

Thanks to Facebook I can keep abreast of what my family and friends are doing, and I can simultaneously let them in on important things that are happening all the way over here, in China. MySpace and Twitter do an OK job with this, but Facebook does it so much better – and at the same time provides a vehicle by which I can meet new people from all over the world.

Thanks to Facebook I have had a chance to meet brothers and sisters in the Gospel I might never have met on any of the other networks. In fact I’ve met many new friends because they happened to be friends of another friend, or shared some profound word from God that caught my attention, or – remarkably – in some cases because a particular brother or sister desired to extend their hand of fellowship in new directions.

In either case, now I have a whole treasure trove of new friends to break bread with; and every day God deposits more into that treasury. Today I’d like to say one thing to my new friends in Ministry, as well as to some of you I haven’t spoken to for quite some time: I thank God for you! And for this new tool, that God has given us to help us expand our friendship. I am looking forward to visiting the States for vacation, this Spring (tentative preliminary dates are May 15 to about July 5); and I hope that I will have a chance to meet at least some of you face-to-face, when I come.

Keep the Faith
Bishop