It’s the hormonal, socially awkward, vaguely smelly testing ground where we learn how to hurt each other. We learn that gossip gives you power, words hurt, and hurting people can feel good. Our bodies fill with chemicals designed to make us emotionally unhinged; we feel waves of new things, strongly, and sometimes that overflows like toilet swirlies.

It’s the Internet. ☺ 

I’m 24 years old. I had a flip phone in elementary school, online fandoms in middle school –  #TeamJacob – and the full Instagram/Facebook/Twitter triple whammy in high school. I never had dial-up and I have no idea what a Napster is. (I also refuse to look it up because then I couldn’t say that line). Grown-ups have been telling me to “put down your phone, you’re addicted to it!” for fourteen years now. Well, now that I’m an adult, I get to say it: 

Put your ding-dang phone down and listen to some wisdom from someone who’s been through the braces-phase of online community. 

You haven’t been to social media middle school until a kid playing an animated dog in Disney Toon Town calls you fat, your friend dms you an alt account that’s been subtweeting your haircut for months, or you feel the horror of texting the deets about your secret crush to your crush. Horrifying.

Here’s a personal example. In seventh grade, our Spanish teacher brought a Snapple drink to class every day. As an adult, I realize this was probably one of a few luxuries she had on a teacher’s salary, and I absolutely identify with the little daily habits that get you through the workday. Plus, Snapple is tasty and people have the freedom to drink whatever fruity tea beverage they like. Seventh graders, however, saw opportunity. 

We descended upon Señora R. like hyenas. It goes like this. Megan makes Ryan laugh by saying “hey look at her desk there’s a new Snapple every day LOL.” James and Emily, both desperate for that middle school peer approval, overhear it and repeat the joke to their friend groups. Maybe they’ll laugh too and they’ll fit in? I mean, of course, it’s hilarious.  Jasmine, who’s toeing the line between popular kid and theater nerd, repeats it backstage and before you know it Snapple is the new “that’s what she said.” It’s a running joke in Facebook comments, memes are flying, and obviously the next move is for me to make a new page called “My Spanish Teacher is a Snapple Addict.”

Okay, so it’s a niche interest. This was the golden age of Facebook pages with titles that posted nothing but signified who you were. Did you smash the like on Taylor Swift? My Chemical Romance? Yeah, we’re all taking note. My Snapple page took off in our extremely specific demographic, and as those notifications rolled in I felt the sweet rush of middle school victory: yes, today I was popular.

Then, the Ferris Bueller record scratch. The biology teacher called me to her desk during recess. Ms. W. commanded respect like no other educator I’ve encountered; her signature lecture was called “FOG” (fear of God), and it was actually pre-scheduled on the calendar. Getting called to her desk, though, really brought that lecture home. 

“Ellie,” she said, “I saw your page on Facebook. The one about Snapple.”

My stomach dropped. Adults are on Facebook? Beloved reader, I hadn’t considered it. In a few minutes, Ms. W. didn’t just teach me not to bully; she taught me a vital lesson in how to live in a world where everyone is watching everything you do, all the time.

I don’t know what a pre-9/11 world was like, but I hear there were fewer cameras. My cohort was raised on civilian wiretaps, mass surveillance, and Snowden disclosures. We know you’re watching, NSA-CocaCola-Google-Russia, like an elf on the shelf. We were also raised on receipts: live like every email, message and SnapChat is screenshotted and stored somewhere, waiting to be useful. 

It isn’t shocking, it’s a fact of life. Kind of like how middle schoolers start to smell and you have to tell them, explicitly, that they need to wear deodorant? We learned to be less smelly online at the same, cringe-worthy time. You learn to dress yourself, you learn to post well.

Here’s the deal, sweet mainline church: we’re just now emerging into the Internet, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, but we’re about 15 years too late and there are a few middle school lessons we need to learn. We spent those pubescent years learning how to dress our changing bodies. Now, we need to get our act together for digital life. 

We’re going to be a punchline because the middle school phase is always a punchline. Church websites are infamously bad, and we’re still learning to navigate the sweaty, smelly locker rooms of social media platforms. That’s okay! We’re growing into an awkward stage, and we’re going to come out the other side knowing better who (and whose) we are. It takes time, it’s natural, and now I’m sounding like one of those “changes” books family hands you when they can’t make it through the gnarly details in conversation. 

What worries me is that we don’t have a middle school to learn it in. The older you are, the more painful the lessons become. Braces and acne are one thing when everyone has them, but it’s a lot worse to be the only one in the room. Adult life carries adult consequences; tweet out the equivalent of that Snapple page and you lose your job. That’s real. Senator Ted Cruz smashed the like on Twitter porn, and it wasn’t an embarrassing conversation with mom about his browsing history – actual news outlets wrote articles about it. Can you imagine CNN publishing an article on your embarrassing middle school moment? Big yikes.

In these middle school years, as we grow into the church of the future, we need to remember Ms. W’s lesson. Our actions online have real consequences. People are watching and saving receipts. Every argument, troll comment, bigoted statement, and Facebook shouting match is on display for newcomers to see. In an age of dirty laundry, we’re on painful display.

“But Ellie,” you say, “the title of this article promised me hope. Are you a liar?”

You’re right, and no. We’ve gotten through the topic of awkwardness, so, like a theater kid who lands their first lead role in an eighth-grade production of Godspell, we turn to the light. There’s a lot of hope on our horizon.

First of all, through God all things are possible, so jot that down.  

As we grow up online, our world becomes bigger, and our mission gets that much more exciting. When we learn to make websites and community spaces that represent our identity, we won’t just find our people – our people will find us. There are so many seekers out there who can’t find our church because we’ve been hiding in print media. 

If we can embrace the dispersed power structures of online movements, we’ll find our place among activists already fighting for God’s kingdom. We’ll have a megaphone through which to condemn sin and preach hope.

Provided we’re grounded in wisdom and truth, we can provide oases for the weary doomscroller. We can call attention to these artificial intelligences designed to pump a constant stream of clickbait and misinformation to our lizard brains. Instead of bringing people enthusiastically to Facebook, we can minister ethically to people on this platform we recognize foments evil. We can, in our post-middle-school future, exist with mature nuance in the digital world.

I’m writing this for the lifestyle section of Earth & Altar because, for all this talk about church, it comes down to each of us as parts of the body. How we live our lives is how the church lives. You and I, we are the church’s online presence. We need to talk openly about the ethics of social media, we need to spruce up our digital doorsteps, and we need to love one another as ourselves.  

You may have noticed lately that we’re going through some changes. That’s okay. It’s natural, our voice will settle, the acne will (probably) fade, and on the other side we get to live into ourselves in a vast and exciting world.

Humans find cliques. We fight, we manipulate, we gossip. But, thanks be to God, we are also formed. We enter the meat grinder of middle school as feral little gremlins and emerge as fledgling young adults, hopefully wearing deodorant. Now it’s the church’s turn.