Review: What Would Jesus Post – Brian Wassom

What would Jesus post by Brian Wassom is a short book about how we should use social media as Christians. It is quite a timely book, as it is almost impossible today to not have some sort of social media profile, yet there hasn’t been a lot of good thought as to how as Christians we should approach it.
Often you will hear social media branded as a negative thing and something we should approach with caution. But right from the start he makes the point that social media itself is neutral, it is how we use it that makes it a good or a bad thing. And he argues that it has much potential for good – opportunities for us to discover people from our network of acquaintances who may need prayer, encouragement or support; opportunities to share our testimony with people who see our faith listed on our Facebook profile and start asking us questions; opportunities to stay connected with people we have moved away from so that we can still engage with them for the sake of the Kingdom should our paths cross again. But he also cautions against possible dangers. There is much potential for a thoughtless tweet or dodgy profile picture to compromise our witness and cause people to write us off as just another Christian hypocrite. And with there being so many different networks we can be a part of and so much shared on them (including apparently 1 hour of video every minute on youtube) social media has massive potential to be a drain on our time, stopping us from doing more important things that we have more impact for the sake of the Kingdom.
This book, while short, is full of biblical wisdom, relating ancient truths, especially from the book of Proverbs, to today’s 21st century world of Facebook and Twitter. I appreciated the assumption he took that those reading would be fairly clued in to the various social media options around and how they work, and so there was none of the patronising explanations that some other books that try to look at social media from a Christian perspective have wasted words on. This book gives 7 good principles to guide how we should approach social media, with the overarching theme that what is most important is that we glorify God in all things. He finishes with a reminder that ultimately social media should act merely to supplement our real world interactions and should never be considered a suitable replacement for these.
The only negatives with this book are it is quite brief so you don’t get much content for your money (although depending on your attitude to reading that could be a positive.. ), and due to the nature of rapid progression in dominance from one social media site to another before long this book, which primarily focuses on facebook, could soon be out of date, although the principles should be fairly applicable to whatever the next ‘big thing’ is. This is a particularly good resource for teenagers or youth ministers. If you have a kindle/kindle app you can get it from amazon for a very reasonable £2.69. The print edition is listed at £7.83 which is in my opinion too much for a book of this length (73 pages).

NB I received a free digital copy of this book from Booksneeze.com in return for a review. I did not have to write a positive review.