When I think of social networking the first three things that come to my mind are face book, blogs and twitter. All of these social networking sites seemed to develop right before or during my mission. Before my mission few if any of my friends used these networks and after my mission it became the norm. Serving a mission allowed me to take a two year break from technology and see how much the world had change while I was gone. These are a couple gospel implications I can see coming from social networking.

On my mission I ran into many of the same problems that exsist with our members throughout the world. Many members are afraid to tell their friends about the church or friends and family don't want to hear about the church. To push religious conversation on a friend or family member who has no interest can make that relationship rather awkward. So what do you do? I feel one of the great things about social networking is our ability to show how members of the church are like in a non-threatening way. It takes courage for someone to committ to go to church to see what members are like. But when pictures of Temples, family's, ward activities and religious blog posts are just a click away friends who are curious can view a good wholesome example of what a member of the church is like. One of my friends shared a brief description of his wedding on his facebook account. There was a picture of him and his wife outside the Temple and he described the wedding with phrases and words like "together for ever," "worthy," "pure," "Savior," "Redemer" and "Jesus Christ." It provided a perfect simple description of how we view marriage in the church and the sacred nature of families. I think when social networking is used right it can become wonderful source to share the gospel in a non-threating way to friends and family in a way thats comfortable to everyone.