Chris Cree is helping me get SocialMediaChaplain.com working. There isn’t much there right now. I’ll warn you ahead of time. But it’s coming.

I’m trying out Chris’s EmmanuelPress. He called me one day to tell me about this new project, helping small churches and missionaries and ministries get online.

As we talked about what he’s doing, I realized that Chris does something that I know is important, but that isn’t important for me to do.

I love what I can do with social media tools. I am thrilled that social media lets us take technology that can reach millions and use it to talk to our friends. I love that creating a website and a blog and a facebook fan page and videos and all of those things are so easy.

But I find that I cannot talk about how to actually get online.

I know that people can and ought to use these platforms to tell their stories. I can show how to do it, sort of, but then I get stuck. I make the explanation too complicated. I lose them. And I find that I don’t care enough that I am losing them.

Because I am not a social media guru.

Chris is, though  neither of us would use that term. He’s passionate about helping people have the tools and training to communicate with this media.

In contrast, I’m passionate about helping people understand. Because I’m a social media chaplain.

The guru understands social media. The chaplain uses social media.

I have less interest all the time in understanding how social media tools work. Learning about how it works matters less than learning how God works. I’m glad for Chris. I’m thrilled that he wants to help people get into this space.

That way, I don’t have to.

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Disclosure. I am part of the private beta for EmmanuelPress. That means I’m testing it for free. I almost didn’t write about Chris because of that. I don’t want to do ads.  But the point about tools is important enough to me to take a chance on being misunderstood.