July/August 2017


Taxi Driving, Twitter and the Christian Colin Dobson


Colin Dobson is a licensed taxi driver, working from Abingdon for eight years. He writes a weekly column in the Abingdon Herald called The Rank Insider and worships with the Thursday lunchtime congregation at St Michael and All Angels in Abingdon and at Saint Clements in Ox- ford on Sunday. Here he writes about his use of social media, its value and potential.


There is a section of the software which produces my web site which, when you click on it, throws up a whole load of logos for displaying the output of various social media services on the site. Many of them I have never heard of. Social media can be bewildering and it is little wonder that many people eschew it altogether, for more conven- tional forms, like actual printed newspapers and books.


When I first started using Twitter, it was under a pseudonym, a sort of everyman taxi driver called Dave. Dave was world weary and cynical from taxi driving, especially at night and didn't really believe in anything. He never went out of his way to help anybody.


In almost every way, he was antithetical to what I believe and how I carry out my own work. Dave certainly was a useful device while he lasted, but he was not real.


Jesus prays for his disciples in John 17 that we are not taken out of the world, but that we are protected. We are "in the world, not of it.” For me, as a self employed sole trader, Twitter has been a way of connecting with people, when I would otherwise be working on my own in my taxi, hour after hour, until the early hours.


Sometimes the Twitter algorithm gets it right and sometimes, it does not. But there is tangible joy in random interaction on subjects of mutual inter- est with strangers on the other side of the world. And God calls us to welcome the stranger online, as in the real world.


Corporately, for the church, its congregations and parishes, it is much more difficult, as social me- dia is a format which lends itself more readily to


Read his column every Wednesday in the Abing- don Herald, in actual newsprint!


or see www.theabingdontaxi.com


or follow www.twitter.com/theabingdontaxi


for daily updates from the front line of UK taxi driving.


individuals than to corporate bodies. It is one of the few areas of media where we the self em- ployed have an advantage over the bigger organi- sations.


There are various approaches to dealing with church social media, but amongst the best are those such as Christ Church Southgate (www.twitter.com/ChristChurchN14) which sim- ply reflect what we as a church do and what we believe. One day, the Church Social Media Lady will be as ubiquitous as the Church Flower Gen- tlemen.


Most weeks, after the Thursday lunchtime Mass, we say one of the post communion prayers: ‘Send us out in the power of your spirit, to live and work to your praise and glory.’ This is as true on social media, as it is in the real world. God calls us to be witnesses and to spread the good news to all the corners of the earth and these days, that includes the internet.


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