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A fresh incarnation of the gospel

Christians should embrace web churches, and forge new communities, says Mark Howe


Churchgoing in the virtual age: two pages from the St Pixel’s site. Better technology could help build community

MANY CHRISTIANS wonder how Church can function on a small, flickering screen. How can typing and reading constitute meeting in any meaningful sense? Others are troubled by issues of identity and deception, and query whether the Church should have anything to do with a medium often associated with pornography and gambling.

Questions such as these often come from those whose use of the internet is limited to email and news websites. Online Church depends on a range of newer and richer technologies, which, to date, have been less prominent in parish life. I would suggest, however, that they are already part of the daily lives of many parishioners.

Blogs can be seen as public, online journals, to which others can attach comments. Members of St Pixels use their blogs to share news, raise questions, and often simply to tell their own story. Forums are similar to blogs in some ways, but are designed for discussion more than sharing. The effect is something like a series of emails on a particular topic, except that related emails appear on the same page, and the whole world can follow the exchange.

Online Church generally also involves real-time interaction, where all participants are virtually present and at their computers at the same time. St Pixels runs about 20 real-time services a week: text, audio, and graphics appear on all screens simultaneously. The interaction is two-way — participants can type prayers and other comments, which will be seen almost immediately by everyone else.

worship is rooted in the attitude in the hearts of the worshippers. Some online worshippers let the text and images wash over them, some type prayers, and others sing in their study. But, whatever the mechanics of their response, they find that the experience is more than the sum of its parts.

Despite the limits of the software, they experience a genuine sense of communion with others and with God. That experience is facilitated by phone lines and networking protocols, but, like all worship, depends ultimately on the presence of the Spirit.

These technologies are now part of mainstream British culture, especially for the young adults who, statistically, are least likely to attend a church service. I once stayed with a church leader who had a long list of objections to online Church.

As the evening drew to a close, he explained that he needed to ask his daughter to log out of World of Warcraft to liberate the spare bedroom. It transpired that she spent several hours a day in that virtual world. The technology he condemned was already under his roof and affecting his family — and probably many in his church.

There are not usually many opportunities in most conventional churches for believers to tell their stories, as they do on blogs, especially if what they say is seen as off-message. Also, conventional congregations cannot always cope with the diversity of views that online forums take in their stride. Conventional churches struggle to accommodate those who cannot attend church meetings, or who are confined to their homes through infirmity or caring for others.

And online Church stands far enough from the trappings of conventional church culture to be able to offer a critique of that culture. Many churches are tied to a previous generation’s technological artefact — the church building — which is expensive, maintenance-intensive, and often ill-adapted to the needs of the community it is supposed to serve.

The community itself is defined in terms of another century’s notion of community — the parish — which is all-but irrelevant to the car-enabled, network-based communities within which many people now operate. The idea of a church arriving at a near 50-50 gender split at all levels of leadership, with no explicit gender policy and minimal dissent — as has happened in St Pixels — seems positively utopian.

Online Church is never going to replace the expressions of Church to which many — including many participants in online Church — are committed. But it should encourage us to recognise the extent to which culture has always affected the way we approach Church. There is as much New Testament precedent for online Church as there is for cathedrals. Both are attempts to incarnate the gospel within society.

The technology behind online communities has been modelled largely on television broadcasts, business teams, and singles bars. None of these models corresponds to what the Church believes to be most important about community. To cite one example, it is hard to find real-time software that allows large numbers of people to interact within one space in a free yet ordered way.

Previous generations of Christians have mastered and helped to develop technologies, from architecture to printing. What would happen if Christians translated their applied ecclesiology into software, at a time when almost everything about online community is still negotiable? The Church’s convictions about community, expressed virtually, could yet help to shape the medium, which will play an increasingly important part in all of our lives.

Mark Howe is a programmer and a member of the management team at the online church www.stpixels.com. His booklet Online Church? First steps towards virtual incarnation has just been published by Grove.

 



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