Online Mission and Ministry

A Theological and Practical Guide

Pam Smith

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780281071517
• eBook ISBN: 9780281071524
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Clergy and churches are increasingly being encouraged to use the internet and social media to promote their ministries. But they may worry about some of the difficult pastoral and theological issues that can arise online.

'Virtual vicar' the Revd Pam Smith guides both new and experienced practitioners through setting up online ministries, and considers some of the questions that may arise, such as:

- Are relationships online as valid as those offline?
- Is it possible to participate in a 'virtual' communion service?
- How do you deal with 'trolls' in a Christian way?
- What is appropriate for a clergyperson to say on social media?

1

Techno Christianity

In the beginning . . .

I started to go online in the 1990s, shortly after the world wide web became available to people with home computers. I was teaching in a college which had a suite of computers connected to the internet, and having tried it out there I bought a modem and went online at home. Home internet connections worked on a ‘dial up’ basis in those days, and there was quite a long pause after clicking to go online while the modem dialled, and then connected to, distant telephone exchanges. The noise of the dialling tones gave the impression of travelling a long distance to reach the mysterious place called ‘cyber space’ where I could read what other people had posted on the world wide web. I didn’t realize at first that it was possible to ‘chat’ to people online in real time, and the first time someone started up a live chat with me I experienced the same sort of shock as I might have had if a character in a book had started speaking to me. A text box suddenly popped up on to my screen and someone in the USA started typing questions about where I lived and why I was looking at that particular web page. At first this live interaction made me feel very nervous, but I soon started to feel more comfortable about ‘chatting’ to people I couldn’t see.

In these early days, connecting to the internet from a home computer required the exclusive use of a phone line, so if I was online nobody else in the house could make or receive a phone call. Most internet service providers (ISPs) charged by the minute for being online. The time I was online cost a significant amount of money and cut the rest of the household off from telephone contact with the outside world.

Despite these limitations, I quickly became enthusiastic about being able to ‘meet’ and talk to people online. I had only been a Christian for a few years, and I found the opportunity to discuss Christianity with people from different backgrounds and at different stages in their faith journey helped me to develop my own faith. One website, the Ship of Fools,¹ subtitled ‘The magazine of Christian unrest’, hosted discussion forums where people from a wide range of backgrounds debated the Christian faith and its place in contemporary society. The Ship, as it was known to its users, had a tradition of arranging offline meetings between members, and when I visited my brother in the USA, several American members arranged to travel to meet me with my family in Washington for a meal and a trip to the zoo. Meeting people who had previously only been known to me through online conversations was an odd experience at first – the mental images I had formed didn’t always fit the faces of the people I saw in front of me. After a few minutes, however, the person I ‘knew’ from talking to him or her online merged with the person in front of me, adding another dimension to relationships which had originally started through exchanging words on a screen.

Knowing people online, and occasionally meeting up with them, became so commonplace to me that I didn’t realize I was somewhat ahead of the curve, particularly in church culture. A couple of months after I met up with Ship of Fools friends in Washington, DC, I went on an away day with the church council, having just been voted on as a member. As an ice breaker, we were told to exchange with the person next to us ‘an unusual fact about yourself’, which was then to be shared with the group. I told the person next to me that when I had recently visited my brother in the United States, I had met up with some people I had first encountered online. His face froze into a horrified expression as he struggled to find something to say. If I had told him that I had broken into a house and stolen someone’s jewellery, I don’t think he could have looked much more shocked. This was my first realization that use of ‘new’ technology in church might provoke suspicion rather than interest.

As I became increasingly involved in mission and ministry in my local church, I started to feel that the internet could be used in mission. The same thing obviously occurred to other Christians, and a number of intentionally missionary online projects were started.² In 2004, I was given the opportunity to join the team of the Church of Fools,³ an experimental online church started by the Ship of Fools management, while I was training for ordained ministry. Four years later, at the end of my curacy (training post), I was appointed as priest in charge of i-church.⁴

The Christians I knew who were engaged in these and similar projects saw the internet as a new territory – cyber space or virtual reality – and believed that Christians should establish a presence there, just as missionaries had always travelled to proclaim the gospel in new lands. However, there was a reluctance among many members of mainstream churches to become involved. Although people were increasingly using the internet in their workplaces and homes, churches remained internet-free zones for quite a long time. It sometimes felt as if churches wanted to protect their members from technological change. In the last ten years, mobile and digital technology have become commonplace in the home and in the workplace, yet it is still the case that many churches are reluctant to engage with this ‘new’ technology, even if ministers and many of the members use mobile phones and computers in their everyday lives. It is as if the Church wants to exist outside the digitized society around it, standing firm against the rising tide of technological innovation, forgetting that the Church and the Christian faith have previously been shaped and reshaped by technology.

It is, of course, inaccurate to characterize all churches as resistant to change – some churches readily adopt new technology, including digital technology, to equip themselves for worship and mission. However, some church communities are suspicious, or even fearful, of change and will hang on to ‘the old way of doing things’, whether it is old hymn books, the same set pattern of services or outdated equipment. Such communities may be resistant to the notion that they have to adopt a completely new form of communication and go online to make disciples.

Technology – opportunity or threat?

Despite its origins being traceable to the early seventeenth century,⁵ the word ‘technology’ has in the last 50 or so years gained a progressive, even futuristic, ring, being associated with ideas and processes which will drive society forward. In the abstract for his paper ‘Technik comes to America: changing meanings of technology before 1930’, Eric Schatzberg describes how the word ‘technology’ acquired its current meaning:

In German-speaking regions, a new discourse emerged around die Technik in the second half of the nineteenth century. This German term referred to the practical arts as a whole, especially those associated with engineers and modern industry. When Thorstein Veblen encountered this term after 1900 in German social theory, he incorporated its meanings into technology, thereby transforming the English word into a sophisticated concept for analyzing industrial societies. Most scholars who drew on Veblen’s concept missed its subtleties, however, among them the historian Charles A. Beard. In the late 1920s, Beard embraced a deterministic understanding of technology that linked it firmly to the idea of progress.⁶

Phrases such as ‘the white heat of technology’, attributed to Labour Party leader Harold Wilson in 1963, increased the sense of a technological revolution that would create a new kind of society. This included the widening use of computers in manufacturing and science.⁷ The phrase ‘information technology’ – usually shortened to IT – became synonymous with the introduction of computers into the workplace, and computers and the information they contained were seen as instruments of progress and change.⁸ Networks of computers were developed to share information among academics and scientists, and from this the world wide web was created, where information could be made available via larger computers called servers to anyone whose computer joined the network.

As Christians and as churches, we need to understand how communication is changing and adapt the way we communicate both within church and with those we wish to reach with the gospel. We must avoid reaching the point where what we do inside the church is so distant from what we do in our homes and workplaces that people assume our gospel is as outmoded as our technology. If we insist on communicating only in ways that we find familiar, we will find that fewer and fewer people are willing to listen.

‘Online church? How do you do that?’

The question I am most frequently asked when I tell people that I am part of an online Christian community is ‘How do you do that?’ The focus of every online Christian community in which I have been involved has been on Christian mission and ministry, not on being in community for its own sake. A theologically correct answer to ‘How do you do church online?’ might be ‘By the grace of God and in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit, in common with all Christian communities’, but in addition to sounding pious and impractical, it doesn’t tell people what they really want to know. I have realized that what underlies the question ‘How do you do that?’ is something less theological and more practical. What people really want to know is: how can people be in community with each other if they are not physically proximate to each other?

Underlying the question ‘How do you do online Christian community?’ is a belief that gathering together physically for worship, including Communion, is what makes a group of Christians into a community. To Christians, the word ‘church’ means both the people who make up a Christian community and a building in which they meet. When people with no experience of churchgoing imagine ‘church’, they imagine a building with people in it. The idea that a church is primarily a physical place makes it hard to imagine a church with no physical presence, made up of people who meet online, via the internet, not together in a building. Some forms of online church address this conceptual difficulty by representing a church building on screen and using ‘churchy’ language, but the underlying difficulty remains – if you stay in the same place physically when you are connected with other members via the internet, how can you be ‘in church’ as well? Chapter 4 on pastoral care and relationships, and Chapter 5 on discipleship and spirituality should give some idea about how relationships within online Christian communities work so that their members experience them as church.

The medium is the message?

Christianity is fundamentally a communication event.

(Shane Hipps)

In his book Flickering Pixels,⁹ Shane Hipps examines the dynamic relationship between technology and the Christian message. His subtitle, How technology shapes your faith, reflects his thesis that Christianity as we receive it has been changed by the ways in which it has been communicated to us, and will be changed again as we communicate it. He points out that we have no choice about this change, as much as we might resist it, for it is an unavoidable part of communication that messages are changed by being transmitted. Languages change and die, so that the original texts of our Scriptures are no longer easily understandable and have to be translated by scholars, who will have to make decisions about language which favour one interpretation over another. As Hipps points out, there has been controversy about translating the Bible into vernacular languages: ‘We take our countless Bible translations for granted, but this was a bitter point of contention at various points of church history. The church has a history and a habit of resisting technological changes.’¹⁰

Hipps believes that spreading the gospel as far as possible involves not just linguistic translation but the ‘translation’ of the message into new formats, concluding that this will inevitably change it: ‘You can’t change methods without changing your message – they’re inseparable.’¹¹

He uses the example of the printing press – which he calls ‘an explosion of nuclear proportions’¹² – to demonstrate how technology changes things in an unpredictable way; for example, after the advent of printed Bibles, the wide open spaces in medieval churches in which people stood for worship were filled with rows of pews. In this way, the physical layout of churches started to resemble the printed columns inside a book. And, says Hipps, the influence of printing went even further:

The values of efficiency and linear sequence, which became more entrenched in the Western world with each passing decade, changed the way the gospel was conceived. Under the force of the printed word, the gospel message was efficiently compressed into a linear sequential formula:

Apologize for your sins + Believe Jesus = Go to heaven¹³

Perhaps it is the recognition, or fear, that the message may be changed which makes churches reluctant to adopt new media for transmitting the gospel.

If Shane Hipps is right, and the system of communication being used affects the gospel it is communicating, what effect will the use of social media and digital communications have on the gospel we are communicating? The ready availability of translations and Bible study tools online means anyone can have access to the sort of information only available to serious scholars a generation ago. There are tools for joint exploration of the meaning of the gospel, not just in the abstract but in the impact it has on our lives in the here and now.

Networked gospel?

The world wide web is a network of networks. When you connect to a web page you are connecting to a server – a large computer which hosts the information, or code, that your computer translates into words and pictures. The image of a web conveys the way computers are linked to each other, and also the way web pages are connected to each other by links in HTML (or Hyper Text Markup Language). Clicking on a link will take you to another page, and links on that page may take you to still more – all the pages you visit are connected directly to other pages, and indirectly by the links on those pages to many more.

Online relationships work in a similar way: when you connect with someone on a social media site, you become linked to the other people he or she is connected to by seeing the same posts by your mutual acquaintance. People may become friends online through knowing the same people, even though they have never met offline. The phrase ‘six degrees of separation’, which became the title of a play and a film by John Guare, describes a theory first set out by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929 that anyone in the world can be linked to anyo...

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Praise for the book
• Title page
• Imprint
• Table of contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Techno Christianity
• 2. Theological understandings
• 3. Where do I start?
• 4. Pastoral care and relationships
• 5. Online discipleship and spirituality
• 6. Dealing with difficult and disruptive people
• 7. Building an online community
• 8. Looking after yourself and your team
• Appendix 1: Example of a worship and prayer service for a chat room
• Appendix 2: Sample forum rules
• Appendix 3: Further reading
• Appendix 4: Useful websites
• Notes