This is the third and final post in my series on ministry and the internet. You can catch up on the other posts here and here.
What is the Church?
Just what is the church? It seems to me that is the central question when we begin to think through the implications of digitalism. As Mark Driscoll stated in his talk at Advance 09, the digital age is forcing us to reexamine and redefine our ecclesiology.
In my study, I’ve come to believe that the church is defined by:
The preaching/teaching/proclamation of the word
The administration of the sacraments (in my view communion and baptism)
And the fellowship of the saints
As seen in Acts 2:42, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”
I don’t think there are too many people who would argue with such a definition. The real debate comes when we start asking whether this type of community can be done in the digital world.
Can the sacraments, for instance, be rightly administered online? Some people think so, as evidenced by Flamingo Road’s internet baptism as posted on Church Crunch. How about communion? Can that be administered online and still embody the New Testament concept of “breaking bread together”?
The Purpose of the Church?
I’m not going to debate here the intricacies of the sacraments and their relevancy online (mostly because I haven’t studied much on it). I’ll save that for another time. But what I do know is that the sacraments are a sign of coming into Christ, and traditionally (and scripturally) a first-step in joining the body of Christ that is the Church. They are not the end-all.
In looking at the purpose of the Church, I believe that the it exists primarily to:
Equip the saints for the work of the ministry (Ephesians 4:11-16)
To make disciples (Matthew 28:16-20)
These commissions are best accomplished by preaching, teaching, and proclaiming the word and by doing the word. As James says, you cannot do one without the other, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” And while some are called expressly to do the teaching and preaching (Ephesians 4:11-12), we are all called to proclaim the gospel and to do it.
When thinking of the purpose of the church in the context of Internet ministry, it’s easy to see how it is useful for proclamation – the preaching of the gospel. In that sense it is an excellent tool. It becomes harder to think of its usefulness in discipleship and in being a catalyst for bringing people beyond hearing the word to doing the word. This is because the Internet is an uncarnate environment that, as I’ve discussed in previous posts, is inherently geared towards engendering a people who consume rather than pour out. Yet, as a community of believers, we are called to do just the opposite – we are called to incarnate the gospel to the world.
The biggest challenge I see in the future of ministry is the pervasive acceptance of digital interaction as true community, replacing, not supplementing, physical community. Yet, in a Christian context, it is the daily interactions between believers that leads to discipleship. As Tim Chester and Steve Timmis write in their book, Total Church, “In becoming a Christian I am a disciple, but that is an identity, not an event. I never stop being a disciple, and I never reach a point where I no longer require daily discipleship by the gospel word in the gospel community.”
Event Driven Church vs. Rhythm Living
Ministries that are diving full force into the Internet by forming Internet campuses, doing online administrations of the sacraments, and more, are indicative to me of the more American expression of Christianity and church, which is an event driven model. For many people, church is just one of a many obligations or events that must be attended, consumed, and completed – an X on the calendar. It’s easy to say you go to church and believe you are part of a church in an online forum if you believe that church is about the Sunday event where you sing some songs and hear a sermon.
But that is not church. If anything that is evangelism, which to be clear is very important. But it is not true Christian community. It provides no true venue for discipleship, or the rhythms of Christian life that are depicted in the New Testament (eating together, praying together, serving together, etc.).
When you approach church as an event, it is easy to leave that church if the pastor says something that pisses you off. It’s even easier when all it takes is a click of a mouse, where no actual physical connection is severed. A rhythm centered approach to church where people are eating together in homes, giving to and taking care of those with need, discussing the scriptures in late night gatherings over coffee or a pint, serving arm in arm in doing the word and incarnating the gospel, and more creates bonds that are not easily broken – and ensures that if a fellow believer is straying, you have a real, valid, and tangible means to confront him or her in love.
Conclusion
Steve Knight, who was kind enough to reference this series on his blog, has written about the importance of reverse incarnation in the digital age. In that sense, the Internet is useful. But in reality, reverse incarnation is simply a fancy word for what we’ve already discussed is part and parcel with being the church – proclamation. We are to preach the word and proclaim the gospel in the digital world. But the digital world cannot replace the incarnate body of believers gathering together in community. You must have both.
I find it hard to understand how we can theologically justify Internet campuses as autonomous and fully functioning churches. Many will speak to their practicality, but we must be cautious when we move to speaking pragmatically without undergirding our pragmatism with theology.
In the end, the Internet is useful, but it can also lead to a disembodiment of the church that is not biblical. It is my prayer that as we move forward we don’t wholesale dive into new technologies because our culture demands it, but that we carefully, prayerfully, and with measure engage new technology in a way that continues the Church’s long and grand tradition of being in the world but not of it.
I invite your thoughts, beat downs, and undying adulation.
This is the second post in a series on doing ministry in a post-Christian, digital society. In the first post, I explored what I perceive to be a cultural shift from post-modernism to what I defined as digitalism. Here I want to lay the foundation to explore some of the ecclesiological implications of the Internet.
You Have No Idea
Seems you can’t go anywhere today without running into some conversation, blog post, or story about how such and such church is integrating the Internet into their ministry. The rise of social media and the popularity of such platforms like Facebook and Twitter, have heightened the sense within the Church at large that we must figure out what our online strategy is. Some people doing great pioneering work in this realm are John Saddington and his site Church Crunch, Kem Meyers, Tony Steward, the good folks over at Church Marketing Sucks, Drew Goodmanson, Church Communications Pro, Tim Schraeder, and many more.
I say it’s pioneering work because, though it doesn’t seem like it, the Internet as a daily and vital component of our lives is really only about a decade old. And we really have NO IDEA what it’s doing to us, our society, our children, and our ministries. Yet, we’ve (society at large) embraced it wholeheartedly as not only a norm, but also as a great advancement in human society and interaction. Perhaps this is because, as I alluded to in my last post, it appeals to our ego in a way no other medium has.
I can think of no other major shift in human interaction and thought that has been so completely, quickly, and docilely embraced than the rise of the digital age.
I can think of no other major shift in human interaction and thought that has been so completely, quickly, and docilely embraced than the rise of the digital age.
I am Ego
As I sit in my office with my headphones on, having spent the last three hours staring at computer screen, I am completely isolated in my world and thoughts, yet I am also connected to more people than ever in my life through Twitter and Facebook – at the same time. But the important component is that I have the power to engage or not engage. I create the reality of my relationships and the context in which they are acceptable to me. And others do likewise.
Of course I don’t have this luxury when my fellow office mates tap me on the shoulder. In those moments I don’t have complete control – at least not without looking like a total jerk. The rules – the norms – of physical community dictate that I should interact with my community, even when I don’t feel like it. And it has been that way since the dawn of human society.
Not so anymore. As a digitalist, I can be a hermit and connected. Picking and choosing which interactions best suit my ego and my desires. It is pure, white-hot consumerism.
When Fools Rush In
My fear is that as the Church we are being swept up in this NEW cultural shift without engaging it correctly. Too often our online strategy is not a strategy at all but a blatant and often poor imitation of the way the world and businesses use the online medium – as a subjection of authority to the individual. Marketers often talk of this great shift from one-way interactions between businesses and corporations and their customers. A new day has dawned. Your customer is in charge, and you must engage them in conversation. The consumer has always dictated product in a sense, but only in so much as the producers made it available. Now it is the consumer that drives everything.
Our job as a church is to create disciples and equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. How do we do that effectively when we’ve never met our people face to face? Is it possible?
Consumerism is not a new problem for the church, especially in America. But I fear the rise of digitalism will make it much more so – and that we will gladly embrace it in the name of going where the people go, without ever actually going to them.
Here are hard and honest questions we should ask ourselves:
Are we doing online ministry and online campuses because they further the Gospel or because people want them?
Is our online strategy full of practical implications but lacking theological ones?
Have we critically examined what implications for the shift to online community are for Gospel formed community?
My inclination is that you have answers to these questions, and I’m not the first to ask them. I’m interested in the answers you’ve come up with.
My next and last post in this series will deal with my thoughts on how we balance the Biblical conception of Christian community with the prevailing culture of the digitalists. Until then, I’d value your feedback on my thoughts here – and your ideas for a path forward.
In case you missed it, here is a great video released last week on the rise of the Internet, called “Did You Know 4.0″.
The statistics in the video are startling for sure. But they confirm what we intuitively already know – as a culture, we’re completely overloaded with information, especially the younger up-and-coming generation.
As the communications director at a church that has a average age of 26 or so, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the challenges that the Internet creates for us – and the Church at large – in terms of engaging people with the gospel. I’m going to be sharing here some of my thoughts on the subject over a few posts.
In this post I want to discuss why I think the Internet, and specifically social media, is ushering a fresh and new challenge for the church that I don’t think we’ve fully articulated, and that I’m not sure we are adequately prepared to engage. To be clear, I’m figuring out my thoughts on this as I go, and hope to open a healthy dialogue on this topic. Input from you will be much valued.
Post-Modernism is Dying
If you’re like me, much of your ministry training in terms of apologetics has been focused on contextualizing the Gospel for a post-modern mindset. And while this is important, I’ve got this sneaking suspicion that we’re fighting a battle that has already been lost in some respects. While we decry post-moderns, the reality is that the world has pretty much wholesale accepted this philosophy, which has been moving full force since the 1960’s. My concern is that as a church we may be fighting old battles and not seeing the new threats on the horizon.
I’ve been thinking that post-modernism is dying. It’s on it’s last legs. Taking its place is what I’ll call Digitalism. Whereas Post-Modernism (in simplified terms) was the subjection of truth to cultural context, Digitalism is the subjection of truth to personal context.
In a post-modern world, there was still some semblance of universal truth, granted it was solely within the realm of culture. But the reality was that you were still held accountable to the truth by those whom you interacted with within your culture. The reality of day-to-day interactions necessitated that people would call you on your crap and bring you in line with cultural truth. Why? Because whether you liked it or not, you were forced to be exposed to people of varying opinions, and more often than not, the majority opinion – public truth – was still upheld, and you were expected to adhere to it.
Whereas Post-Modernism was the subjection of truth to cultural context, Digitalism is the subjection of truth to personal context.
In the world of Digitalism, we are no longer forced to interact with those who disagree with us. Through our various Internet interactions, especially our social media platforms, we can easily delete friends from our lives who would dare to question our version of reality – our personal truth. For the Digitalists, the ego is supreme. Truth is derived completely from within, all reality is subjectified to personal taste, preference, and experience – and most importantly, only those who carry the same truth, or who are willing to not question that truth, are sought out to become part of community. Digitalists are creating worlds within worlds. Worlds that are not bounded geographically, but instead ideologically.
So my question is: How Does the Church Engage the Digitalists?
Part two of this series will explore some of my thoughts on what we are doing right and what I think we might do better to engage this cultural shift in its early stages. But in the meantime, I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts.
1. Do you believe that post-modernism is dying? If so, what are your thoughts on the concept of digitalism I’ve presented here?
2. What do you see as the important strategies we need to employ as the church to engage the Digitalists?
Last March I was in Raleigh, NC for the Acts 29 Network (A29) Boot Camp with the Praxis Church elders and some of my fellow elder candidates. It was a great time of worship and teaching, with some world-class speakers and a lot of very practical information.
Everywhere I looked MacBooks were open and people were clicking away little “tweets” about the conference using the #a29 hash tag. If you don’t understand any of what I just wrote, God bless you. They were on Twitter. It piqued my curiosity, and I signed up for an account to follow the goings-on.
Fast-forward seven months or so, and today you’ll find me very active on Twitter (to the point that Pastor Tim unfollows me regularly because I tweet too much!) And as someone who is very active with many social media forms, including Facebook, Twitter, and blogging, I can attest to the fact that they can be both significant time wasters and narcissistic vehicles that give the appearance of community but lack any true substance. And before you know, if you let them, your social media accounts can take over your real life! Yet, they can also be very valuable and rewarding tools.
Internet Ministry?
When I came onto staff at Praxis as our communications manager, part of my job was to create a comprehensive strategy that used social media.
Early on, the biggest danger I recognized was that our online efforts could create a community that was engaged online with each other and church information, but that had little-to-no engagement with the actual body of Christ outside of that.
So, from the beginning I’ve intentionally not been satisfied with just interacting with people online. Rather, I want our online efforts to result in what I call incarnational interactions. The word incarnation is a theological word that refers to Jesus coming down from heaven, becoming human and taking on a body like ours, and living among us. Paul talks about the incarnation in Philippians 2:5-8:
“Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on the cross.”
For me, it’s important that our online interactions as a church result in incarnated moments – times when we come together in person, ditching the computers for a deeper, more fulfilling relationship. At Praxis, we have no interest in building an awesome online community in and of itself. Everything we do online is engineered to bring you into physical (incarnate) community with our church. It’s easy to hide behind a monitor, breaking off relationships with people who challenge you with the click of a mouse. It’s much more messy, difficult, and challenging to walk shoulder to shoulder with the people whom God has called you to be in community with, a community that celebrates with you in the good times and mourns with you in the bad times. A community that is called to incarnationally live out the gospel, just as Jesus did, to each other and to the world.
The Kentucky Connection
I’d like to share a story that illustrates how approaching social media this way might work. When I first started using Twitter, I naturally spent most of my time finding interesting people to follow and interact with.
My first searches were for people who were connected with the A29 network, since I have a vested interest there. One person I came across was Chris St. John, who is now a good friend online.
Chris lives in Somerset, KY. As we began to interact, I learned that Chris had a brother in Scottsdale, Craig. Later, I learned that Craig went to Praxis on and off, but wasn’t sure he wanted to commit. Chris in Kentucky introduced me to Craig in Arizona. As I got to know Craig better online, we decided to get together and hang out. Today, Craig is now a part of my missional community and a regularly attending Sunday services at Praxis.
In Craig’s words, “He was ready to get off the wall and commit.” All this happened because I met Chris in Kentucky, who introduced me to Craig in Arizona, and because I intentionally moved the relationship from behind the monitor to a handshake. That is the essence of an incarnational interaction.
So I encourage you to put some thought into how you use the Internet and social media. Are there ways that you can better utilize them for the gospel? Are you taking your online interactions and turning them into incarnated moments? If not, please consider doing so. As a body of Christ, we’re called to live life together – both online and offline.
You can follow Praxis Church on Twitter @praxischurch and on Facebook – just don’t make that your only interaction with the church!
This is the third and final post in my series on ministry and the internet. You can catch up on the other posts here and here. 
This is the second post in a series on doing ministry in a post-Christian, digital society. In the first 
Post-Modernism is Dying