Rethink Mission: Inspiring gospel-centered missional churches

By Jake Johnson

“The brave new world of cyber-glop will be an increasingly lonely, isolated and dehumanized word. It will be a place where you can order anything you want online, but you don’t know your neighbors, where your children and your parents will spend evening hours logged into the Net, talking to distant strangers rather than each other.”

-Clifford Stoll, author of “Silicon Valley Snake Oil”

If you are a blog nerd like me, and you have an unhealthy obsession with the implications of technology on ecclesiology, and you were on the Internet on Thursday, you may have come across Doug Estes post on Out of Ur, “In Defense of Virtual Church.” (In full editorial disclosure, Doug mentioned in the comments of his post that his original title was “The Myth(s) of Virtual Church,” which was changed without his consent by Out of Ur’s editors.)

The post has generated quite a bit of discussion and controversy, being called everything from a great post on an emerging topic to an attack on straw men and a cheap plug for Doug’s new book, SimChurch.

As the Communications Director at Praxis Church here in Tempe, Arizona, I have a vested interest in this topic, as it is highly relevant to our church demographic. We are a young, vibrant, growing, urban church with an average age of 26 and more forearm ink than could fill the pages of the Encyclopedia Britannica. We’re tech savvy hipsters with all the trappings. And we run a fairly active online community.

So I found Doug’s post to be of high interest – and also a bit disturbing, both in it’s seemingly casual dismissal of opposition, and in its cavalier style that was less concerned with dialogue and more concerned with body slamming.

In quick summary, the myth(s) Doug seeks to expel are that online church:

• Is not good
• Is not healthy
• Is not biblical

In doing so, Doug sums up the reasoning of those who hold these viewpoint as being the “very common and tired themes” that “Internet campuses and online churches are not true churches because they don’t look like and feel like churches are expected to look like and feel like (in the West, anyway).”

The vast majority of criticism against virtual church, according to Doug, are, “blogposts…based on cultural factors, pop psychology, materialistic misreadings of a few New Testament verses, or worse, citations of famous pastors who have doubts.”

Now, I’m not a professor, nor am I a Lead Pastor, so I’m already at a bit of a disadvantage from a credentials point of view. I’m just one of those bloggers that Doug eviscerates so succinctly. But I’ll do my best to respectfully articulate some of the thoughts that I’ve been mulling over as a practitioner in terms of technology and ecclesiology – and to not quote famous pastors, except for Doug.

Since Doug seems to think that all arguments against virtual church are rooted in inherent Western preconceptions with materialism (buildings and physical contact), I hope to present some other considerations that are both more pragmatic and also philosophical in nature. Some of this material was originally published on my blog, thejakers.com, in a series I called, “Ministry in a Post-Christian, Digital Society.”

I’ll be doing this over the course of four posts looking at:

• The (Unknown) Effects of the Internet
• The Cultural Implications of the Internet
• The Physical Limitations of the Internet
• The Ecclesiological and Scriptural Implications of Online Church

The (Unknown) Effects of the Internet

The Internet is relatively new – at least when you think of it in terms of it being an all-consuming, daily part of our lives. The reality is that the rise of social media and near universal access to the Internet for the world’s affluent is only about a decade old – and has just hit its stride over the last five years or so.

Like many of you, I can still remember the day when I didn’t have a cell phone, email account, and thought America Online was the coolest thing ever invented. You mean I chat on a computer with live people!

Today, I have a cell phone linked to four email accounts, a Facebook and Twitter account, a dying MySpace account, four computers, broadband access, and a host of other technological wonders. I’m totally reliant on the digital world. This is worrisome to me because it happened in the space of less than a decade.

What is more, I can feel intuitively that the Internet is changing the way I think, and the way I approach life, my family, and community. I’m not alone.

As Nicholas Carr writes in, “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” an article published in The Atlantic:

“The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind ‘is very plastic.’ Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. ‘The brain,’ according to Olds, ‘has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.’

We know that the brain can change dramatically, even in adults; yet, we have no idea how the Internet, a new form of interaction and community, is affecting our minds.

As Nicholas Carr continues: “Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.” (My emphasis).

Yet, we have accepted it as a normative part of our life with little-to-no opposition. Like Isaac, we’ve laid ourselves down on the Internet’s alter with full faith that it will turn out well in the end.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: 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 Internet and the digital age.

The fact that we have almost no tangible evidence on the Internet’s effects on our minds and development – whether good or bad – should be reason enough for us as the church to be hesitant in embracing it as a ecclesiological norm and a substitute for church as it has historically been practiced (physical community) over the last 2,000 years.

Tags: culture, leadership, technology

This entry was posted on Monday, October 26th, 2009 at 12:57 am and is filed under church. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.