Rethink Mission: Inspiring gospel-centered missional churches

by Jake Johnson

Scriptural and Ecclesiological Considerations

The last post explored the physical limitations of the Internet as well as the “digital divide,” the disenfranchisement of the poor and minority from the digital environment.

In this last post, I want to consider the scriptures and what they say about church.

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”?

To this Doug says, “Every virtual church I’ve encountered has worked hard to put into place ‘regular’ aspects – from baptisms to small groups to mission trips – in order to help build real community across the board. Critics aside, no virtual church I’ve ever met is trying to be virtual-only.”

If Doug is truly implying that virtual church is really not virtual at all but rather a mixture of online teaching and physical community, then I’m on board. But I’m pretty sure that is not the end of the line for virtual church, but rather the beginning of an erosion of physical community all together. There will be a day when virtual church is just that, a completely autonomous congregation interacting solely on the Internet. And Doug seems to leave room for this as a valid expression of church. I cannot disagree more. As John Stott said over 27 years ago:

“In such a dehumanized society the fellowship of the local church will become increasingly important, whose members meet one another, and talk and listen to one another in person rather than on screen. In this human context of mutual love the speaking and hearing of the Word of God is also likely to become more necessary for the preservation of our humanness, not less.” (Thanks to Justin Taylor for pointing me to this quote via his blog.)

The Purpose of the Church?

In looking at the purpose of the Church, I believe that 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 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, 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.  Above all, it presents a visible, incarnate, and clearly counter-cultural community that provides hope in an increasingly individualistic and consumerist culture.

“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, creates bonds that are not easily broken…”

Conclusion

Steve Knight 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 purely online Internet campuses as autonomous and fully functioning churches – if they never gather together physically (and no, Doug, I don’t mean a building when I say that). Many will speak to 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.
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See: In Defense of Physical Community – Part One, Part Two, & Part Three.

Jake is the Communications Director at Praxis Church in Tempe, Arizona, and a freelance writer and editor. He enjoys long walks in the park, glorious sunsets, romantic poetry, and snarky bios that make people wonder if he’s serious. He’s also trying by God’s grace to be a good dad and great husband. He blogs at www.thejakers.com.

By Jake Johnson

The Physical Limitations

The last post discussed the cultural implications of the Internet as a communications medium, and proposed that we think more carefully about how it may be a tool that marries Christianity and Western culture, effectively rebirthing colonialism in a new digital format.

This post is concerned with the very real physical limitations of the Internet and the growing “digital divide”.

I think most of us would agree that one of the biggest challenges the Western Evangelical church faces is one of comfort. Many of our churches (not all!) are very wealthy and rarely expose themselves to the outcast, poor, and dejected of society. We build large, sickly expensive buildings (compounds) in suburban enclaves and interact with people who are much like us: middle-class.

Practically speaking, how does Internet church fix this?

The reality is that the disenfranchised of our society have little-to-no access to a computer on a regular basis. Forget about access to dial-up or broadband Internet access (which is a necessity for Internet church).

Consider these top factors positively correlated with access to broadband Internet according to PEW Internet:

• Income (household incomes greater than $75,000 annually)
• Having a college degree or more
• Parent of a minor child in household
• Married or living with partner
• Employed full-time

And now the top negative factors:

• Having less than a high school degree
• Senior citizen
• Living in rural America
• Having only a high school degree
• Being African-American

According to an article from the Buffalo News, “Internet use in particular and technology use in general are lower among the elderly, the poor, those who didn’t attend college and those who live in rural communities, data shows. ‘There are socioeconomic and demographic factors that are intertwined in people’s use of the Internet,’ said Aaron W. Smith, a research specialist with the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Experts say this gap in technology use, often referred to as the ‘digital divide,’ makes it more difficult for those groups to participate in modern society and the global economy.”

I don’t think I have to go into proof texts on the Church’s mission to the poor and disenfranchised. Does holding church in an “environment” that is inherently exclusive (and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future) help or hurt the church’s ability to fulfill its mission?

The implications of this apply not only to online churches but also churches that are by their nature intimidating and exclusionary in a physical sense to those same disenfranchised people groups.

That these churches exist in the physical world is again not reason to justify the conception of Internet churches. It is a call to reform the way we do church in the physical world.
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See: In Defense of Physical Community – Part One, Part Two & Part Four.

Jake is the Communications Director at Praxis Church in Tempe, Arizona, and a freelance writer and editor. He enjoys long walks in the park, glorious sunsets, romantic poetry, and snarky bios that make people wonder if he’s serious. He’s also trying by God’s grace to be a good dad and great husband. He blogs at www.thejakers.com.

By Jake Johnson

Cultural Implications – White-Hot Consumerism

In the last post I discussed the unknown effects of the Internet on our mental and communal health and why I thought proceeding with caution was a wise choice when it came to wholesale embracing virtual church. You can read that here.

Here I want to briefly explore some of the cultural implications of the online medium.

Let us not forget that there are many vested interests in the propagation of the Internet as a normative part of our lives – many of which I’m sure are not concerned with our mental or communal health.

For all his railing against Western cultural influences, I find it interesting that Doug Estes somehow neglects to acknowledge that the Internet is quite possibly the ultimate Colonial tool, spreading the Western materialistic and consumerist mentality to the masses of the world in the name of democratization of information (which I actually consider the anarchy of information – but that’s for another day), and that online church is primarily a Western phenomenon.

Consider for a moment the implications of the Internet. Much of our ministry training has been centered on fighting post-modernism. I’ve argued that post-modernism, if it isn’t already dead, is on its last legs. Replacing it is what I’ve proposed as Digitalism. Whereas post-modernism was the subjection of truth to culture, Digitalism is the subjection of truth to the individual.

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.

In the world of Digitalism, we are increasingly 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 (or ignore) 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 subjected 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.

Practically, this is an escalation of our already Western predisposition to consumerism and individualism. I’ve labeled it white-hot consumerism.

In a church context this means someone may choose to be part of an online church rather than a local church because they like the preaching, it feeds them spiritually, or some other personal reason. Of course, this is not a new problem, and, as Doug points out, mega-churches often result in the anonymity that allows for the same behavior. But that is not a valid argument for online church; it’s an argument for reforming the way we approach mega-church ecclesiology.

In the end, the problem is an individualistic pursuit to consume church rather than enter in to community in the local church.

Online church simply accelerates this problem. At least when people used to church hop, they had to do so within their communities. Eventually, if they church hopped enough, they’d start running into people they knew – and who, more importantly, knew them (and their church hopping ways).

Now people can attend a church thousands of miles away without ever being involved in a localized community that has the concerns and ministry needs of that person’s local community at the forefront of its mind.

What is more, we can now begin to colonize the world through our Western online churches, supplanting local congregations in foreign locales or foregoing the hard work of planting local congregations that can more effectively meet the needs of the local community and contextualize the gospel to the local culture.

We are on the way to creating a worldwide phenomenon of Christian consumerism through a medium that is one of the most individualistic and consumerist communications environments ever created.
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See: In Defense of Physical Community – Part 1
Parts 3 & 4.

Jake is the Communications Director at Praxis Church in Tempe, Arizona, and a freelance writer and editor. He enjoys long walks in the park, glorious sunsets, romantic poetry, and snarky bios that make people wonder if he’s serious. He’s also trying by God’s grace to be a good dad and great husband. He blogs at www.thejakers.com.

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.