Theology of a wired church?

Some members of Scots Church in Adelaide, South Australia have started to think about the notion of Wired Church. I have read through some of the material and this blog site is essentially a result of me thinking to myself that I need to explore and write about this subject myself in the light of what I have learned.

The Internet has been around for some twenty five years now. The Internet came into existence during a significant period of change in the western world thinking that is also profoundly forcing the church to come to terms with the emerging postmodern world. To some extent the Internet has been a major contributor to the speed of change that we are experiencing. No part of the church or its institutions will be left unaffected. It doesn’t mean the end of people and institutions that are thoroughly modern – however they too will need to learn to operate in a different context.

What is happening is nothing short of a major transformation of how we think, work, and relate with each other. The improvement in information and communications technology in the last twenty years have enabled us to break down institutions and systems that were constructed to because of the way things have always been.

The Internet having been birthed within an emerging postmodern age basically reflects the cultural aspects that we see in the ‘real’ world. As such the church needs to be fully aware that any attempt to colonise the landscape of the Internet will not be tolerated by the emerging culture. As is the case in the ‘real’ world, the ‘virtual’ world of the Internet requires the church to rethink many underlying assumptions of the nature of church, mission, worship, evangelism, and especially justice.

Our understanding of these things as a church ought to determine how we use technology as a community of faith for the sake of the mission of God.

We in the church must change our way of thinking about the Internet. If we don’t, we’ll end up with our own subculture online, just as we have in “real life.”

Andrew Careaga

A good place to start thinking about how to approach the Internet is to look at the way in which the church ought to interact with the world. For example, how does the convergence of technology affect the way in which the church might engage the world?

Drew Moser wrote about New Media, Convergence and the Postmodern Church where he described the notion of convergence as a “postmodern concept” that “is essentially an effort to transfer media autonomy from the media mogul to the individual user”. He says that the outcome is that “mass communication is giving way to a YouTube, Facebook, and Blogging culture that doesn’t want to be merely fed information” but instead “wants to interact with it”.

I’ll probably write more about this idea in future posts.