Emerging church bloggers who have been so kind to participate in interviews with me so far have offered me a glimpse of their lives on, beyond and with the screen. For some (and I apologise that I’m not at the stage when I can say how many or take liberties to identify them yet), especially those under the age of thirty, the blog has been a tool to consolidate thoughts and feelings about faith. Ideas and emotions make sense to them when they post it online, like writing in a dairy or thinking out loud. These bloggers report that connecting to others online through their sites happened accidentally, organically, when an unknown readership appears in comments. Within a small time frame, their blogging evolved from a private enterprise to a humble introduction to strangers and acquaintances who make surprise visits to their site.

For these bloggers the Internet has become an extension of the mind, an online memory that becomes a collective memory for the community of readers. Bloggers construct an image of themselves on their sites, that develops with each posted memory and interacts with other online identities.

The interviews have so far revealed that use of the Internet varies widely between bloggers, depending on their access to a connected computer, and the time they have at their disposal to “be online”. But for the majority the computer is a devoted companion. Bloggers are connected both at home and at work. Owning a laptop computer with satellite broadband or WiFi is the greatest pleasure, being online in the lounge room with the television, catching public transport or at the dinner table. Interviewees have reported that not only they have made the Internet readily available to them, but how they have made themselves available online, responding as readily to an email or IM alert as they would a ringing pone or knock at the door. The world behind the computer is just as present to them, generally speaking, than the world inside their office, classroom or dining room.

Brasher tells of the significance that the entry of the computer into society has on religious identity:

Like the words vassal, lord, citizen, and proletarian before it, the word cyborg paints humanness in a historical context. It discloses how the organization of contemporary social and political life is working in consort with computers as the reigning means of production to influence the range of humanness possible in our era. (Brasher, 2001: 145)

Religious bloggers seek to make cyberspace a godly place, and in doing so seek a transformation of both the Web and the users therein. Religious bloggers present a challenge to not only how we view “being online”, but how we view “being religious”, as individuals and as communities, churches, and structured organisations. Consequently, religious bloggers offer us a new approach to understanding of what it means to be human, that may be seen by traditional religious eyes as potentially revolutionary.

Revolutionary, mainly as it calls Christianity to account for the fact that its narratives, symbols are based in pastoral roots, and the doctrines that are formed are based on conceptions of humanity that are born from these symbols. The most contentious of these that I see for the emerging church movement is the theme/meme of “incarnation”. Bloggers talk of the importance of missional community and practice that is infromed by incarnational theology. But what does it mean to talk of belief in and response to incarnational theology in a place where we do not take our bodies? This is a paradox that emerging church bloggers must negotiate daily, and I contend that they do so with vigour (and I’ll talk about this in Thesis 5 I think).

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