I’ve just submitted my thesis summary to a panel of RMIT staff for judgment at the graduate research conference on 4 June. Posting it here…

Emerging church bloggers in Australia: Prophets, priests and rulers in God’s virtual world

Thesis summary :: Paul Emerson Teusner

The emerging church movement is built on a postmodern critique of both contemporary expressions of traditional/mainstream Protestant Christian community, and modern forms of Evangelical Christianity that is found in the “mega-churches”. Its task is to seek a viable alternative to these apparently mutually exhaustive models of Christian community and practice. In the offline world, emerging church communities are small groups of people who are locally based and often not connected, in any formal sense, to any other emerging church group outside their traditional denomination. Online, bloggers converse over emerging church practices and criticisms of traditional and Evangelical theology to construct a global identity.

This research aims to uncover how blogging technology is used by those involved in the emerging church conversation to construct individual and communal religious identities. This is its main question. It is expected insights into the following secondary questions will be shown:

1. How do religious attitudes towards the Internet and blogging contribute to the way people interact online?

2. What contributions and constraints do blogging software, and people’s use of it, offer the construction of online identity?

3. How are bloggers working together to construct an emerging church theology, ecclesiology and missiology?

4. How is authority distributed among emerging church bloggers, in relation to other systems of authority both online and offline?

5. What can be said about the place of the emerging church blogosphere in the current tensions of 21st century Australian religious sociology?