A sample of approximately thirty blog sites was chosen and articles posted in the periods 1 July – 31 October 2006 and 1 February – 31 May 2007 were collected, plus up to 28 days of comments after each post. Each blogger was invited to participate in an interview with the researcher, of whom 27 responded positively. Home pages at the end of each period were also stored for information about bloggers’ online personae not found in articles posted (including data on other blogs read and networks identified).

Informed by Marshall (2007) and Lövheim and Linderman (2005), the research understands that the construction of identity takes place in sites of social interaction in which there is sufficient social trust shared among its members. Etiquette practices, together with the proclamation and exchange of social capital, are often required for such trust to be generated. A discursive analysis is therefore employed to uncover etiquette practices among these bloggers and their commenting audience, and to identify what constitutes social capital in the sample. a network analysis is undertaken to explore connections between bloggers, according to links made in posts, comments and blogrolls. Interviews offer more information about blogging purposes and practices otherwise unknown to the researcher.

Findings from this research may be summarised in terms of four paradoxes:

The cyborg paradox

The blogosphere is valued as a place of safety, control and authentic expression. Bloggers find the environment provides for a parliament on religious practices, symbols and doctrines and a place to build an emerging church identity that values, as a premium, on incarnational mission in a new culture. The paradox lies in the search for a spirituality of embodiment that takes place in an environment devoid of bodies. This paradox calls for the adoption of new discursive practices and patterns of interaction, while maintaining a link to Christian tradition.

The network paradox

It is apparent that bloggers in the sample are far from a cohesive group. Many share more interactions with bloggers outside the sample, even outside the country, than with each other. The strength of online connections appears dependent on particular interests (like communities of practice) and on offline networks and environments (such as denominations), yet among them there is a call to define the emerging church in Australia as distinct from international expressions of the movement, particularly when these other groups are reported as representative of Australian emerging church bloggers. In this is an endeavour to discursively construct an Australian emerging church blogging community, while at the same time recognising that the emerging church values fluidity and diversity over conformity and structure.

The authority paradox

The rhetoric of democratisation is upheld in posts and conversations among bloggers in the sample. Debates about theology and church authority and structure often involve questions on what groups of people are “left out of the conversation”. Yet both discourse and network analyses show bloggers that are published in other media (newspapers and books) have more social capital than others, and that public discourses are favoured over private ones. This has much to do with the socio-economic and professional status of bloggers in the sample, but also with the fact that, despite its audiovisual capabilities, blogging favours writing.

The “glocal” paradox

For bloggers in the sample the Internet is a tool for maintaining or enhancing connections originally made offline. Conversations in the blogosphere are useful primarily in that they relate to religious life offline as well as online. Despite the Internet’s facilitation of “me-centred” networks, and that safety and control that it provides in contrast to offline religious settings, bloggers hold to the ideal of intimate, localised communities and call others to bring their experience of these communities to the blogosphere, and take resources from the online experience back to their own settings.