Many posts and discussions in the blogs examined focus on corporate and personal faith practices. These include the presentation of liturgies and prayers written by bloggers, journaling of preparations for community worship services, private prayer regimens, and discussions on traditional and contemporary worship styles as practised in churches. Evident in these conversations is a desire to reclaim and renovate practices and symbolic environments that appear lost in recent Protestant history.

Bloggers reveal their interest in private devotional and meditational practices, including contemplative prayer and lectio divina. Some bloggers talk of their desire to inject into their daily lives a sense of the monastic, to engage in practices that bring the sacred into ordinary living. Some bloggers speak favourably of rituals borrowed from other faiths and new religious movements.

In conversations about corporate worship, bloggers show they do not enjoy the light and sound shows of many contemporary Sunday services. They tend to resist the directive styles of music lyrics and liturgies that either conform to strict theological principles or are filled with redundant words (especially “I just really want to…” type prayers). They enjoy the use of art and popular music to create audio-visual environments that gently guide people through an experience of the sacred. The poems, prayers and liturgies offered use themes and motifs borrowed from urban living to connect love, pain, joy and loss with God’s story of hope and renewal.

In the conversations about the purpose and nature of Christian worship, these emerging church bloggers want to dissolve the distinctions made between religious and secular text, and sacred and profane spaces. They do this by suggesting the use of popular images, music and other texts in otherwise traditional services, and through the use of art installations, promote the creation and mediation of experiences of the sacred in other public spaces. In their personal lives, they show a desire to break away from the “Sunday Christian” lifestyle by bringing the religious into everyday living.

In some cases, blogging itself is considered part of this spiritual regimen. Bloggers present posts for the sole purpose for encouraging others to contemplate and share stories, or to meditate on the words or pictures on screen and tell of their experience of doing so. Others treat the blogosphere as a confessional space, telling stories of their daily rights and wrongs and requesting absolution and support from their readers. Others ask readers to pray with them on private or public issues, and offer a prayer to be read by their audience, or a picture to meditate on.