**

Blogs are a vehicle for participants in the sample to reflect on the practices of Christians in relation to those outside the church. It is also a place to retell personal experiences of meeting others in ministry, ask questions and share knowledge.

Generally these bloggers are suspicious of programs and activities that attempt to convert people to Christianity, or attract them to come to church. For a start, having everyone come to church will not necessarily make the world a better place. Also, the motives by which the programs are implemented are under scrutiny. Bloggers question the packaging of spiritual goods for consumption and edification (and profit) of the supplier. The “God-shaped hole” rationale, which treats everybody as “needing the Gospel”, is viewed by bloggers as arrogant and judgmental. Bloggers believe there is not much good in going to church that people haven’t found in other faith practices and religious sources. The converse is also true; history shows that church-goers have much to be held accountable for.

This is why a small number of bloggers have played with term “apologetics”. Bloggers accept that their faith is on trial by wider society, they seek to learn from others how to right previous wrongs, search for common objectives, and strive for reconciliation. In a few posts some bloggers have retold the experience of the Desert Fathers, recalling a historical period when, like this one, Christianity needed a defence. For these emerging church bloggers, the culture wars between Christendom and secularisation is over, and Christendom lost. Yet there is a beauty in the story of Christ and followers that deserves declaration, both within their experience and into their imaginings. The story offers a prophetic voice that bloggers receive in order to responsibly speak to their readers on their cultural experience.

For many, Christian witness is most authentically expressed in service. This may involve offering resources to communities in need, caring for individuals who are marginalised in these communities. They wish to see themselves not as missionaries to the lost, but fellow travellers, who carry the same questions, and are willing to find answers in others. Christian mission is as much a quest for self-transformation, and renewal of the present-day church, than it is a call to reform larger society.

These voices, then, do not use blogging to rally the troops, or convert people to their way of thinking, but as a confession that their experience of Christianity is not all they have wanted it to be, and that the world they know is not the same world their churches think it is. They call out for alternative methods of thinking and doing mission, and seek to engage non-Christians in the discussion. Perhaps there is another paradox to be noted, that in the use of new technologies these bloggers seek a return to older, even ancient, conversations.

Generally these bloggers are suspicious of programs and activities that attempt to convert people to Christianity, or attract them to come to church. For a start, having everyone come to church will not necessarily make the world a better place. Also, the motives by which the programs are implemented are under scrutiny. Bloggers question the packaging of spiritual goods for consumption and edification (and profit) of the supplier. The “God-shaped hole” rationale, which treats everybody as “needing the Gospel”, is viewed by bloggers as arrogant and judgmental. Bloggers believe there is not much good in Christianity that people haven’t found in other religions and spiritual practices. The converse is also true; history shows that Christianity has much to be held accountable for.

This is why a small number of bloggers have played with term “apologetics”. Bloggers accept that their faith is on trial by wider society, they seek to learn from others how to right previous wrongs, search for common objectives, and strive for reconciliation. In a few posts some bloggers have retold the experience of the Desert Fathers, recalling a historical period when, like this one, Christianity needed a defence. For these emerging church bloggers, the culture wars between Christendom and secularisation is over, and Christendom lost.

The primary task of Christian mission is service. This may involve offering resources to communities in need, caring for individuals who are marginalised in these communities. They wish to see themselves not as missionaries to the lost, but fellow travellers, who carry the same questions, and are willing to find answers in others. Christian mission is as much a quest for self-transformation, and renewal of the church, than it is a call to reform larger society.

These voices, then, do not use blogging to rally the troops, or convert people to their way of thinking, but as a confession that their experience of Christianity is not all they have wanted it to be, and that the world they know is not the same world their churches think it is. They call out for alternative methods of thinking and doing mission, and seek to engage non-Christians in the discussion. Perhaps there is another paradox to be noted, that in the use of new technologies these bloggers seek a return to older, even ancient, conversations.

Bloggers in the sample seek a reconstruction of Christian theology, and this quest is ideologically driven. In considering theology, some call it “emerging”, “missional” or “postmodern”, but most refer simply to their personal beliefs, attitudes and questions. By-and-large, bloggers believe in the triune God composed of creator of the universe (though they are far from creationist), redeemer of humanity, and the Spirit who moves among us. They tend to shy away from the gender-specific terms of Father and Son, preferring simply God and Jesus or Christ. Central to their theology are the death and resurrection of Jesus, who is God incarnate.

Other doctrines are up for discussion. An all-loving God is seen as a more important concept than an all-powerful one. For this reason atonement theology is problematic; they question why God would require sacrifice. The cross makes more sense as an indication of the extreme love of God, to endure the worst of human experience, even if that takes the form of abandonment from God. Prosperity theology makes even less sense to them, and is highlighted in many posts and discussions, as it not only lacks sufficient biblical evidence, but appears in its application to serve the higher classes more than the poor. And they believe God has a preferential option for the poor.

Indeed, God has a politic. Doctrines of heaven and hell are at best unhelpful, at worst systems of control and oppression. The Kingdom is an earthly realm, breaking into this world. Jesus came not to make Christians, but to bring liberation and justice. The resurrection is symbolic testimony to the fact that God’s message is not welcome by the powerful, but will not be silenced.

While Christ is the head of the Kingdom, both here now and to come, this Kingdom is not the Christian church. The church is tasked with bringing the Gospel to the world, and ushering in the new realm, but being close to God, participating in the Kingdom, is not conditional on belonging to a church, or even being Christian. Emerging/missional theology accepts that much of God’s word and work can be found in secular culture, and some bloggers find that church culture is failing to speak the Gospel, and go so far to say it is an institution that needs to be overthrown for the Gospel’s sake. Even contemporary methods of academic theology are criticised as serving to alienate people rather than empower people to talk of God.

Bloggers do not claim that this theology is new. They draw on sources such as the Jesus movement, the works of GK Chesterton, NT Wright, CS Lewis. Their claim to being “postmodern” lies in their language of “doubt”. For postmodern theology, doubt is an essential component to faith. Blindly holding on to little truths, such as unhelpful doctrines, leads to a resistance to change and growth, and ultimately collapse. Realising that our worldviews will always and repeatedly be challenged and broken is the path of the spiritual traveller, who affirms that Jesus has been there before, and God is there now. When modern Christians appear like Roman soldiers casting dice at the crucifixion, postmodern Christians want to be like the disciples who run away, only to return to the resurrected Christ with both shame and delight.

God is a rebel. Jesus is a revolutionary. Revelation is rupture. Heaven and hell are not outside this world, but on this planet at this time. In bloggers’ theologies, dualisms are replaced with metaphors. It seems a paradox that the ethereal realm of cyberspace becomes the place to openly affirm this.

I start by outlining four phases in bloggers’ awareness of and engagement with audiences. We might add the Scollon term, interaction order, to these. Naming them as phases may be somewhat misleading, as it connotes that there is some sort of progression from phase one onward. I call them phases as there is fluidity between them. Not all bloggers have necessarily occupied all phases, though some occupy more than one, or all of them, at some point in time.

I call the first the autotelic stage, borrowing the term from Kris Cohen (2004). A number of participants interviewed mentioned how they were attracted to blogs as a way of developing or practising a writing style and regimen. In blogging they saw a tool for writing that was much like a personal diary, yet in an exposed environment the challenge of writing for the interests of others is noted. They may be aware of a number of people who read their site, yet the main motivation is for an imagined audience, publishing written work for its own sake. Articles are posted in order to get a thought, story or opinion “out there”. These articles are posted erratically if not seldom, and are self-contained (i.e. not serialised). Tags or categories may be used, if only for the use of the blogger him- or herself, to order entries as an archive. The discourses in place, such as blog titles and texts contained in side-bars, are personal, in that they are used to create a picture of the blogger.

The second is what I call the networking phase. Here the blogger is more aware of their site’s readership, and is motivated to post more regularly. The writer is likely to more explicitly encourage comments and discussion, post articles on particular issues and themes, and either alert readers to upcoming, or apologise for previous, hiatuses in blog postings. The blog’s design and its content would not only promote the blogger but his or her readership, including blog rolls, links to information about groups and organisations that he or she may be involved in. Both posts and surrounding text contains both personal and professional content, and there may be much “filter” information, i.e. lists of links to other places on the web of interest to the blogger and known readers. Bloggers are also likely to use devices to gain more information about their readership, such as the use of side-bar poll programs and comment-based voting activities.

Next is the community phase. Here blog posts illicit long strings of comments by regular known readers. The interaction order changes somewhat as commenters respond not just to blog posts, but to other comments. Bloggers are likely to compose moderation instructions, and enforce them in a variety of ways. User registration functions are likely to be in place. Posts are less likely to be personal in favour of discussion on public issues, and are more likely to be regular, and sometimes serial. Guest bloggers are a feature, for when the blogs’ owner (or owners) wants to take a break, or introduce a new discussion topic that’s best started by a known reader. The content of surrounding text and design feature less personal information in favour of creating a group identity.

This last phase is hardly discrete, as I believe all bloggers would occupy this phase at the same time as any other. Yet there is a level of interaction other than that between blogger and their known or imagined audience. The range of blogs read by those interviewed in the sample is assumed to be more expansive than the reach of the bloggers’ own work. Bloggers bring an understanding of the global emerging church network home to their readers. Yet, rather than being at its centre, bloggers are motivated to remain “at the edge” of the conversation, focussing on issues important to them: theology of mission, faith in popular culture, alternative worship practices, technology in faith practices, etc. Bloggers see their relationship with readers as a niche in the wider emerging church blogosphere, and aim more to cement it rather than expand it.

Scollon and Wong Scollon (2004) note that social action occurs at the intersection of three factors: the interaction order, the discourses in place, and the historical bodies of the participants involved. The authors give the name “nexus analysis” to the study of discourses at this intersection.

The interaction order describes the structure of relationships between participants in the environment in which the interaction takes place. In a classroom setting, for example, interaction is structured according to the relationship between a teacher and the students in the class. Communication in a classroom is centred around the teacher, who presents teaching material to the body of students and receives questions and comments from individual students. While there is communication between students in a classroom, through conversations in whispers and notes passed between desks, these conversations are deprivileged in contrast to the "official" communication of the teacher.

The discourses in place include not just communications between people in the interaction order, but other forms of text that exist in the environment. Continuing the example of the classroom setting, these texts may range from posters in walls through the clothing of students to the arrangement of furniture and the use of communication technologies. These discourses inform the physical shape of the interaction order, and which communications are privileged over others. For example, in a classroom where all students are facing the same direction (toward the teacher), communications between students are deprivileged below communications between teacher and student. Likewise, text written behind the teacher (on a chalkboard or projected on a screen, is considered more "official" than text on posters on other walls or written on student desks.

The historical body describes the set of assumptions, skills, values, beliefs and motivations that each participant brings to the setting of the social interaction. An example of this would be the desire for retention or promotion within the institution that drives the teacher to deliver a quality performance in the lecture theatre, while some students’ attention is dependent on their as yet unfulfilled desire to choose an appropriate major in the degree course. The term “body” as used here may be problematic, as it connotes something physical, and in the physical world we bring our physical bodies into all our interactions. It may be helpful to consider the “historical body” as something like “the body of experience” that comprise part of the context in which interactions occur.

Scollon and Wong Scollon argue that just as each of these factors impinge of the nature and design of the discourses at their intersection, they are likewise not constant. Thus there is a cycle of change as each factor interacts, which the writers name semiotic cycles. Nexus analysis, then, is the study of how each of these cycles inform and change other cycles to aggregate change in the relationships of people in a setting of interaction, and nature of communication therein.

Registration (includes lunches and morning and afternoon tea):
$ 160 wage earners
$ 100 students and non-wage earners* *

*CALL FOR PAPERS *

This conference will focus on religious communication and religious aesthetic forms. The underlying impulse is to bring into dialogue scholarly work undertaken in religious studies and theology with debates and research in the fields of communications and cultural studies, including performance, literary, visual and aesthetic analyses. The premise of the conference is that communication and aesthetic forms play an active role in shaping a religious culture’s sensibility rather than merely reflecting that religious community’s ideology, logic or worldview. In short, religious communication makes religious experience meaningful, possible and effective.

The conference will have a wide interpretation of ‘religious communication’, including, but extending religious communication beyond ‘communication studies’ understood as ‘mass media’, to include religious modes of communication such as prayer, sermons, revelation, art, theatre and ritual, as well as religious uses of mass media. We invite papers from the perspectives across the humanities and social sciences, including literature, music, performance, film and television, anthropology, sociology and history, as well as religious studies and theology. We also invite papers from all religious perspectives.

The conference is particularly interested in exploring:
* Religious affect and its relationship to different media (e.g. song, prayer, architecture, film, performance, images in general)
* Religious interpretation and textual hermeneutics (e.g. literalism versus symbolism)
* The use of communication media and art forms by religious groups to create a sense of community
* Communication as a ‘portal’ or window to the ‘divine’ and/or the ’sacred’
* Cross-cultural adaptation and the creolisation of religious forms
* Religion and the sacred in popular culture
* Modernity, post-modernity and religious communication.

This conference will be held immediately prior to the World Parliament of Religions, providing an opportunity for reflection on religious practice and the relationship between religious identity and the aesthetic forms of religious communication, and cross cultural communication.

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 22 June 2009
Please email an abstract of 200-250 words, and a short biographical note to:
Elizabeth.Coleman <at> arts.monash.edu.au

Conveners:

Dr Elizabeth Burns Coleman
Associate Professor Gil-Soo Han
Communications and Media Studies, ECPS, Monash University

Supported by:
English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University Performance and Social Aesthetics Research Unit, Monash University

http://www.arts.monash.edu.au/ecps/conferences/religious-communication/

In this system of relationality three levels of naming are identified. The first is the level of text: naming beliefs and values that are in common with others, or are distinct from others. They may include shared stories and experiences. The second is the level of speaker, which is mainly identification of some common ground with other people. This may include the fact they are in similar spaces, or follow similar discursive practices. And the third is the level of structure: naming the sources of authority or institutions that create connections.

Applying this model to my survey of emerging church bloggers, I’ve identified three levels of tension in their quest to discern a common religious identity. I can only name them as tensions. Blogging interaction is not constrained by formalised membership process or adherence to any fixed set of principles or ethics. Bloggers bring diverse and unique experiences to the conversation, and listen to a variety of distinct and unequal voices from both within and without the study sample. What remain are assertions of comparisons and contrasts contained in reflections of religious experiences, conversations with readers and responses to other bloggers.

Orthodoxy-heresy tension

As I’m writing this post I find that Pete Rollins’ new book is called The orthodox heretic, showing this tension is well known in the emerging church conversation. In the face of Christian institutional practices and doctrines, bloggers express a sense of marginalisation. Popular movies illustrate religious life more than a Sunday sermon or contemporary worship music. Conversations with prisoners, atheists, and those rejected by their congregations offer more inspiration for theological reflection than local church programs. So bloggers welcome the term heretic, describing one who embraces doubt when religious truths clash with apparent facts, and reject doctrine and piety that debilitate themselves and others from living faithfully.

Yet, when meeting religious pluralism and secular humanism, bloggers hear the call to assert some Christian fundamental beliefs. These include the story of the resurrection and the image of the Triune God. It appears not an project of evangelism, or of reasserting a Christianity within the culture of bloggers’ experience, but more an endeavour to locate a common point of difference from other faiths, from which solidarity may be sought. For bloggers orthodoxy is based on an understanding of the Christian witness at the emergence of the apostolic writings, a period recalled (whether factually or mythically) as pluralistic in culture and religion, where Empire values clashed with Judaic nostalgia and bureaucracy, and where Christianity was subversive and counter-cultural. Parallels between this period and the entrance of postmodernism in contemporary culture are acknowledged.

Inclusion-exclusion tension

“If you come, you’re in” appears to be a popular emerging church axiom. There appears no condition of entry into the conversation, no ritual or marker by which one can claim membership in the group. A similar impression my be drawn from the sample of bloggers. In interaction with commenters, bloggers welcome responses from and conversations with non-Christians and anti-Christians, and are reluctant to filter comments from spammers and flamers. In cross-blog associations, bloggers are opposed to using symbolic objects that connect them with a definable group (e.g. “friend of emergent” logos), and are reluctant to adopt the term “emerging church” in self-description (though some like the term “missional”). The network of links made from one blogger to another shows the sample is more a collection of small groups, based on conversations about particular ideas, or offline connections, than a cohesive group. So while tags and searches may identify their sites as emerging church blogs, bloggers generally consider themselves on the edge, or outside, of any sense of emerging church community, or reject the notion that there is one.

It is easier for bloggers to set themselves against certain descriptions of religious identity than alongside them. They are not “churched”. They are not “mega-church”. Yet even these notions are up for debate. Some bloggers attend Hillsong events, and some talk favourably of traditional congregation-based ministry. Blogging allows members of the sample to present a identity that sits within a fluid and expanding network of connections, rather than a static group. Bloggers are able to “remain on the edge” of discursive endeavours to define and locate them.

The tension of words

Members of the sample have used the blogosphere as a space to reassess terms such as liberal, postmodern, Baptist, emerging, evangelical, traditional, Protestant and missional. In this space, bloggers endeavour to remove themselves from the institutional structures that define these terms and create borders and distinctions. Bloggers do share, however, a certain level of formal education, and have access to academic resources that allow them to engage in theological discourse. Writing is highly valued among the bloggers in the sample, and the opinions of many are drawn from the same range of published works. Bloggers point to a library of books from which an emerging church theology and missiology may be sourced.

Bloggers are keenly aware that academic discourse excludes voices from the emerging church conversation, and that those bloggers who can engage in it are given greater authority than others. They try to bring other forms of information to attention of readers, such as other websites, music and art, and the sites of less-know bloggers. Yet, since it’s easier to reproduce words than other media in a blog, the blogosphere tends to favour writing. Bloggers that are considered good writers are by-and-large given more attention, and those that can offer well-versed criticisms of other writings can attract comments and links.

For bloggers in the sample, religious identity is not fixed, but emerges out of tensions that are exposed and played out in interaction with commenters and through hyperlink-based networks with other bloggers. Bloggers find their place, not in the resolution of the tensions, but in the act of identifying and engaging them.

Now at the risk of immodesty, I think I’m a good public speaker. Even when nerves get to me, I manage to engage an audience in a story or a message that always includes a good laugh somewhere. Years of teaching, preaching, performing, add a little brain, and you got the makings for a good time. But for some reason my tongue decided to revolt this afternoon, and my brain went on a little strike. I forgot really important details that had been in my head for days and weeks, I failed to recall the reason why some data was on certain PowerPoint slides and not others, and wasted a lot of time getting my mouth around stuff early in the presentation and had to rush through the main points of my overall findings and arguments. In short, my completion seminar sucked while it also blowed.

At every graduate research seminar I’ve presented since late 2006 there has been one panel member, who is a brilliant scholar and really nice person, but whose mind I can never predict. She always offer some sort of criticism that I have trouble understanding, and each time I think I’ve got her worked out, she comes up with something else to trouble me further. Don’t get me wrong, her critiques have ultimately been helpful, but it’s always frustrating to know that no matter how hard you’ve worked, there’s always something else to have to figure out.

Anyway, her only criticism today was that she read my thesis summary (presented in previous posts) and utterly loved it. She thought it was concise and catchy, that I had a great grasp of both language and my entire concept. And she thought she’d see more of it at the presentation. But all she got was detail and numbers and formality.

The total bugger of that was for the past few weeks, while I’ve rocked myself to and fro in a corner muttering to myself in total panic about this completion seminar, I’ve been telling myself to ignore my own tendencies, to present a detailed model, offer as much data as you can, try to be as quantitative as qualitative, and back up any musings with real discovery. But if I had only trusted my own instincts, and made a show the way I would want to hear one, I would have finally made her happy, after all these years. Damn! I have to believe in myself. I can’t believe it.

Anyway, the seminar was finished at 3.30pm. At 4.30pm I got a call from my supervisor, who told me that yes-indeedy there were some issues that will be clarified over the next few emails and meetings. but I may be assured that the university is looking forward to reading my thesis when submitted in August.

Phew!

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.

While the first three factors mentioned are offline, they offer a ground for the reception and use of the Internet for the purposes of religion. Highlighted are concerns and debates about the nature of “virtual” identity, community and religious experience, seen as incomplete, duplicitous, and mere “play”, or as continuous with offline identity and interaction in the quest for authenticity (Hine, 2000: ; Kennedy, 2006: ; Turkle, 1996). Internet research also calls into question the promises that the blogosphere promotes: democratisation of public voices, the blurring of public and private discourses, and the blurring of distinctions between producer, user and media text (Beer and Burrows, 2007: ; van Dijck, 2009). Moreover, while the blogosphere promises a parliament on the usefulness of religious practices and structures in the construction of authentic religious identity, whether it does so on certain terms is an important consideration. It must be asked, what discursive products and practices are required for entry into the blogosphere, and by what conditions are people given voice and authority (Turner, 2007).

At the nexus of these debates and theses is the theorisation of the spiritual cyborg: one who seeks to enhance their connection with the word and understanding of their place in it through connection with technology (Brasher, 2001: ; Davis, 1998: ; Gunkel, 2007). This concept, as an object of study, has mutated in the short history of research into online religion, in which Højsgaard and Warburg (2005) have identified three “waves”. In this research a fourth “wave” is proposed, informed by recent developments in Internet technology and usage. In this fourth wave it is acknowledged that:

· going online is no longer a discrete step (Thomas, 2006);

· the Internet is also a window for the world to see the individual user, and not just the other way around (Thomas, 2006);

· research into religion online should not just consider what online content is religious and what is not, but what is religious about the project of creating online content (Lövheim, 2008); and

· the same research should not just consider online environments as peculiar religious spaces, but forums for considering the place of religion in all parts of life (Cheong, Halavais et al., 2008: ; Lövheim, 2008).