fishers, surfers and casters

At CMRC Joyce Smith offered a discussion of the struggle between church and media as meaning-making insitutions in the conext of her favourite television program, Rescue Me. Not aired in Australia (yet), the drama series focusses on one character, a fire-figher in New York City who comes from Irish-Catholic heritage and struggles to find meaning in his life after the breakdown of his marriage and the loss of family members in the 9-11 disaster.

The show has received negative reviews and protests from the American Catholic Defence League, in its portrayals of Jesus and other biblical characters and in the presentation of other characters, such as a laicised priest and another priest who is arrested for peadophilia.

Smith offers the show as an alternative space where audiences reconsider the Christian story, and as an example of television’s power to reinterpret and portray the biblical story. She sets it alongside other examples such as The Passion of the Christ.

My first reaction to these statements was “No, they aren’t bad because they challenge the Church’s authority to present the Christian story. They are bad because their interpretation is just wrong.” Immediately I saw myself doing exactly what Smith was saying the Church was doing: I see them as bad because they don’t interpret the story and its characters my way. And this, I think, is exactly what the Church and its bodies, like the American Catholic Defence League, is going through. The Church is on trial in this show, and the Christian story is set above and outide its context, and therefore control.

Can’t wait for the show to come to our shores. Thanks, Joyce, for your presentation and for identifying the struggle that I’m also having.

1. What are Australian churches doing with the web?
Man, what aren’t they doing? They’re embracing it, exploiting it, ignoring it, defaming it, you naming it.

The Catholics have set up a Christian alternative to Facebook called XT3 which doesn’t look so bad. It was established in the advent of WYD08 but I think it’s kept going. I think they have priests and counsellors and youth workers on the site. The Uniting Church has The Transit Lounge which is at first sight a simple structured web site but has paths to discussion groups and blogs.

The Sydney Anglicans have extended their web presence to include a variety of blog and podcast feeds, which seem to be a web-based extension of resources for parishes and groups, but there are forums and a news feed. It seems way more institutional based than the others above (e.g. what the Syndey Anglicans are doing rather than what people in the church are doing). However I know there is a sister site for young people around, and I just did a search of my own blog to find a link to it, christianity.net.au, which I think is just pure proselytism, good ol’ Sydney Anglican style. Speaking of proselytism, there’s also the Jesus – All about life campaign.

The Australian Christian Channel has an interesting ministry model and are moving from TV to mobile technologies, and networking with other PayTV entities in SE Asia. I don’t know much apart from this, that I’ve been told by other researchers, but I will hopefully speaking with some of them in the future around a research project.

I can’t remember from the top of my head anything else, but of course heaps of Christians are writing blogs, SNS pages, as are Christian groups and local churches. Tonnes of stuff around.

As I wrote in this paper, I reckon the trend at the moment is for churches to downplay their denominational identity, even the labels of Christians, in favour of talk about God and Jesus. The word Christian is no longer cool, Anglican, Catholic, Pentecostal, Methodist, not cool. God, JC, spirituality and stuff, still okay.