Now the examination has come back I’m into full swing again. I’m thinking there will be at least two all-nighters a week, a few meaningless “uh huh” and “sure you can” to my children every so often. But while the actual PhD work is not that much, I’m involved in getting a few things published which is cool, but keeping me up. Here’s what I let myself into:

I’m presenting at two conferences, the first of which starts in a couple of days, followed two days later by the second. Both are in Toronto. The first one is the biennial Conference on Media, Religion and Culture, and I’m giving three papers: religious cyborg, godcasting, and authority in the blogosphere. The second is the quinquennial (does that mean every five years?) International Association of History of Religions Conference, and I’m giving the religious cyborg paper. I’m hoping to escape to Montreal for a breather in-between, wallet-willing.

By the time I return to Oz I have an article due for the online journal on religions on the Internet, Heidelberg Online. I have always been really impressed with their publications so I’m really chuffed to have an abstract accepted by them. It’s on how Aussie emerging church bloggers use visual text, including photographs, A/V uploads, and design and layout, to help present their religious identity. I’ve got all the main data and discussion done. The journal edition focusses heavily on aesthetics and the senses so I’m doing a lot of reading on that to steer my arguments correctly. The two big names on religion, media and aesthetics, Birgit Meyer and David Morgan, will be in Toronto, as will the journal editors, so I will be buying people lots of drinks in exchange for wisdom.

Also by the time I get back I will have received peer review comments from an article I’ve submitted to the Journal of Technology, Religion and Theology. It’s a literature review of studies into religion online, with a focus on fourth-wave stuff. I hope it’s good, because going back to old articles and re-editing is such a pain. Then again, it’s something I have to get used to.

I have also just found out I was accepted to write a chapter for a new book called “Networked Sociability and Individualism: Technology for Personal and Professional Relationships.” My chapter will be on religious bloggers and their negotiations of networks and congregational/denominational identity.

It feels good to be able to get these things underway. One regret during my PhD was that, while giving so goddamn many conference presentations, I hardly wrote at all for journals. So this is nice, and I’m aiming that I will get into a writing rhythm that somehow got lost when the new TV arrived.

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.

Such issues as abortion and homosexuality barely receive a mention, and even then, outright opposition is questioned. Bloggers appear to reject or ignore the moral campaigns of the so-called religious right, to contend that global issues of justice, peace and care for the environment are greater and more urgent. For this reason emerging church bloggers may be labelled “Christian left” or “liberal”. While they may align the “family values” mentality of the government of the time (when the coalition of the Liberal and National Parties held power) to the term “religious right”, they are slow to accept the terms “left”or “liberal”.

Yet they see their churches “stuck in Christendom”. They claim the divisions that the institutional church creates between ordained and lay, and sacred and secular culture, are viewed as false by the world outside the church. The face of the church has been taken over by the “religious right”, whose fascination with “family values” not only serves to exclude many from participation, but denies God’s true call for the church.

As people with leadership roles in their local context, many have much to say about the nature of leadership within the church. They regret that clergy often are called to represent the entire ministry of their congregations, and as such have to live up to difficult expectations. They are suspicious of the books and conferences that are advertised in clergy circles, promoting answers to “successful” ministry. They refuse the notion that one’s ministry strategy will work for every pastor, and they are critical of the criteria on which such success is measured.

Most evident in posts and conversations in the study is a critique of the so-called mega-church model of Christian community. While bloggers take Evangelical theology with a grain of salt, they see the mega-church model of ministry as contrary to the Gospel. Under particular attack fall Hillsong in Sydney and Riverview Church in Perth (though a couple of bloggers defend some of Hillsong’s projects). These are not churches. They are businesses who promote spiritual goods and services for money, and treat their congregants as consumers rather than participants.

Bloggers consider the emerging church conversation a search for a “third option”, where traditional churches and mega-churches fail to connect Gospel with community and culture. In doing so, bloggers open their space as a refuge from these places, encouraging readers to share their stories of exclusion and promoting conversations of possible alternatives. From these conversations emerges a picture of the “ideal” organisation of Christians, where all members are active in decision-making and action in mission, according to their abilities, and where leaders are called to be “on the margins” of the community: equipping lay members in their own work, and exploring opportunities for new ministry projects and practices.

**

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.

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.

But Moritz does offer a criticism of the emerging church that I would like to comment on. He asserts that while the emerging church rhetoric seems against systematic theology, it falls into the trappings of the discipline in its conversations:

It would seem that the vast majority of Emerging thinkers who reject systematic theology are faced with the same conundrum, in that every in-house Emerging discussion over theological matters that I have witnessed so far – be it in books, on blogs, in sermons or in lectures – has transpired predominantly via prose. In this way Emergents make constant use of the language and categories of systematic theology while at the same time denying its legitimacy and denouncing it as irredeemably modern. If one it to take seriously the Emerging Church’s focus on praxis informing theology, I would ask why this should be the one exception. [...]

[...] If we cannot speak of God how can we assert so confidently that none of our categories apply to God? I fear that some Emergents might be wandering down the road of Nominalism while insisting they are Critical Realists. The rejection of modernism notwithstanding, theological and philosophical incoherency is still not a virtue – even among the most hard-lined postmodernist philosophers. (p. 33)

I have to hand it to Moritz – it is a fair observation. Emerging church blogs (for example) do tend at time to delve into sophisticated diatribes about many issues that a large number of us would fine academic and perhaps inaccessible. However, though a fair observation, it doesn’t make it a worthy criticism of the emerging church at large.

Firstly, his knowledge of emerging church thinking is limited to “books, blogs, in sermons or in lectures” where he sees discourses akin to the systematic theology we find in bible college. Well, d’uh. If you’re going to look at books, lectures, sermons and even blogs, you’re going to get that kind of prose. It’s the nature of writing. Writing is linear, logical, rational and propositional. emerging church writers are going to write like a systematic theologian, because they’re writing for an audience that wants to consider emerging church theology by reading. If Moritz wanted a statement of emerging church theology by listening to music or visiting an art installation or mission project then he would read something altogether different.

Secondly, I think the emerging church, by and large, is not biased against systematic theology as much as it has reservations about the place of systematic theology in the contemporary church. As Mary Hess puts it well, “systematic theology leaves people out of the conversation” and its the systematic theology conversation that bears its great weight in thinking and talking about God in the church. For “Emergents” (Moritz’s term, not mine), systematic theology may inform the church’s present and future, but it does not make systematic theologians the church experts, the first go-to for advice and decision-making. If other media can carry other types of thinking about God and church and discipleship and faith and etc then “Emergents” will embrace them, in order to listen out for other voices and bring them to the conversation.

What do you reckon?