fishers, surfers and casters

Any comment on what Web 2.0 can do for churches?
I think I’m out of comments, does anyone else have any?

Can youth ministry grow through online media?
Depends on how you measure growth?
1. More young people getting confirmed? Probably not, online confirmation programs only work well in conjunction with traditional settings.
2. More young people saying their Christian? Probably not, the word just aint cool.
3. More young people coming to church? Probably not, will need to focus more on churches welcoming them, than online media lying to them about how welcoming our churches actually are.
4. More important connections with young people? Probably yes BUT not through developing a new media youth ministry. It will be the rest of the church learning how to be the church in the new media environment, not your young people or your youth ministers. A new media course at Ridley or UFT may work better, coupled with teaching our clergy how to respond to issues of spiritual abuse.

I probably haven’t answered the question here. Does anyone have anything to add or change?

What can the Anglican church learn from emerging churches and their online habits?
Mmm, I can think of a few things, but I don’t want to make it look like the emerging church is doing everything right and nothing wrong, and the Anglican church doesn’t have anything to teach the rest of us. I also don’t want it to look like every part of the emerging church is doing it the same way. These are my opinions, which come from what I’ve seen and read and heard, but should be received as the opinions of some guy, not as the opinions of someone in any privileged position.

What can the Anglican church learn from emerging churches’ online behaviour?
1. That emerging church people don’t use the new media for world domination.
2. That they use them to listen as much as they use it to speak.
3. That they are more interested in sharing information for use on offline contexts, rather than ensuring that the online connection is the be all and end all.
4. That they create online facades that are deeply personal, rather than organisational. I.e. pages and profiles are more about people than they are about groups.
5. That they expect dissent, treat it as a way to help them grow rather than a threat to survival.
6. That they appreciate that a conversation is as good as a conversion, as they accept they are in need of ongoing conversion.

2. What are young people doing with their religious identity?
Wow, that’s just like saying, “So, tell me about the universe.”

A quick answer would be that young people are living their lives with it. But I wonder if the question actually was meant to be, “How are young people becoming religious?”, or something like that.

Safe things to say:
1. That young people are less likely to align their religious identity with a local church, group, para-church body, organisation, denomination or institution than previous generations.
2. That even regular young church-goers would get more information about how to be religious from sources outside the church than within it. Friends, movies, TV, magazines, all that stuff.
3. That this shift away from organised religion is also true in other spheres of life. Young people are also less likely to align themselves with a political party, a civil action group (I know Greenpeace wonders where all the activists have gone), a volunteer organisation than past generations.
4. That this doesn’t mean young people are less political, activated, even religious. It just means their choice of expressing these parts of their identity is different.

Difficult things to say:
1. That denominational expressions of Christianity are on their way out for good.
2. Aberystwyth.
3. That this is not just a trend, a slow social change. This is an ideological shift that is due in part to the mistakes made by institutional churches, which they(we) need to address. The spiritual abuse of young people is an important one, though by no means the only one.