fishers, surfers and casters

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.

I got a call the other day from a project worker with Melbourne’s Anglican Archdiocese. She found some research I had done online and thought I’d be a guy to ask. The Archdiocese is seeking ways to use new media to meet, talk, etc with young people. We had a chat over the phone and she emailed me some questions to think about.

They’re pretty big questions so I got her permission to paste them here. If you have any responses I’d love to read them. The Archdiocese will also be reading the post, and they’re looking forward to reading what you think. I’ll fill in what I can think of at the moment, and will come back from time to time to add whatever else I can dream up. I’ll post them as separate items on the blog.