fishers, surfers and casters

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.

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.