Emerging church bloggers in Australia
This thesis will delve into and expound the ongoing identity project of emerging church bloggers in Australia. The goal will be approached from three perspectives. Firstly, this thesis will explore how those involved in the emerging church movement use blogging to construct individual religious identities. Secondly, relationships between participants in the Australian emerging church blogging community will be studies to determine how an emerging church identity is constructed within the blogosphere. Thirdly, the thesis will seek to understand how the Australian emerging blogosphere contributes to an emerging church identity for the offline world. All three angles will work to address the following research questions:
How do those involved in the emerging church conversation use blogging technology to construct individual and communal online religious identities?
How do emerging church bloggers in Australia contribute to the construction of an Australian emerging church identity?
The research begins from the premise that identity on the Internet is a discursive construction. Moreover, it assumes that identity construction is a reflexive process, that undergoes continuous formation through relationships, and that, at least online, these relationships are also discursively constructed. Thus discourse analysis will be the main method of analysis for this research. How bloggers consider their relationship to their computers, the Internet, blogging and its software, other bloggers, the emerging church movement, Christianity, church and society will all be considered as acts of discourse, through which their understanding of themselves in relations to these partners will emerge.
Other methods of analysis will also be used. Tools of network analysis will be employed to uncover how bloggers are connected to produce an Australian emerging church blogosphere, inside a global network. Content analysis of both Christian and secular media texts will work to highlight how bloggers in the emerging church conversation are perceived as contributing to the construction of a mediated construction of the emerging church in the offline world.
This thesis will provide insights into the following issues:
- How religious attitudes towards the Internet and blogging contribute to the way people interact online.
- What contributions and constraints blogging software, and people’s use of it, offer the construction of online identity.
- How bloggers work together to construct an emerging church theology, ecclesiology and missiology.
- How authority is distributed among emerging church bloggers, in relation to other systems of authority both online and offline.
- The place of the emerging church in the current tensions of 21st century Australian religious sociology.
This research is placed within a short but well-established tradition of research into religion online. A broader ambition of this thesis will be to address concerns that are current among researchers in the field, and propose new directions for research into religion online for the next decade.
