Here’s the funny thing. Back in 2014 I published a book: Mediating Faith: Faith Formation In A Transmedia Era. It’s a tour, evaluation, and theological response to the trans-media era. In other words, basically the era all of us were mostly engaging before the pandemic and then during the pandemic found ourselves even more immersed in.
One of my favorite New Testament theologians and avid gamer said of the book:
“It offers the churches, theologians, and the denizens of digitally-mediated environments an informed, experienced, thoughtful pathway into the attentive apprehension of the convergence of ecclesial life with the revolution that suffuses our worlds. Mediating Faith carries the authority of someone who has let the environment teach him its effects, its limitations, its possible promises and betrayals, and above all the signs of the Spirit already at work within the circumstances he narrates. Other such works exoticise digital environments with the bemused distance of a European explorer describing ‘new worlds’ (the condescending *dis*orientalism of pundits unfamiliar with the cultures on which they’re pontificating); Schnekloth sees loveliness and risk and uncertainties, and he introduces his readers to them with generous appreciation and judicious caution.”
—A. K. M. Adam
University of Oxford
Eight years have passed and a lot has changed in the trans-media context. As examples, the growth of some new media has leveled off (e-books take up a portion of the book market but print has held and even regained territory). Other media spaces like Second Life (I include a whole chapter in the book about worshipping in churches in that online virtual world, which I did for a season at St. Matthew’s By the Sea, named after Matthew Shepard of blessed memory) have remained niche rather than mainstream, while at the same time Mark Zuckerberg is busy trying to enclose the entire world (virtual and real) into the meta verse.
And of course, over those eight years we watched some of the largest social media giants rake in massive profits, consolidate wealth (and data) and degrade aspects of our democracy through the proliferation of false information and fake accounts; all while we utilized those platforms as a kind of public utility and relied on them to stay connected while we quarantined.
A core thesis of the book (not original to me, it’s a core insight of media studies) is that communities notice the effects of changes to new media and tend to forget the impact of established media as media. For example, nobody says, “I received a message inscribed on this thing called paper the other day. It’s really weird to get a message that way and you don’t hear a voice.” We’ve grown used to writing on print media. It’s become almost an extension of ourselves. But we notice the effects of new media (those kids are all on their phones) until we don’t (when the adults are also on their phones and nobody notices because we’re all on our phones).
Here at this later awkward stage of the pandemic, I’ve been feeling some guilt that I don’t have all the cutting edge insights available to apply the wisdom I supposedly gained writing a book on media effects. There I was back in 2014 studying MMORPGs and administering a large Facebook network of Lutheran clergy and quoting Marshall McLuhan.
I should be one of the people with all these insights on what’s next in church and new media, right? Nope.
Well, honestly, here’s what I did during the pandemic. I sorted out how to low-key accomplish all the social media we needed to host mediated digitally church during a quarantine.
We live-streamed worship through my iPhone on Facebook Live for almost eighteen months.
We taught our parish how to do communion in their homes.
We used paper letters and seasonal kits to make church tactile even at a distance.
We sent a LOT of e-mails.
We used social media to fund-raise and support hundreds of households struggling to pay their bills.
We experimented with a variety of media resources: a weekly Youtube chat about hymns and their history; book discussions with authors via Zoom; heck we even hosted a congregational meeting via Zoom where we approved facility improvements and when we didn’t have a quorum everybody texted their friends until enough folks were in the meeting.
We went outside for worship a lot.
I used social media as I always do to tell stories, reach out and check in with people, and encourage everyone to do the same.
However, what I’m noticing about myself now in summer of 2022 is that my attention is drawn primarily not to the digitally mediated ways people are still engaging church, but very much to the in-person forms of church life. I even recently wrote a post on pastoral ministry in this moment and (inadvertently?) bracketed mention of digital church attendance.
Why? Well remember, media studies indicate we notice the new, so it’s likely that a return to in-person church means my attention is focused on what’s new. In this case, intriguingly, what’s new isn’t online worship but in-person worship.
The new media is the old media. Huh.
I mean, I wish I had noticed this earlier, but I guess it’s good I’m recognizing it now. And I can interrogate myself about it.
My first question: How can we know what is being effective in digitally mediated church life these days? Honestly, I don’t get a lot of feedback. We get some rough engagement numbers on Youtube because it counts the number of views. And if people add a comment then that’s a form of feedback. And if people give robustly to a fund-raiser (as they did for two we conducted recently, for rent relief and Ukrainian relief), we know they’re connected.
But during the pandemic we didn’t build out the kind of Zoom congregation some churches did (we had a religious trauma Zoom group for a while, and periodic book studies, but those have mostly dissolved now that we returned to in person), so we don’t have a regular group gathering as a digital community to survey.
And I’ll admit, because we aren’t a huge church, we only have capacity to invest energy in a certain number of directions. If we are currently creating new children’s messages for in-person worship (and a follow-up educational e-mail), practicing our music and writing sermons, planning Sunday school lessons for the fall, there’s only so much capacity to also develop an innovative, intentional digital layer of church life. Right now, we offer quite a bit (Sunday live-stream, weekly e-mails, a blog, a significant social media presence), but not much of it is “cutting edge.” I’m not sure what cutting edge would look like, to be honest.
That being said, we have a certain percentage of our congregation who participate at a geographical distance (they live in places like Seattle, Baltimore, Missouri, Poland) and it would be wise of us to think through better what “active” participation in the life of the congregation is for those distance participants, not to mention those who live right here in Northwest Arkansas who for a wide variety of reasons haven’t returned (and may never return) to in-person worship.
We know that many, many people connect to our church through social media. That’s a given. But of course that’s a different way of being together than gathering in a specific place and time. Do we call everyone who is connected through social media part of the congregation?
This leads me to ponder, at least in an early stage, the whole topic of Web3. This is a hot topic these days, with the focus on the Metaverse and NFTs and other technologies.
What is Web 3.0? At it’s most basic, it’s a decentralized form of commodification reliant on blockchain technologies that serve as verification of ownership with non fungible tokens (NFTs). One form of this is cryptocurrency, and of course if you take a look at crypto, you discover that crypto isn’t just a currency but also a community, in many cases an arts community, and that’s quite intriguing if also esoteric still to many people.
Substack, the blog on which I’m writing, is part of Web3. It’s a decentralized form of quasi-commodification. Rather than me writing this long post on a social media platform and posting it, which then is controlled by the platform and it’s secret algorithms, with Substack I publish to a known community, my e-mail list, or those who follow my RSS feed, and it’s commodified in a distributed manner, because instead advertising revenue drummed up by the corporation as the source of funding, instead you as a reader can choose to subscribe, and your subscription (if you pay) financially supports the project and the writer.
A lot remains to be seen as to whether or not Web3 will be truly a decentralized form of commodification, or whether the same people who got rich off the big social media platforms will now get even more rich off NFTs and Web3. It’s too new to tell, but I suspect it will be just as mixed as Web 2.0.
Web 1.0 was truly not commodified. It was funded by the federal government and military, and was “free” for all users in a kind of Wild West way until a few big companies essentially commodified and took up ownership of the whole web (Google, Facebook, Youtube). We don’t have that Web 1.0 anymore. At best, Web3 might capture some of that distributed-network non-capitalist vibe. We’ll see.
Back to church life, we can essentially rely on the fact that the majority of members of any church are using the (always proliferating) social media platforms, so of course there remain beautiful ways for churches to do ministry in media spaces. There’s the personal touch of a phone call or text, the bigger blast of information in a newsletter, or even the old school postcard. Plus micro-communities on Snapchat and Discord or bigger platformed representation on spaces like Twitter or Instagram. I imagine these will remain anchors of healthy church life together.
The only part of church life I’m still really struggling to comprehend, and I feel as much a newbie about this in 2022 as I did back in 2012 when I started writing my book, is how those who participate primarily or exclusively in the life of a local congregation through digital media will have a sense that they are “the people of that church.” I think group identity is important. It’s important to be proud of the groups you are a part of, and to be formed by them. Here at GSLC, we think of ourselves as a “progressive church in the South,” and those affiliated with us either in person or through new media are formed into a people who will make a difference in God’s world the better we sort out how to be a part of one another, distributed as we are.
I think I won’t know the answer to that question until a certain percentage of those participating in that manner in our congregation report back to me what they need, how it’s going, and what it means to them. Until that time, I’ll be mostly still in Web 2.0 and focused on returning to Sunday school this fall, a favorite old school procedural media of mine.
You have such a groovy perspective
CommunityI belong to OSLC Minneapolis, a unique and amazing congregation of active, concerned, very able and participatory laiety that are a real community. Because of age and disability, my wife and I share the community only by on-line participation. Some thoughts.
There needs to be exposure, visually, verbally, and frequently, of all participants.
There MUST be competency by those handling the technology.
Acknowledge the differences between the format of delivery of the worship experience without trying to copy the traditional.
Use the familiar, ie; known hymns everybody sings, simple liturgy, familiar biblical passages, etc.
The members should be allowed the functional role as collective “pastor”.
Do not expect a congregation to pattern after your attending membership, and reinforce the ability to worship and commune in the different format. Your “new” congregation may just be as able to experience the love of Christ and their fellow worshipers as those hearing old fashioned preaching Lutheranism.