In my line of work, people often hold teleconferences: either entirely virtual meetings, where everybody phones in, or hybrid meetings, where some people sit in a room with a speakerphone, and those who can't be there in person dial in. This has become a very inexpensive way to talk. How did our church fellowships come to miss out on this kind of thing? Some are apparently very good at video-casting the preacher, but what about providing for those who are away from home: why shouldn't they dial into the prayer meeting, or the home fellowship group?
It could be that I'm just ahead of the curve here, but I don't think so. It could be that the cost, though low, is still too great for our average fellowship. Or it could be that we don't really value meeting together quite as much as we say we do. If we did, of course, we could go one stage further and provide such facilities for those who are too infirm to leave their own house. Sure, there are technical hurdles to be overcome, but if they can use a phone, they can join a teleconference. Do we value everyone in The Fellowship, or do we just say that we do?
A different take on a similar topic comes in this news article from a rather incredulous BBC reporter. A New York church offers a prayer ministry via the world-wide web: send in your prayer request, and they will pray. How neat! The reporter is keen to point out that prayer has not been scientifically verified (and I have to say that some kinds of intercessory prayer do make me most uneasy; very confused about how we understand prayer) but that does not seem to be an unreasonable problem: those who do not believe, do not need to participate (as pray-ers, or prayer-requesters; I guess they may be the subject of prayers, but if they don't believe prayer has any power, I presume they won't mind).
Communications technology is really transforming the world. Are we ever going to dare to let it transform church, or is church going to be forever stuck in the 16th century?
4 comments:
It all depends on what you're idea of community is, or what, specifically, the "church" feels that you need from it. For instance, you can access tons of podcasts from all over the place (not that this is a bad thing, I listen to a few sermon podcasts a week), or, the youth group that my wife works with knew that a bunch of kids couldn't make a retreat they went on, so they streamed live everything from the music down to the lesson.
So, if the idea of what you need is to be preached at, then we're doing a decent job at adapting our assemblies to fit the internet generation. If your idea of community is interpersonal relationship (of a triadic level or higher) then we fail terribly.
I guess I would probably hold out against the latter, for some reason a relationship formed with actual physical conversation seems more stable, or perhaps deeper, than one formed with pixels on a screen, or rendered audio through speakers.
Thanks for the comment.
Yes, I guess the church at large has been good at doing `instruction' via the technology of the day -- whether televanglists (shudder) or podcasts. And indeed many assemblies have (sometimes inexplicably) carefully recorded each sermon on cassette tape - Christians have been slow at switching to CD, let alone MP3 for this, but it's surprisingly hard to pin down cost-effective robust technology for doing that.
Streaming the youth group camp sounds like an excellent plan.
But, as you indicate, we do at least lip-service to the assembly being a whole lot more than that; to the value of every person, not just the preacher. However, we don't invest much effort in that beyond hoping that people will turn up at appointed times and places.
Of course the best way to develop that community is together - in prayer, conversational bible study, over coffee [I think the coffee-time is easily the best bit of the home group I belong to], by walking in the countryside, or sharing a movie together. But what about those baby-sitting, those frequently travelling for work, those who can't get out of the house. We have the means to involve them, too. But we don't bother.
Food for thought. Thanks. Two slightly tangential comments:
1. if they don't believe prayer has any power, I presume they won't mind I was really startled to have an acquaintance vehemently announce that she'd heard that Christians (generally) were praying for a category of people to which she belongs, and that she wanted me NOT to pray for her. I tried suggesting that if she doesn't believe in prayer in the first place, it was silly to get upset, but this just made her angrier and I had to switch conversational tactics pretty quickly.
2. is church going to be forever stuck in the 16th century? I think this could make a fun ice-breaking question or blog meme - What century is your church stuck in? ;)
Ruth, aha; thank you!
As I wrote that line about presumed indifference, I did wonder. There could, of course, be a concern about privacy, but it doesn't sound as if that was the concern of your interlocutor. Perhaps we can say that prayer has a power all of its own...
As for the meme, I like that :-) I'm not sure how to choose.
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