Becoming Digitally-Integrated Church

A Media Scholar and a Church Staff Advisor Reflect on How Our Online Lives are Shaping Religious Practice Today—And How Churches can Respond, Connect, and Engage Online and Off

Posted in 21stCenturyCulture, 21stCenturyMinistry, Becoming Church, DigitalMinistry.

A decade and a half ago, Heidi’s book, Exploring Religious Communities Online, documented how traits of early forms of online religious communities emerging in the late 1990s posed both a potential challenge and opportunity to offline churches. These early “virtual communities,” as they were referred to, grew out of the web 1.0 era of email lists, newsgroups, and... Read more

Jesus is the tweet. You are the hashtag.

Reflecting on Life in the Digitally-Integrated Church

Posted in 21stCenturyCulture, 21stCenturyMinistry, DigitalMinistry, Re-mediating Religion.

Editors Note: Each month, Bearings contributors offer insights on a key theme in the practice of life-as-ministry. As the final installment in the issue, The BTS Center’s scholar-in-residence Pamela Shellberg, PhD reflects on the articles in the issue and poses questions for further reflection by Bearings readers and the communities in which life-as-ministry plays... Read more

Re-Mediating the Global, Digital Body of Christ

A Conversation with Media Scholar Heidi Campbell

Posted in 21stCenturyMinistry, DigitalMinistry, Re-mediating Religion.

For more than a decade, new media, religion, and digital culture scholar Heidi Campbell of Texas A&M has been exploring the ways that the internet, social media, and other digital technologies engage with the religious and spiritual practices of ordinary people. Her more than seventy articles, books, and edited volumes have mapped how digital social networks... Read more

Hashtagging the Good News of Social Media

Posted in 21stCenturyCulture, 21stCenturyMinistry, DigitalMinistry.

I thought about writing this piece the old fashioned way, with words forming sentences forming paragraphs and so on. But I realized that instead of writing an essay about hashtags, Twitter, and the good news of social media, the piece itself should embody its own content. As Marshall McLuhan reminded us in 1964, “the medium is the message.” The form of the medium... Read more

Re-Mediation in the D-I-Y Church

Posted in 21stCenturyMinistry, 21stCenturyMission, DigitalMinistry, Re-mediating Religion, Themes.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a passage from the Gospel of John in which Jesus reminds Peter that our youthful vigor and self-determination will always fade. “Very truly, I tell you” Jesus says, “when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will... Read more

Searching for the End of the Internet

Posted in DigitalMinistry, Websites.

You may remember a commercial that DirecTV ran back in 2002, touting its then state-of-the-art DSL internet service. The ad featured a guy sitting in front of his huge desktop computer. He supposedly was able to surf online so fast that a message popped up on his screen: “You have reached the end of the internet. You have seen everything there is to see. Please... Read more

This is the Way We’ve Always Done Things …

Posted in ChurchChange, DigitalMinistry.

This is the way we’ve always done things. Now, there’s a phrase that brings about a sense of impending doom in my heart, especially when it comes to the practices of communities of faith. In part, our love of familiar practices comes from finding comfort in the apparent stability of structures. Yet as a Jesus-follower, I sometimes wonder if finding comfort... Read more

Re-Mediating Religion by Turning Up the Social Media Volume on Social Justice

Posted in 21stCenturyCulture, 21stCenturyMinistry, ChurchChange, DigitalMinistry.

Earlier this year, one of our award-winning Bearings contributors, Kelly Baker, wrote a piece about the challenges, for white people in particular, of thinking through and talking about racism. Especially with other white people, including goodhearted, well-intentioned, ideologically liberal white people. Often, we just don’t want to hear about it. We get it.... Read more

Women in Ministry

Is Social Media the Great Equalizer?

Posted in 21stCenturyMinistry, ChurchChange, DigitalMinistry.

I write this on the last day of Women’s History Month. Over on my Twitter account, I spent the month highlighting—via the hashtag #BlackChurchHERStory—African American women religious leaders alive today who have been trailblazers in ministry and in the academy. These pioneers range from the likes of Rev. Dr. Yvonne Delk, who in 1974 became the first African American... Read more

A Church of Storymakers

Posted in 21stCenturyCulture, 21stCenturyMinistry, DigitalMinistry.

The first time I saw a woman preach from the pulpit was in seminary. I grew up in a traditional Presbyterian church made up of Korean immigrants and their children. The leaders of the church were all Korean men, along with one African American man. The pastor, youth leaders, and teachers were always male. Meanwhile, women taught Sunday School to the children... Read more