The Internet and How It Affects The Modern
Christian Church
When Gutenberg first invented the printing
press, the Christian church had a new way to disseminate information. In the
beginning, it wasn’t cheap and only a few churches could afford it. However, as
the technology got better and more affordable, the church had a good way to put
out the Word in a cheap way. Now the Church has to deal with another information
technology: the Internet. The Internet, invented by the Department of Defense,
has become a widely available information source. The church has the same issues
with the Internet as it did with books when they first came out. For example,
the issue of availability. Some churches, normally the richer ones, could afford
the luxury of written media. At the time of the printing press, most were
illiterate anyways in those areas. You could compare this to today. When the
Internet first became available, only the rich could afford access. Now just
about anyone can get online through libraries, universities and anywhere there
is a modem and an Internet service provider.
The purpose of this class was the issue of
material culture and religion. I am going to discuss how the material, the
Internet, has affected the Christian church. I am going to discuss issues
regarding the relationship of the church to the modern media and how they are
reacting to the Internet, focusing on the issue of community and how community
has changed the church and how the church must change to reflect the community.
Modern media
techniques are a major threat to the print culture of the Christian church. One
issue that the church has is that it tends to deal in obscure language, like
Latin and Old English. For a generation that is used to television, these
languages turn people off. Also, the churches want the media to conform to them,
not the opposite. They demand that the media follow their rules. “We need to do,
in our context, what the writers and translators of the Bible did in their
contexts throughout history – to bring the religion into the communications
systems of our culture.” Boomershine says. The current heads of the churches
need to realize that they need to bring the way they communicate into the modern
arena. This is becoming more prevalent; for example, about fifteen years ago the
St Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church in Tarpon Springs conducted services almost
completely in Greek. As they began to lose membership, especially the younger
membership who no longer spoke Greek in most cases, or didn’t identify with the
high language of the Church, the church switched to one English service, one
Greek service, then switched to mainly English services. Van Den Heuval states
that while people around the world use the most modern technology, the churches
communicate in the language of the “day before yesterday.” He says modern media
techniques are a threat to the “word and print culture” that has been a large
part of the church. He agrees that most churches have no idea they are so far
behind.
Van Den Heuval thinks that
the churches need to be more flexible in dealing with the mass media. He says
that the current churches want the media to “spread only the churches own views.
That is stupid, because the media nowadays are much more influential than the
church. We should serve the media rather than expect them to serve us.” He
believes the church media should “pick up themes hardly treated in the secular
ones.”
Van den Heuval sees the
Internet as becoming a major tool for pastoralizing. However, he does not think
that this should be a role relegated only to clergy, as he believes the laity
knows best what they need. He feels that the church cannot be effective as a
community leader until it knows fully what it’s people need and can deliver
those needs. The same goes for the Internet service of a church. The church
needs to make sure that their Internet offerings have what their people want to
have. One of the primary necessities in building any website is that it have
information people want. A site is not going to get any “hits” or visitors if it
only places on it’s site what the church leaders want, and not what it’s peoples
want.
The Internet offers great
resources for the church. You can find many different facets of Christianity
from the lives of the disciples to the sacraments of the church. You can also
use scriptural search engines. Feeling depressed? Type in the word depression
and you can get a whole list of scripture designed to help you. Or, if you want
to remember a verse you heard a while ago involving righteousness, enter the
word sword and you’ll get a plethora of entries. This can be a boon to the
church, as it makes the word of God more accessible, but that is a mixed
blessing. When you read any book, the sentence you read takes its context from
the sentences around it. Kellner states that “the ability to move around
biblical texts at will and find references instantly may end up lessening our
understanding” of the Scripture. He says these programs are unable to give these
messages in context, which can have the same effect as only listening to one
part of a conversation, especially the only part someone wanted to hear.
The Internet, as part of the
new and more interactive media, has redefined the sense of Christian community.
The community has shifted from denominational focus to a focus on the issues.
Local congregations and special interests are replacing national church
bureaucracies as the major force in community. Instead of denominational ties,
the dividing lines are now the role of women, gay rights and abortion. (Shopping
117)
“We don’t have a lot of time
to fiddle around with whether we’re in this denomination or that one,” says Fox.
“I challenge you to find any twenty-year-old who can tell the difference between
a Presbyterian, a Lutheran, a Methodist, an Episcopalian, and a Roman Catholic.
And who cares?” Fox is a minister who criticizes the church for its emphasis on
redemption and original sin. He now calls himself a “post denominational
priest.” (SHOPPING, 25)
How does Christianity define
community now, when the lines are so blurry? Do you still define community as
the church, it’s physical location and actual people inside the church and their
activities? Or do you begin to have a new definition of community that grows and
changes to involve people from all over the world in a chat room, or the patrons
of a website?
“Can we have real community
without real location and authentic relationships? We seem to be using the
concept of community too loosely and superficially,” says Schultze, but he is
not willing to give up completely on the subject of community through
cyberspace. Kellner agrees. He says the “incarnational nature” of Christianity
is not honored when we can remain connected to people around the world, but
neglect our physical surroundings like our family and church. It is important
that the physical community still be a major part of the Christian movement or
it’s fragmentation and loss of members might increase.
Another threat to the
community that the internet brings it that as the doctrines of the church become
more unimportant to people, as the secular religion becomes more important, the
experimental elements of religion will become more prevalent. (Shopping)
The “pick and choose”
approach to faith will continue in the coming century, as well as the desire to
“take what is wonderful and good.” (Shopping) People in the modern day, in the
age of political correctness, don’t want to hear anything they think is
negative.
New technology will forge
direct links between believers and religious groups, thus bypassing
denominations and bypassing geography. (Shopping, 113) It is easier to do this
due to the ease of creating a website. An unofficial group from a church can now
put out information as easily as the church home. A Catholic sect can put out a
website as easy as the Vatican. Free sites like Homestead and Geocities offer
easy and free ways to get started in putting out theology on the Internet. You
can also set up virtual communities, bulletin boards where doctrine, news and
information can be disseminated and received, all without ever seeing a
parishioner or leaving your easy chair. It also makes the faith more accessible
to others, where they can get easy and often free information.
One case where this didn’t
quite work as it was planned: the controversial Church of Scientology, founded
by science fiction author L. Ron. Hubbard. They started an electronic bulletin
board system, or BBS, namely alt.religion.scientology designed to introduce
people to the basic teachings of the Church. However, the BBS became full of not
messages from seekers, but views of the critics of the Church. These criticisms
took over the BBS. This BBS does still exist, and criticisms still far outweigh
support on the site.
The church needs to define
what it is going to be in the new century and the new media. Are they going to
sit back and let the community get away from them, or are they going to embrace
the new definition of community and bring it’s membership into the new era? The
internet has millions of possibilities for the church if the church is willing
to embrace them.
Bibliography
Cimino, Richard and Lattin, Don. Shopping for
Faith: American Religion in the New Millenium. C. 1998 Jossey-Bass
Publishers. California.
Kellner, Mark A. Losing
our Souls in Cyberspace. Christianity Today. V. 41, p 54 –5
Wired Religion.
The Christian Century. V. 114 p. 1183
Gutenberg Church,
Internet World.
The Christian Century.
V. 117 p. 173-4
Schulze, Quentin J. Lost
in the Digital Cosmos, The Christian Century V 117 p 178 - 83