Conversation on Tuesday 14th July - Subject Area: MIssion in the Digital Space

 

Mark – moved from street evangelism, now interested in online mission – is it a tangible culture or many cultures?

How do we get from Digital to Real in terms of becoming an authentic Christian influence without invading territory?  CONTACT _Con-3AAF8B181 \c \s \l Navin Motwani, Archbishop’s Council

Consider digital culture to be my culture and here to offer my experience but other than that here to listen – Rachel Collinson, Rechord

John, Scripture Union - I am concerned about children and young people.

Peter – Jerusalem Trust – 20 years co-producing public service TV programmes and as PSB declines we’re trying to get into the internet with more specific messages but bringing with us the virtues of humour, watchability. Dividing line between entertaining and evangelisation that we’re exploring.

Daniel – Church of Sweden – Director of biggest website in Sweden for Christian youth.

Nicola – Run online ‘services’ for young people. Asnwering questions. People can subscribe. Relatively successful community. We set up messageboards and blogs and people just don’t. Online church is anonymous. People are so keen to hide their identity. How can you create community among people who can’t even put their hand up and say they are a Christian or want to be? People are emailing us a lot which is getting to be quite a workload. It’s wonderful to be abe to do that but how do you resource it without a physical community?

Ruth from Taiwan but studying in Finland. Studying digital culture. Writing thesis on Christianity in the Digital Space. Studying a Taiwanese website. Would like to know about mission in the Western world in terms of Asia and what kind of mission is it possible to achieve? The website that I’ve been trying to write about is focusing on students. IT’S quite interesting – designed as an interstellar space. Finding planets to explore presenting different theological topics. There is different interactions between users – a community planet with different neighbourhoods and guardian angels. 

If Christians are creating a website to attract people to join, will it be more effective if they use Facebook instead?

Karen – Diocese of Hexham and Newcastle – part of diocesan evangelism team. Information for DE team, events etc, and monthly newsletter for evangelists. Then there is a section called a seeker centre. Developed in connection with Catholic centre for evangelisation. Way for people to connect with local course – RC equivalent to Alpha. Info about becoming a Catholic, podcasts and comments from Catholics. Interested in developing this further.

Steve Hollinghurst – Church Army

How much of training in cross-cultural mission would translate to an online context? If that’s the case, I would always say that how do we move from an attractional mission base (ie coming to us) to a cross-cultural outreach (ie going to them). IF you do successful incarnational mission online, does that inevitably lead to indigenous expression of church online? From there what is the connection with offline, to bringing to reality the Kingdom of God?

Questions of online culture:

Anonymity

Parameters

What does it mean to do incarnational mission?

How does it relate to Christian community?

What does that mean for offline reality and discipleship and Kingdom translation?

Multiple identity – people will always be themselves at the core. We can put on masks but they are temporary and not very deep. We all spend time thinking about how different we are, but actually we are all the same underneath. Behind the avatar is a real lost person.

I spend years doing cross-cultural mission in France. I saw huge numbers of missionaries arrive and go away as broken people a few years later. People who came, did 2 weeks of mission and went away thinking they knew about digital culture. That’s almost worse than admitting you know nothing. 

I am wondering if the church should have more to do with the original internet culture of ARPANet etc, about open source, pride in your work, craft, open source, not slapping a copyright symbol on things like most churches who claim copyright on their blogs and so on.

But don’t you think we have to meet people where they are and try and speak to them there rather than wishing it was like the old days?

Copyright – about the money or about the right to be asserted as the author? Will loss of copyright mean that the church has less income? Copyright is about more than money.

We are in a classic cross-cultural mission conversation here. What do we say we are for and against as Christians?

There are 2 potential issues cross-culturally – for those who are digital natives, has Christianity always felt at home for you in a digital environment? 

I’ve been online since I was 11. My relationship with Jesus has always felt at home as long as I was trying to be more holy, but I have been given no theological tools by the church to address a lot of the questions of digital culture. I’ve had to make it up as I go along, just me and Jesus.

That’s very similar to what people say about their work life.

The church has been very slow to pick up on this.

There is a massive institutional fear about the internet. What I say on Twitter is monitored at my workplace and if I say the wrong thing, it gets picked up by the media as ‘the Church of England says this’.

Isn’t this just the same as the sacred/secular divide? Do you have to be a community to welcome people in? Mission probably begins with 2 people who go out and form a community with people who were not Christians.

Our site we realized became evangelistic almost by accident as people were typing in to Google ‘becoming a catholic’ and finding out site and I realized this is an evangelistic opportunity.

Good quality informational sites are really important. Needless to say we are not the only religious community to ask these questions. Most faith groups had largely abandoned it because it was impossible to get new members through the internet. They failed because people didn’t make personal connections. It was an enquiry base. How do you get people through the door from there? 

The Catholic Church now has a YouTube channel which is amazing for the Catholic Church. How do we go from there to offline? We need to be conscious of the real world as well as the virtual world. Vis the Matrix? We really need to connect up with what’s really happening.

How might we make online relationships? Both that support Christians online but also engage with non-Christians online.

I think you need virtual missionaries, and define their role. My own personal cut on it is to say ‘I am arriving as a missionary’ and introduce everything about my culture and come and try it. You can see that happening on the internet. The other approach is to become more French than the French. I become a poor carbon copy. To be an effective missionary you need to be able to create a 2-way critique. Teaching the sending country and also criticizing the receiving country.

Shouldn’t it be about equipping the people already within the country to do mission and resourcing them? 

But how do you find the person that’s willing to run with that?

How can they critique the culture if they are already within it? That seems to be to me the worst possible means of transformation.

So it’s about saying ‘I have things to share and I have things to learn’. That’s one of the key challenges for us then.

There is a role for apostolic figures who travel between places in cultures – community creators, who tend to empower people to carry on the vision who are indigenous. I think that’s quite a good model so I think we probably do need digital apostles. I think you follow the principle of the 72 – you keep traveling until you find a place where you’re allowed to stop. 

If you were an online apostle now though where would you start?

In the chat rooms, because that’s where you chat with people. That’s where you’re allowed to chat to people. I try to find conversations that are interesting – talking about life issues or people who are sharing at a deep level. I’ll hang around and join in and see how the discussion develops.

What about the suicide girls website? Should we send people to that?

Yes that’s very sensible. But use cross-cultural principles. Listen. Get to know the key people. Understand the language. Make sure you understand. Don’t just leap straight in – you can easily fail to communicate with anybody.

Recognising that we’re not in a monoculture – digital is about tribes. Paul chose places strategically. Where are our strategic places?

You have to start by exploring. Large amounts of users – could be strategic. From that point of view Second Life looks interesting. But in reality it’s actually quite hard to engage with people and lots of people at that.

But chat rooms – for every conversation you have, several 100 people may be looking at it. In other cases you may be thinking how do I get to people who are in themselves key and influential?

What about YouTube and MySpace?

YouTUbe’s got to be good. 

Your question about creating content that can be viewed by a lot of people. Susan Boyle – the viral effect. 

Why would I go and even look at a Christian clip on YouTube if I’m not thinking about going to church?

Because it’s fun. Because it’s good. That’s actually true about a lot of our gospel presentation. A lot of our evangelism assumes that people were raised in church. We need to think – why would people be interested? It’s about making Christianity attractive rather than believable first of all.

I used to moonlight as a clergyman. Most of the people I worked with knew the gospel. Now we’ve left that far behind. When I say to somebody it’s Whitsun maybe 1 in 50 would know what I was talking about. I had a tremendous argument with the BBC over them trying to finish the Passion on Easter Sunday. I said – that’s just the beginning of the story. We are in a Marcionite period. The Bible Society is wasting its time trying to add the OT to its books because it’s ignored and unknown.

As a youth worker, how should we engage in online relationships?

Do people here use online chat rooms?

The Christian – Muslim ones tend to degenerate into dreadful arguments.

I tried going into a chat room and got PM’d all the time and asked for dates. I had to pull out because it was just too hard work and very draining. Where is your own support network?

Exactly the same is true offline though. You are 1 or 2 missionaries in a foreign country.

But you have a sending church there.

You’ve said exactly the right thing. Online missionaries require exactly the same support that offline missionaries require. It’s very pioneering at the moment. I meet a lot of people doing online mission work in this way. They are largely below the radar. There are real tasks – how do we find these people and support them?

In Sweden we hardly have any Christian chat websites – we have mostly secular chat rooms – and talking to people on them has been really successful and really good. We had one big community where 90% of all the Christian youth were. The Christian forum was bigger than the sex forum for a while. Really good conversations and cross-denominational too. You could ask a question about baptisms and get 4 different answers from 4 different denominations. We could refer people to churches online – email contact firsthand, and then we don’t know what happened after that. 

There is the danger that we don’t look at what’s gone before. 

A lot of the pioneering work is church planting and nobody is thinking how does this relate to the church in history or what has gone before?

Suicide girls – this is unlikely to be my mission field as I don’t tick either of the boxes! So okay, somebody wanders in there and convinces a teenage girl not to go down that path – you’ve stripped away her reason for being there. Then what do you do? Say go along to this Anglican church? That’s not going to cut it. We need to offer them a new tribe – replaces the good things they were getting out of that community. She’s come out of this group unless she’s a very strong individual she’s going to go back.

My question would then be: I’m a bit apprehensive about a church on Second Life, or an online church – at some point they need to have an offline church. In order to move forward you need to go somewhere where you have an offline discussion, a real-life setting.

There are steps though – we find churches for people to go to. But there are still huge barriers, crossing the threshold. 

That’s why I want to ask questions about the Kingdom of God. You can’t fulfil a vision for the Kingdom of God entirely online. Online faith must have an offline application. The question is how to understand the process for that. 

We’re not saying everything about bricks church is bad. Bricks church has to change so that we’re geared up to receiving people from online connections.

If we portray church as this really funky thing they’ll be very disappointed when they actually go there. You might do more harm than good. 

My fear about online church as a starting point is that everything from cross-cultural mission tells me that if we create a tribe before we get down with the people in the culture, that tribe will be created to suit the missionaries rather than the people. 

The days of a big monolithic church that suits everybody have now gone. The idea that Fresh Expressions offer different ways of being church – that’s a possibility. New forms of church. The second thing that’s very strong in the em church world is the new monasticism. Whether you are in Torquay or Newcastle, you can find people who share your values. 

What about online spiritual direction?

How many suicide sites are there?

Huge numbers have been shut down but they keep popping up. There is some really horrible stuff out there.  I saw a Satanist site about how and why you should kill yourself.

I’m interested in the fact that you say that it’s a Satanist site. Remember the whole of Western Europe was converted because they targeted the tribal leaders. Go for the people who set up the websites and engage them.

Why does nobody question the use of Facebook? Everybody questions Nestle but nobody questions the corporation of Facebook.

But if Nestle had a garden where 200 million people hang out, I’d go in there. I’d want to be a subversive force inside it.

I think what he’s saying is that we shouldn’t adopt it uncritically. Young people don’t have the skills to criticize Facebook.

But Facebook is an extraordinary opportunity. I have had amazing conversations with atheist and muslim friends who’ve actually initiated conversations with me about Christian stuff. 

But that’s you discussing with your fringe like churches do. What about the unstructured billions about there? 

But there are discussion boards on Facebook where I go and I choose them because people are really genuinely seeking and have chosen to seek. There’s a lot of hysteria in the media about groups getting closed down because they are Christian and so on. But I think that probably underlying those things is people who don’t know how to communicate properly. It’s all about how you do it. 

Facebook is an alien culture. You need to understand it before you go into it. Let’s recognize that’s what we are doing. It’s not necessarily a land of milk and honey. You can’t just say Facebook is heaven. It isn’t any of that stuff.

When will Facebook disappear? How do we know where to go?

Look at Twitter.

I think one of the reasons MySpace started to go downhill was when News International bought it. Now it’s just about discovering new music. Facebook was designed to facilitate interaction with people at the local University. It will always be there because it’s about facilitating communities. 

Where the technology is heading is a convergence to the mobile phone. You’ll be doing it when you’re out and about. That will change a lot of things.

That’s a continuation of the process of change with computing. Preaching is a very high content media. What I’ve learned about interaction on chat sites is that you can only go for minimal content. That’s challenging for how we communicate our faith. Some Christians put up monstrous posts that are page after page and people just don’t read them. They haven’t made the translation away from online sermon mode. That’s quite challenging because you want to be nuanced. It’s going to get even worse when we start doing it from mobile phones. 

You have to make the content shorter, much smaller, and to some extent have to be able to sometimes do without sound. Visuals work without sound in the way that TV doesn’t allow. If you stand in Liverpool St Station and look at Sky’s socking great screen, you still get the news. With Christian content on mobiles you have to have short, and the possiblitiy of no sound.

Competition is much greater. With St Pixels we had silent prayer times – absurd. – because we were competing with a whole load of other stuff. Even if I’m silent in one window, I’m active in a lot of other windows. The next version of St Pixels I hope will be active on mobile phones where it will compete with the whole of life! Not just my living room.

That’s why Twitter is so good because it forces us to condense our message. If you’re only getting bite-sized chunks of information, it fits in.

But isn’t that going backwards rather than forwards?

But isn’t Twitter tantalizing people and then not taking them anywhere? 

No – you just put a link in your tweet.

You have to take the long-term view. You’re creating an awareness. It’s about the long-term relationships. You have to really introduce people to Jesus first and then your organization. Let’s get rid of the Christian adverts – but it’s sad because you have to do that to keep the Bishop happy. The church is more advertorial than many companies. 

I’m trying to translate offline to online, so bear in mind the cultural issues. Offline we have the same problem that there are good people out there who make connections but where next? Church, even good church, is simply too big a jump. What I have seen in offline things that work well is that they have 3 levels of experience.

Christians working in the environment and meeting people.

Neutral space where we agree we want to talk about this further. (A group called We are Spiritual Travellers Together.)

Discipleship.

But then all the Wiccans will descend. 

But that’s great because you can talk far more in-depth about Christianity with Wiccans than you can on your own. But where a lot of groups go wrong is they think once they’ve reached level 3 they can collapse levels 1 and 2 and then the whole work disappears.

People working with young people in cathedrals found that young people want 3 things:

Anonymity

Predictability

A class act

We get loads of young people in our cathedral. They do it because they can access the cathedral in that way. Interestingly it doesn’t seem to beother them that it’s high Anglican. They seem to like that. The challenge is getting them from contact to community. 

On the road out of Gothenburg to another big city, there are 2 big billboards that say ”God loves you” and “Jesus wants you”. A lot of people have started going to church in Gothenburg because of those billboards, but it’s the local Pentecostal church that does it and they haven’t benefited.

Do bear in mind that in Sweden there is a strong background of sundayschool and church attendance. 

On St Pixels people ask us “Tell me what to believe” and we tell them “Be comfortable with your doubts.” That’s not actually answering the question! Way to evangelise! Part of the tendency with this is to have one size fits all. We need lots of different expressions each of which works in its own context.

I think language here might help us. When people ask questions, they look for people to go where they think they might find them. Sometimes people stumble into Cathedrals and find things there they didn’t expect. There will be places you can go – sacred spaces – where you can go that you can experience God. People are looking for sacred spaces.

I do consultancy for cathedrals and look at this and it’s exactly the same with websites.

Shouldn’t we be trying to recapture all of that and say that everything is sacred? We need to get that message across.

“All social networks are ways that people are trying to touch the sacred.” – Kester Brewin. Let’s bear in mind that quote when we use websites and social networking sites.

People are really looking for sacred spaces – see the massive number of hits on the Jesuit Sacred Space site. People are looking for places where they can ask questions. Places where they can pray. A sacred, holy place to be in, where they can find wholeness in themselves. That needs to exist both online and offline.

While you were saying that I was thinking of the Catholic Cathedral in Clifton where they used the old skills of broadcasting. They made little snippets that tell stories, using great broadcasting values. It won the Sony Award! This is a Catholic Cathedral website with a story of his wife’s battle with cancer. It won because it was put together properly. We can learn a lot from advertising because they are so experienced in condensing a message into a few seconds.

I find myself torn between the idea that everything is sacred and that there are ‘thin places’ that are somehow easier to connect with God in than others. It’s easier because there’s less of the other distractions. 

I was thinking about sacred spaces and prayer. Giving people the opportunity to pray. I’ve been thinking about congregational participation. I took part in an online service where people had obviously been waiting just for the moment when they could pray. They were impatient to pray. I’m interested in an online space with different prayer rooms – offering people the chance to pray and be prayed for. 

We are closing opportunities for people to pray in churches during the day – what about online places where people can pray? 

That’s a really good idea.

That would be really cool.

I’ve always found the idea of sacred space ridiculous, but I’ve realized since doing mission online that it genuinely does make a difference. We set up a chat room and called one room ‘the sanctuary’. There was one user who would go into the sanctuary, do nothing and then come out again. For her that actually meant something even though it was just the word at the top of the screen that said sanctuary. You don’t have to work hard for a space to become sacred for somebody.

There’s clearly a real need here. How do we create sacred spaces for people? How do we find other people’s sacred spaces and participate with them in those spaces?

I want clarification on something. I think it’s great if people have a quiet time, but how do we know they’re genuinely engaging with God? Is being online a distraction? Do people need to be in front of a computer to do it? I think we could spend a long time just playing with technology, but I’m interested in seeing people saved. 

You face exactly the same in every cross-cultural missionary situation. It’s a very long slow process. We think if people have formed a community in 5 years they’re doing incredibly well. Are we just having a useless engagement or is there something developing? I heard a question in there about how do I know I’m connecting to God anyway? When I go out into a field, do I connect with God? Does God have to be in a box labeled church? I understand the issue of distraction – is it that we have a problem with information overload? Or if there is something that is more attractive, why is it more attractive? Have we been so bad about presenting the gospel that people are not drawn to the gospel?

We need to recognize that people are different and have different styles. Distraction for one person is background for another.

For me, I often go into work half an hour early. I log into the Jesuit site to pray. I do it mainly because it’s there, because it helps me pray. If I didn’t do that I’d read the news or do something else. I do it because it’s there. We need a presence for people. 

Action Points Suggested