Collide Magazine

Technology and the Virtual Church

Cynthia Ware - Originally posted Tuesday, June 10, 2008 -

How we view technology determines how we will evangelize and equip the next generation...

A New Thing: Seekers and Skeptics Divide 

The second chapter of the book of Acts records the dramatic arrival of God's Spirit in the newly founded Church. As a group of believers waited in the upper room of a home in Jerusalem the promised Spirit arrived, announcing himself with a completely unexpected demonstration. The believers suddenly spoke in languages they had never learned and could not understand. As excitement spilled out into the public square, a curious and startled crowd divided itself in response—seekers and skeptics. The seekers responded with amazement, wondering out loud, "Whatever could this mean?" But the skeptics reacted with mockery, concluding, "They're drunk."

Seekers and skeptics are born to every generation and mingle in every crowd. Seekers are receptive to the miraculous, responding with amazement and a vibrant inquisitiveness. They are forward-looking and search for meaning behind the miraculous, alert for the possibilities phenomenal events imply. They welcome dialog, ask many questions, and listen for answers.

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Skeptics, though, habitually reject new works with confident scorn, implying or even declaring that work of the Spirit is, in fact, the work of the flesh. They sit above fresh movements with disdain, their judgment separating them from seekers. Avoiding dialog, skeptics instead declare their rejection and denial of the miraculous.

Thus, extraordinary new things—whether fashioned by the hand of man or worked by God—become the litmus test of our heart's receptivity to the dynamically new.

Technological Miracles: Our New Thing
This generation may well be viewed in history as the "Era of Technological Revolution." As Moore's Law illustrates, the rate of technical innovation is exponential: Microchips get half as small, twice as fast as the previous generation, or computing capacity gets twice as large in half the time. And highly advanced technology can seem quite miraculous initially. Thus, rapidly emerging technological innovations—like God-breathed miracles—often produce the usual divide of skeptics and seekers. Yet these innovations—from nanotechnology to robotics, from genetic engineering to fabrication, or from microchips to Web 2.0 applications—all require a thoughtful, prudent response beyond the initial rush to enthusiasm or censure. We must think carefully and respond wisely both to the inventions themselves as well as to a culture transformed by scientific progress and the looming prospects of technological singularity.

For those of us living on this side of the digital divide, our computer-mediated culture is quickly becoming multimedia-centric. We reject the analog in favor of the digital because, after all, "digital is better." Binary data is the new currency, and even our currency contains binary data. Soon not only will every thing be wired, every one will be wired—or wireless. As the Pew Internet & American Life Project reports, three out of ten Americans are already technologically "elite." Whether we are natural seekers or wary skeptics, a future dominated by virtual means is inexorable.

This is at once both inspiring and intimidating. We may view the march of technology with wonder, anticipating its bright potential, but we also dread our growing reliance on technology and its dark potential to control our lives. We rely on being globally connected yet are uneasy with the attendant loss of privacy and independence. While online identities promise anonymity, online data mining search-bots eliminate it. Possibility and inevitability stand in dynamic opposition; a tension common to so many aspects of our postmodern lives.

Although an entirely virtual world might still sound overly futuristic, within a generation or two the world will move from a primarily analog-augmented existence to a digitally-dependent one. The effects of the 20th century's Industrial Revolution and its streamlined mass production pale when compared to the potential outworking of the Technological Revolution already underway. Our generation could see transformations we can only imagine—manipulating matter at the atomic level, transcending spatial boundaries, and potentially engineering life. We will be forced to wrestle these impending ethical challenges, seeking the heart of God for situations with no historical precedents.

Envisioning what the world may look like for our children is too often the business of futurists and visionaries, but it should also be the work of strategic Christ-followers. We are the people who believe all of history is simply a backdrop for the divinely unfolding fulfillment of His story. We are the people called and commissioned to use every available cultural means to spread the gospel and equip believers. We are the people who can explore and communicate our faith online, capitalizing on technological opportunities when we see them.

Technology itself is neither good nor evil; its use, not its essence, defines it. As messengers of the Kingdom, we are mandated to proclaim from one generation to the next all the wonderful works of God. Seekers will do this by using every communication tool and medium available. If we want to speak to the Internet Generation (iGeneration) with any relevance, we will need more than a megaphone to raise our voices above the din. To even be admitted to the conversation we will need to abandon our skepticism and embrace online communication technologies. We must engage our changing culture in their native vernacular—with interactive conversation.

We must become seekers, sensitive and responsive to the possibilities inherent in each miraculous innovation whether positive or negative.

Christian seekers who recognize the Internet as today's marketplace of ideas, a modern-day Corinth, will find themselves investing time there, anticipating that the next generation will be raised with pervasive virtuality. The next generation will take online access for granted, unable to imagine a world without forums, email, texting, Wikipedia, MySpace, imageboards, meta-data, moblogging or YouTube. But the Christian skeptics—purposefully detached from the iGeneration and scornfully ignorant of the streets and back-alleys of cyberspace—will disdain time "squandered" on the Internet, leaving the vast mission-field of the iGeneration unperceived, misunderstood, and un-evangelized.

A New Challenge for the Church

Even as we speculate and dream about applications and implications coming from science and high-tech breakthroughs, we also wonder about the effectiveness and trajectories of tomorrow's Church. Institutionalized Christianity is confronted with new challenges every day, and there is mounting evidence that we must respond with change. Charged with being—irrelevant, socially apathetic, outmoded, program-driven, hypocritical, bureaucratic, disengaged and hierarchically authoritarian—seekers and skeptics alike are starting to pay attention. In our postmodern world, rock stars are viewed with more credibility for acting upon their interpretations of Scripture than are trained pastors and priests. Many argue that the Church, while striving to remain theologically sound and historically orthodox, has inadvertently cloistered itself and forfeited its immediacy, its vibrant dynamic, its passion, and its life-changing power. The challenge is real: The institutional Church must venture from our comfortable traditions and speak of the wonderful works of God beyond our pews and stained-glass windows. If the Church needs to be skeptical of anything, it should be skeptical of non-biblical custom for custom's sake alone.

For example, the culture of church hegemony stands in stark contrast to the emerging mindsets influencing other fields of inquiry today. From education to business, from entertainment to politics, new values are evolving out of our interdependent, transparent, wired world. And these values are rapidly galvanizing new paradigms of order, operation, and currency replacing the top-down, proprietary, program-driven systems of yesterday.

Changing Values
Some of these new values include:

• embracing teamwork
• sharing information
• open-sourcing assets
• collaborating on insights and interpretations
• transparent and participatory decision-making
• publicly exploring failures and differences
• synthesizing new ideas and solutions from outside the chain-of-
• command.

Contrary to historical models of order where elites distributed select information downward en mass (i.e., broadcasting), today's technologically elite believe "information wants to be free" and so bypass the centralized, proprietary gatekeepers that inhibit innovation. Grassroots movements gain worldwide momentum overnight. Participatory media compete with mass media. Garage-based micro-teams trump big business in profits, mind share, and influence. And in our ever-flattening world, traditionally impermeable boundaries evaporate.

Additionally, the technologically-savvy have mastered key abilities that the institutional Church has yet to harness. Rising from the convergence of new communication and information technologies, these new facilities include instantaneous communication (including one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many), interactivity, peer-to-peer sharing options, extended social networking, and the nurturing of virtual communities. Through wikis, e-books, innovation jams, podcasts, vodcasts, blogs, and etc., collective interactivity and participatory communications abound and are transforming our ability to connect, collaborate, and converse on a global scale in real-time.

Viral Christianity, Digitally Empowered
Following the Holy Spirit's arrival, the book of Acts portrays a viral Christianity with disciples spreading its memes via both one-to-many broadcast (public-speaking and preaching) as well as by one-to-one "sandal-net" (spreading the "good news" to individuals and from house-to-house) networks. Later, the apostle Paul used a hand-couriered packet-messaging system (handwritten epistles) to remotely disciple and strengthen new converts. The New Testament Church had grassroots innovation as its norm. Believers met in homes outside the Temple every day just as many presently connect online every day. And the dynamic power of God's Spirit, to convert, to transform, and to empower the early Christians, still animates believers across denominations and across cultures today. This Holy Spirit dynamic is increasingly represented online wherever the Internet has penetrated and Christ's disciples use the technology to interact.

Though the nebulous and sometimes contradictory expressions of Christianity on the Web today may not seem to reflect the early Church's frenetic innovation, perhaps we're still trying to negotiate the artificial, clumsy interface of an immature electronic reality. Online churches have become easier to find within the last few years, and some of them are actually mapping new territories. Whether through extensions of real-world congregations, via online campuses, or independently, congregants are also beginning to express their faith in new ways online. Electronically-mediated tools create new options for exploring the priesthood of every believer.

We are likely to see even more evidence of real online ministry in the near future as examples of salvations, healings, and deliverances grow in commonality. With its natural instantaneity, the Internet facilitates vastly distributed prayer chains, immediate discipleship opportunities, and intimate worship experiences. With storage cheaper by the minute, the resulting persistence of data creates long-term teaching and mentorship archives. These archives record and make searchable the proclamation of doctrine and the stories of millions of individual expressions of faith as participants in the dialog network together.

Unity in Diversity
As the boundaries between the virtual world and the real world blur we will begin to see greater diversity in the Body of Christ expressed online such as the offices described in Corinthians. Apostles, prophets, evangelists, pastor/teachers and missionaries will inhabit cyberspace. Particular spiritual giftings, offices, and callings will grow more noticeable. We will also see special graces in the virtual world, for example, hospitality and material generosity. And, no doubt, the fruit of the Spirit will be as evident in the virtual world as it is in the real world.

Further, the online Church will reflect the cultural and racial diversity described at the founding of the early Church in Acts 2:9-11 ("Parthians, Medes and Elamites," and so on). Russian believers will rub virtual shoulders with Australians, Americans with Nigerians, Asians with Irish, and the old with the young. It is even possible that those on this side of the digital divide will begin providing technology and the skills to use it to the "have nots" out of simple conviction—as one of life's necessities. By God's grace, such online diversity might in turn once again permeate the real-world Church.

The Future: Ends or Beginnings?

Futurists who do not embrace the Scriptures, although seekers, cannot have a full understanding of the course of human events, and often their theories lead to human-extinction scenarios. Kurzweil, for example, predicts paradigm shifts will increase exponentially, leading to "technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history" (Kurzweil, 2001). Although high-tech progress appears to be unstoppably self-driven it is, in fact, an expression of human effort. As such, it is therefore subject to the divine orchestration of events leading history towards the fulfillment of all Scripture. The future of the 21st century Church, at least, is completely secure.

But while neither the gates of Hell nor the advancement of technology will prevail against the Church, the question remains—what role will you and I and our generation play in advancing the Kingdom of Heaven online?

Will you be a seeker, or a skeptic?

Cynthia Ware, along with her husband Bob, has served the Foursquare Church denomination for the last 20 years. They reside in Thousand Oaks, CA.