Church and the Interwebs, Part II

Continuing my thoughts on Here Comes Everybody.

So what are the things that are the essence of the church? On the United Church of Canada's website they describe Five Marks of the Church:

Kerygma (proclaiming)
Didache (teaching)
Koinonia (fellowship)
Diakonia (service)
Liturgia (worship)

It is possible to do all of these things online.

Of course, not all of these things will be as good online as in person, or, the online piece will be better as a reinforcement than as the actual thing. But teaching online, in general, is already a big thing - witness the University of Phoenix. Fellowship online is basically what Facebook is. And podcasts of sermons and livecasts of worship services exist now. Are they a perfect substitute? No. But is the extra effort worthwhile? As you can see, I have more questions than answers at the moment.

Church and the Interwebs, Part I

I'm about halfway through Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It's about peoples' ability to organize quickly and easily using the internet, and how that makes a lot of institutions redundant. This is because there used to be a high cost to getting organized, so you needed large institutions to collect the people power to get it done. For example, journalists used to be people connected to publishers who owned printing presses or radio stations or TV studios - the means of producing and distributing information. Now, however, anybody with a cell phone and a web connection can get information out to the entire world instantly. What used to be a tremendous cost is now almost free.

This has me thinking a lot about traditional churches, especially since I'm starting up a church myself. (Here's the website.) What were the difficulties and costs that traditional churches were brought together to overcome? Gathering people into groups, building houses of worship, educated and accountable leadership, economies of scale for overseas mission, and, that's what I can think of right now. Which of these things still require the church as an institution?

On a more personal level, this has implications for the clergy as a profession as well. (Ulp!) Of course, I already knew that, since I know a bunch of people who have become ordained online to do a friend's wedding. But what is the purpose of ordination if what a clergy(man) used to be was one of the most educated people in the village? Knowledge is not a scarcity anymore.

Shirky writes the story of what happened to scribes. Before the printing press, scribes performed the valuable service of maintaining libraries by recopying books. Once people started using printed books, scribes co-existed for a while, but eventually faded out to almost nothing - modern-day calligraphy is about all that's left. Is that the destination of our major institutions, the church included?

Politician as Person of Faith, Part 97

In this blog post from the Sun, Matthew Brown shares that Archbishop O'Brien urged Martin O'Malley not to support gay marriage based on O'Malley's Catholic faith. This is yet another example of the difficulties presented by separating church and state. (Not that I'm against the separation, of course!)

How does a political person handle this? On the one hand, I look to my faith to shape my decisions and to make me a moral person. And the church has a long tradition of working toward consistency and comprehensiveness in terms of a moral belief system. On the other hand, we have a separate way of judging what is right and wrong in the public sphere, and sometimes that moral code overlaps with religious views, and sometimes not. The US legal system's "belief system" is very much rooted in modernity and the rights of individuals, while those aren't always the first priority for different Christian worldviews.

I'm glad that O'Malley decided in favor of the commonly held view of individual rights.

On a side note, the language of "redefining marriage" that Archbishop O'Brien most likely assumes that marriage is not the union of two equals. Here's a piece from Slate on how gay marriage is good for straight women and men's equality.

Same-Sex Marriage and Church Freedoms

On Friday, Martin O'Malley is planning to make an announcement on his strategy for moving same-sex marriage forward in Maryland. Which is a good thing, for sure. I think the near miss we had this year in the legislature shows how important it is to have strong support for the legislative change.

It makes me sad, though that the main objectors have been people of faith.

There's the old, sad story of pitting black people against gay people. A few problems with this. First of all, it's not as if there weren't any LGBT African Americans out there. Second of all, when you look at something like Proposition 8 in California, which ended same-sex marriage with the same election that brought in Obama, the first story was, "oh, Obama voters did this." The truth is more complicated than that.

It's frustrating, though, to see religious people arguing that they don't want to offer the same services to same-sex couples as they do to straight couples, and that therefore Maryland shouldn't offer same-sex marriage. In the fallout from same-sex marriage in Washington, DC, Catholic Charities stopped doing adoptions and offering partner benefits to their employees. That's a pretty steep price to pay to keep gay couples from having something straight couples were previously able to have. I think it's called cutting off your nose to spite your face. (On the other hand, here is some interesting news about Catholic Charities USA.)

For a long time, there has been a reluctant kind of truce between civic life and religious beliefs. The same-sex marriage conversation seems to be another opportunity to see where the fault lines are when you try to separate religion from the public square. Yahoo....

Self-Control and Religion

So, thanks to the NY Times for an article about studies of self-control in intrinsically religious people. For Good Self-Control, Try Getting Religious About It. It seems like a pretty positive article, except, of course, for the fact that it seems to assume that the reader will not be a religious person. Maybe they're just trying to be cute.

Choice quotes:

Researchers around the world have repeatedly found that devoutly religious people tend to do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and be generally happier.

Does this mean that nonbelievers like me should start going to church? Even if you don’t believe in a supernatural god, you could try improving your self-control by at least going along with the rituals of organized religion.

But that probably wouldn’t work either, Dr. McCullough told me, because personality studies have identified a difference between true believers and others who attend services for extrinsic reasons, like wanting to impress people or make social connections. The intrinsically religious people have higher self-control, but the extrinsically religious do not.

Um, no.

No, no, no. Obama is not the Antichrist. Thanks for spreading ridiculous crap, John McCain's candidacy.

I wish I had a snappier comeback - or something more insightful - but basically I've moved from thinking the Left Behind series was just poorly written and harmless, to being a dangerous tool o' manipulation. What else is there to say?

A Picture of Religion in America

Heather sent me a link about this survey

Basically, it's one of the biggest and most in-depth surveys of religious affiliation in the US, possibly ever. Definitely in recent times. It makes it possible to have good estimates about how many people are affiliated with pretty small groups, as well as to differentiate between the many types of Baptists, who, it turns out, represent about a fifth of the US population.

A few things that stood out to me as particularly interesting:

--People are changing religions at a much faster rate than they used to.

--"Unaffiliated" has grown as a category, and now represents about 16% of the population

--There are more evangelical Protestants (26%) than Catholics (24%) and more Catholics than mainline protestants (18%), and then only slightly more mainliners than unaffiliated (16%).

--Only 51% of the country is Protestant, with that number slowly dropping.

I am planning to comment more on this, but thought I'd toss some facts out first. Don't want to make my post too long. :)

Monday Morning Preacher - John 3:16

I finished reading The Secret Message of Jesus by Brian McClaren this week, and it was so wonderfully enjoyable. I always like the chance to get a review of what Jesus' message was, because it's so easy to get caught up in the "what should we do about this message" part. Sometimes things just need to be about God.

So this morning's gospel reading (John 3:1-17) was a story about a smart guy - a Judean teacher & authority - who sneaks out in the middle of the night to ask Jesus what he means by this idea of eternal life. You may be familiar with this verse of the story: "For God so loved the world that he sent his only begotten son, that whosoever should believe in him should not perish, but have eternal life" John 3:16.

Let's look at that again in a modernized/different/fresher? translation: "This is how much God loved the world: he gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life." (The Message)

Here's what I see as the good news: this new life, this "whole and lasting life" is a gift from God. It's not something we can earn, purchase, find for ourselves, or otherwise develop/create or force.

I think the key to the passage is the idea of "believing in" God. We can believe in God in the sense of philosophically believing in God. God=first cause, or God=ominiscient + omnipotent + perfect. A lot of folks run into trouble with this approach, because the Bible wasn't written by Greek philosophers, and God doesn't always fit into mathematical/logical categories.

Or, we can believe in God the way we believe in another person. If you believe in somebody, you believe that they can accomplish what they say they will, even if there are setbacks. It's about trust and confidence. What would it mean to say, "I believe in you!" to God? It's much more personal, much less intellectual.

Of course, beyond this I can't give you the mechanics. How does trusting God lead us into a whole new way of life? How does it bring us into a post-domination, peaceable kingdom? That's the gift and the mystery of it. Sometimes things just need to be about God.