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Statement of Goals and Learnings Sought

Intro to Larger Research on Theology, the Internet , and the Church

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Statement of the focus.

The Project

Theological foundations for that focus

God began forming community contexts from the beginning"It is not good that this man should be alone" (NRSV), and soon called a people together to go to a land, form a nation, and strike a covenant with them.* The Bible traces the history of the journey of humanity before a God who constantly calls them to face their dealings with one another out of their devotion to the covenant.

Elizabeth O'Connor has written the history of the Church of the Saviour in Washington , D.C.  In one of these series of books, their journey has been characterized as a "Journey Inward, Journey Outward". In community, we learn to know God in the sharing of life with each other. It is in the "Inward Journey" that we seek to know one another and share our own stories and listen to others, and discover common mission according to our gifts; discovering what gives us life. This emerges into the"Outward Journey", and this is where each of our gifts are applied to mission.

Many times, we discover that what we find ourselves doing is our "call"; our ministry, because it is what drives us and moves us. We cannot help it.

" Ministry " is meeting the world at some point of brokenness and seeking to make it whole. Our most precious resource as a people is the offering up of what drives us to ministry:  Community.

Community must inevitably result in a moving out into the world to extend the invitation to join in, and to seek to impact the society around it with the living out of community values, grounded in a God in whom we gather together and experience in our midst.

This is the predominant image in my theology of Church. It surely has many faces , but it begins with the journey to find out what it takes to live together and care for each other. When we are about this journey, we see the importance of communicating this perspective on life.

The emphasis on community is crucial, but it must also clearly define this community as something radically different than the rather loose, vague notion of it often applied to many different kinds of associations between people. It has become a buzz term for corporations and social groupings. It is not rare anymore to hear of this "community" or that, or to hear companies refer to their organization as "the 'company x' community".

I am building this Web site to explore the possibilities for the community to which the Church itself must be committed. This itself has proven to be a broad concept, with a variety of expressions, representations, and styles. But my vision involves very intentional movement toward participating in one another's personal and spiritual journeys in ways which our society has made it increasingly difficult.

To engage upon this journey into the depths of community, society and it's distractions and skewed values must be recognized and named, and we must allow our vision to confront what we find.

I have begun building this Web site to provide a place to explore what it means to be "Church" in this context. In this exploring of vision, community, and journey, Theological Education happens. There are resources in the official educational structures of the various theological groups, but there are also resources in the social sciences, in the psychological sciences and healing professions, and in the wisdom traditions of various cultures other than our own. There are also instances of dilution and compromise in all of these; values and approaches that serve status quo rather than the call to seek structures and relationships that represent the new community to which God is calling us.  It is in exploring the various resources for their insights and shortcomings that we can learn together about what makes community happen, what needs to be done to help heal our society's alienation from these values, and how we can use these rapidly developing online technologies to bring these resources into our theological education.

The emphasis upon the Inward Journey is valuable in terms of its effects upon the Outward Journey; that our discoveries concerning the way human relationships ought to be will call us into processes which point us to creating structures which heal the broken, distorted structures in our world. The breadth of this concept should not discourage us from embarking upon the journey; a journey toward forming the kind of community that will impact our lives and those around us with the good news that God intends for things to be different, and for healing to happen.

It is very apparent to me that my call for this time is to the online world. I am , in a sense, claiming quite a large "parish", but I also expect that as more of us with similar callings "meet" online, that this calling will take more specific forms and begin to blossom within a specifically focused community that will probably consist not only of people who are local to my geography and with whom I can covenant to meet on a regular basis, but also with people whom I meet and agree upon a similar covenant to be carried out in online meeting places.

I believe I have a call to the online world because I see opportunity there for building an "outpost" for the Kingdom which can help us to bring some of the elements of community together in a "place" which is becoming more accessible to more people, and a place which is "open" at all hours, where we can find someone to listen, find a link to important information, or help us see more of the variety of expressions of faith that are finding a place to be heard.

The online world is also impacting the way we look at prior media; new media tend to allow us to step outside the unconscious influence they formerly held over us, and let us move beyond former barriers to more "wholistic" communication than what was possible with the printing press.

The Call to Observe the Online Phenomenon

Since the dawn of the electronic entertainment age with radio and then television, increasing numbers of communication studies have helped us to understand more of the sense of McLuhan's famous "the medium is the message". Today we are seeing a further layer of electronic communication which brings into sharper focus the relationship of print and oral communication, and the awareness of the interdependence of knowledge.

I consider it a responsibility for theology to sociologically study the phenomenon of the online world which is presently developing at an astonishing pace. People the world over are thrilled with the prospects of finding information, entertainment, and conversation at anytime, from anywhere. With our focus on the matter of community, it is our repsonsibility to understand all we can about what all of this means for the kind of community we envision.

It is important to ask what it is that is being envisioned as we proclaim that this medium can be utilized to advance mission. To some, it is evangelistic, which for them means "a medium for theological argument and debate", for the purposes of "winning" people to the Church. This approach seems to me to be inviting people into an intellectual assent to a theological system that is elaborate in its design but lacking in its clarity of vision for what we do once we believe. Why are we called together?

We in the church must be asking what the Internet can mean in terms of human community, and what it might mean to us in social, psychological, and cultural impact. Many in the church tend to look at the values or dangers inherent in a medium by what it presents in terms of content. Therefore, much of the discussion I hear in "church circles" is how to avoid the pornography or "weird ideas", because we are somehow to be "watching out" for ideas which would "mess up" (which usually means to question) the orthodox (as defined by someone in leadership) "realities" that all must believe in order to be , shall we say , theologically correct.

The Great Good Place

Oldenburg seems to make no attempt to question why it is that the Church is so inept at providing this. A story from the founders of the Church of the Saviour in Washington DC asks this same question.

Link to story of Potter's House beginnings (at Great Good Place section)

"Great Good Places" have been attempted online in many ways: There is Café Utne (forums provided by the cultural critique magazine, Utne Reader). There is "The Well" online, with the forums offered from one of, if not THE largest BBS's in the US. And there are also forums on HotWIRED, of WIRED magazine's online presence. I have started a forum entitled "Theology and the Internet" in one of their forum areas in order to bring some of the kind of issues I am exploring in this paper to the public place. There are numerous opportunities in forums like these that are welcoming new forums hosts to step forward and provide an outlet and a place of dialogue for people to interact around issues that matter to them.

I once had a seminary course taught by Dennis Benson, called The Visible Church, where we explored the ways the church paid attention to human behavior and needs , contrasted with the way businesses and marketing pay attention to the same for purposes of profit (to attact customers). But the church does not seem to apply the same rigor in the service of our mission. The marketers "win people" to their cause (or their product), and the church often applies very inferior effort to the exploration of what they have to offer people, and where these people are in terms of their own lives.

In the online world, the same applies. If there are to be people present in masse on the Internet, then this is a place to set up a presence. If this is where many will flock in the absence of alternative "real life" (RL) third places, then this is where the church needs to be studying, developing, and setting up Great Good Places in cyberspace.

I feel so strongly about the centrality of community in the church's mission, becuase it seems to me that this is the core of the human quest; it is "built in to our operating system"; our "natural preferences" for the way we operate which is also the most healthy in psycho/social/spiritual terms. This notion is in constant struggle with the way our culture tends to operate. It's forces tend to mold persons and societies in the direction of individualism, so that the collectivity of human endeavor is spent mostly in consumer patterns of relationship.

Not only do I consider community to be a core human need, but it is also a part of our "psysiological/psychological" wholeness. There is something "out there" in others which we need that we must "connect" with in order to complete some pieces of the puzzle within us. Some 2oth century thinkers in the area of human relationships and psychology have discovered things about us in these areas.

The Force and Matter of Community

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin included a vast sense of community in his eschatology; which was many have called "a theology of evolution". To Teilhard (as I will refer to him henceforth, since the rest of his name is too cumbersome to repeat each time), there was not such a big gap between the life/earth creation scenarios postulated by most of the scientific community, and a properly understood theology of Christianity. But more importantly for this study, was his view of the "purpose" of evolution. To posit a "purpose" for evolution is to venture into areas hitherto untouched by most scientific studies. But, for Teilhard, it is the development of conscious life from the point of complexity that marks the significant beginnings of the move toward the eschatological goal which he names "Omega Point".

This "omega Point" is a grand synthesis, where humanity experiences the ultimate community and ultimate awareness.

He identifies Christ with this Omega Point. His descriptions of this synthesis stage remind me of the way Matthew Fox describes "The Cosmic Christ". It is this end or goal of all evolution that guides the evolutionary process. Teilhard identifies the movement toward this end as a guided process (by Omega) and it is carried out by the dawning of consciousness, and the fist stages of the growth of consciousness, which is "diversification" where thinking beings move out and stake out new territory.This is where humans filled the earth, moved out across the globe, and established living patterns. For eons, this expansion continued, until the beginnings of the next phase, "unification". This is signaled by the convergence of these "flocks" of conscious beings, as they meet each other when boundaries begin to overlap as the earth is filled with humans.

Teilhard wrote during the time of the start of World War II, and presented hope in his theory that this stark reality of war (after many in the world had hoped that WW I had been the "war to end all wars") was a signal that this age of unification was being born, and that these were the "birthpangs". The conflicts were a signal that humankind was awakening to a challenge that lay before it.

Slanted Views of Technology

Slouka's reading of this idea is through the lens of some people whose techno-utopian rhetoric is of such fervor, that it is little wonder he looks upon the ideas with suspicion. (Mark Dery's Escape Velocity covers this "counter-culture cyber-utopian group" in more detail, and with less print-age bias). I doubt that Slouka had any contact with Teilhard's ideas on the issue, since he stays with the populists and hypsters of today (such as those covered in Dery's book) to make his case against the notion of a "collectivity" concept.

I got the sense from Slouka's quotes that I would find a problem with the hype as he cites them, but I am also made aware as I proceeded through his book that there may be some cases of "looking for red flags" in Slouka's assessments. He begins to sound a lot like Clifford Stoll in Silicon Snake Oil as he proceeds into the later chapters and slips into the old , stale "back to the natural world" response to what he sees as escapist technology.

I have no problem with the idea that our bodies are made to be close to the natural world. After all, we are a part of it. I have no argument with the fact that we feel better when we are closer to it than we would staying in mediated environments. The problem with emphasizing these problems so much that they become our major focus or determinant in our approach to things such as Computer Mediated Communication, is that this will cause us to overlook the things which can truly help us to utilize the medium for human ends rather than to seek to reverse developments which do, in fact, seem inevitable. In addition, I am not so convinced that Computer Mediated Communication is more "destructive" of the "back to nature" kinds of urges and needs that Slouka describes, as would be , say, writing a letter or reading a book. (I suppose one could claim that one could read a book outside, but this seems to be getting off track. The issus here is whether Computer Mediated Communication tends to help us communicate better, more efficiently, or improve the transmssion of ideas).  For better or worse, we might as well seek to encourage and enable the developments so that more people can experience the good, and keep a sharp sociological eye on the things which are happening (and they will) which are cause for concern.

But to resist because we somehow think that books or conventional education is somehow less slanted, less deceptive, and more creative is to fail to see our way out of our own prior conditioning. Many of us have been educated in a system which upheld the higher standards of the book over all other media (appropriately or inappropriately). From my understanding of the history of print technology, the people of early orality based culture had their own suspicions about the technology of the book. Many have stressed the fact that Jesus himself never instructed his disciples or followers to write anything down.

I want to suggest that we would do well to think about the form in which we cast the "content" of our community and its traditions. We have lived for 500 years in the age of print, and some 1500 years before that with the manuscript. As the printing press brought about changes in the experience of the written word, so too I propose that the new "textuality" that we are seeing develop with the rise of hypertext as a means of information navigation will once again prove to be strategic for the experience of communicating ideas. New additions to the simulated experience of face to face experience are added to our virtual, electronic communication experience with the advent of Computer Mediated Experiences such as hypertext.

Perhaps the story, and the communication of "spiritual truth" will get a boost from this. It seems that there is something qualitative added to the experience of technology-mediated communication with hypertext that has not been captured before. Hypertext allows for a non-linear , rapid association, multidimensional story to be told. It seems that it is a story teller's dream, this way of presenting material that can branch, illuminate, footnote, digress, and return.

The Bible is a text which "tries to be hypertext", as David Lochhead points out. In their constant reference to prior traditional material, the Bible writers sought to set their stories in the context of previous experiences of the people. Biblical scholars have long emphasized the impoertance of the"sitz in leben", or setting in life, of a passage. If only we had the benefits of hypertext for those stories to point us to the experience(s) or historical event(s) to which this story was linked in the writer's mind! Then there would be much less "reading back in to the text" from our own limited historio-sociological knowledge of the times, and we would be closer to the actual intended message for the text.

(I emphasize "less" in order to say that there will rarely if ever be any instance of nothing being read back into the text. I do not believe we are ever completely free of the social realities and perspectives from which we have emerged. It is an educational task of the church and its institutions of learning to provide helpful information about context and meaning so that we can see more of the vision of the Scriptures in terms of our society.)

Maybe that will be taken for granted in future generations. We can give them links to what the setting and particular situations were from which the stories we give to them have arisen. .

Writers may experience more freedom to write in a setting where linearity is not such an assumed virtue. Writing using hypertext can be much more like "story telling" and conversing, since we tend to alter our direction of thought in conversation and even before audience much more than we do as writer apart from readers. Writers block often happens to me when I feel bound in by the constraints of the moving from beginning to end. I feel it is too daunting a task, and so I give up for long periods of time. With the flexibility of hypertext and multiple, linked documents, I can create series of documents which I can "spread out" on my virtual desktop and move from one to another, and easily link places in one to another, and it need not be only MY other writings. It can be those of others.

As we set out into yet another "wave" of change in culture represented in the "information age", we must study the trends in order to find a place in the communication of content, and also examine the effects upon human relationships (and possibly the human-divine relationship; the "I-Thou"). What has computer communication technology done to us, or what is it working in us in regard to our sense of self, relationships, and view of the world. We need to become "Net literate", not only in terms of how the stuff works, but concerning how the "Net culture" which is expanding and having an impact which is growing exponentially, is affecting our role as a theological community, and what tools we should use to carry out that role.

The writer of John's gospel leaves us with an observation at the end of story which presents an interesting challenge to the notion that the gospel or the truth is contained in a book:

"There are also many other things that Jesus did; if everyone one of them were written down, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. "

I feel the same way when I am faced with the task of how I might describe what this community means to me. Hypertext gives us a way of indicating, within text or other "multimedia" elements, that there is related or illuminatory material elsewhere. We constantly need to qualify, illuminate, and reference our sources as we seek to speak something of the truth about our lives, so that our theology does not become too separated from the journey that has formed it.

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