I just discovered there is some such thing as “The Pew Internet and American Life” project. I’m not sure what it is yet, but I will probably find out about it soon and report back if it is interesting. Stay tuned.

The project got mentioned in this article, “The Church-Internet (dis)connection.” It was written all the way back in 2002, but I wonder how much the author, Andrew Careaga, believes things have changed. He wrote:

When I went to Search Party 2002, a conference on postmodern ministry held just down the road from me in St. Louis, in May, I was expecting to connect with a different breed of ministers. I was expecting to meet pastors and priests who appreciated the Internet’s ability to facilitate community… I figured everybody at the conference would be willing to dive right in to discussions of the Internet as community.

I was wrong.

Our panel fielded many of the same questions that church leaders were asking four years ago. “How can I make my church website cool?” “Should we have a message board on our site?” “How can we make our website ‘sticky’?” “How can I keep people from leaving my church to join a ‘cyberchurch’?” We also were put in the position of defenders of the Net as a resource for developing community. One participant claimed it was impossible to create authentic community over the Internet.

I came away from that experience shaken and disillusioned. I thought that perhaps we had moved beyond the Big Question of the Internet — the question of whether online community can exist. Howard Rheingold wrote the book on online community nearly a decade ago, and millions of Netizens are online proving that virtual communities can and do exist. While we in the church are still asking, “How can I make my website cool?” and debating whether or not people can develop relationships and community on the Net, some 3 million people a day are using the Net for spiritual purposes. Before Search Party 2002, I assumed most church leaders in the postmodern movement had gotten to the point where we could talk about how the Internet is radically reshaping lives, perceptions of reality, communication, community, relationships and culture. I left Search Party realizing that we are a long way from that point.

I suspect many might resist the idea that technology can radically reshape lives, but I think they’re being naive. Communities require communication. The fact that Cingular offers unlimited minutes between my wife and I on our mobile phones is an immense change in our lives from before. We rarely ever are together outside the home, and when we are we have all four children with us, which doesn’t make for much private conversation. Effectively, I have moved to a situation via technology in which I am never alone. Whenever I need it, or simply on impulse to hear her, I can have her voice “in my head.” And she has the same option.

I realize that face to face involves a deeper level of communication. Voice alone will never be as powerful as voice and eye-contact or voice and shared food. Nevertheless, the fact that our voices can be heard without regard for distance is still an amazing extension of community. Without wanting to neglect the role of the other senses, to the extent that communities are built on hearing and reading, geographical space has been collapsed. We have been moved out of exile into a common city.

So, in other words, I think Careaga is on target when he writes, “Why is the discussion about e-tools in the first place? Is the Internet just a tool, something we can use to manipulate and alter our surroundings, to carve out another niche in the world? No, it’s space. It’s more organic than mechanical. It’s a place in which relationships can occur. It’s at least that, if not more.”

However, I may differ with Careaga on where his emphasis lies. It seems to me that when we speak of “the church” and web 2.0, we are simply talking about how Christians use the internet. Christians blog. Christians use myspace. Christians, in other words, are already netizens. In my experience, moreover, this has not resulted simply in Christians forming exclusive Christian forums, but in lots of other things. Christians like surfing (I mean on the ocean in real space) and cooking and movies and TV shows. I have no idea if this is done more or less often in cyberspace than in realspace, but it happens plenty. And this is not, and doesn’t necessarily need to be, a concerted strategy on the part of Christian leaders guiding the rest.

(This difference may parallel my tendency to think in terms of “post-modernity” rather than a “post-modern movement.” To me, the post-modern is not something you adopt, but that has already adopted the world. We are all post-moderns simply by virtue of living in the Western world in the twenty-first century.)

So it isn’t clear to me how much pastors of congregations have to do with this. It seems to me that they mainly need to remind their congregations to behave in a Christlike way in all their endeavors and situations, including their cyberspace ones. And it is probably helpful if a pastor has a blog or some other netizenship on desplay for his congregation to see. But this sort of outreach is simply happening. I’m not sure how it could be, or if it should be, a specifically congregation-based outreach.

But building community in the Church might be a different manner. The Net now under girds communities based on affinities. Bikers, joggers, watchers of the new Battlestar Galactica and others find in the web a way of generating and maintaining a community based on what goes on in the real world. And I don’t think Church congregations, parachurch organizations, or larger denominational structures, should be any different. In my opinion, “How can I establish community with our church website?” is a really good question, though I don’t know that it actually requires a website, per se.

This is one of the reasons I’ve started working with Connect Our People–having gotten involved through my friendship with the Boneman. I think it helps in a needed area, using the web to collapse space between Church members or between the members of other Church groups both within and without a congregation. Take a look at the video if you haven’t already. Sooner or later I’ll be working on a second blog about these issues (and will export this entry) there.