Adam passed me a link the other day about some great thoughts and discussions happening around the Church online and the Scriptures.
This particular article is very interesting, but not without many concerns (and certainly questions). Go there to download it or here directly.
Mark Brown, the author, is obviously doing a lot of thinking, research, and conversating about the subject and I’ve been reading his blog a lot recently to make sure I’m seeing the full picture.
He has some other great thoughts here on this post about his presentation from the Digital Space Symposium. One particular thing of interest was a possible .org that could help navigate the Church at large with these topics, like whether or not a dragon (yes, a fire-breathing dragon) can lead a church service:
One interesting meta-theme emerged worth mentioning : a continuum between those who saw online ministry as only effective if it resulted in an offline, ‘normal’ experience of church, and those who considered an experience of ministry online in and of itself sufficient.
An example of this is the discussion around identity: how are we represented online? Can a dragon lead a church service? Or do we need to transparently represent ourselves online as we are offline?
Funny, but somewhat serious on the same note. At least the conversation is continuing, right?
Another issue I have is with Brown’s predictions (in the Bible in the Digital Space article), not that they are necessarily bad predictions (they could be right) but rather the danger of having them be true. For example, the “personalized” translations of the bible for individuals; that seems a little “off” to me on a number of different levels.
Give it a read; love to hear your thoughts.