Is the Virtual Church a REAL Church Community?
// March 18th, 2009 // No Comments » // Spiritual
Douglas Estes is releasing a book on the Cyberchurch in a few months. Here is an interview taken from http://tallskinnykiwi.typepad.com/ (which is a great blog by the way) where Douglas asks Andrew (who is tall skinny Kiwi) a few questions about virtual church.
Douglas: Is the virtual church a real/genuine church?
Andrew: Absolutely not. But neither is a physical gathering in a church building on a Sunday morning. The body of Christ is a spiritual aggregation of believers whose names are written in the Lamb’s book of life. That body finds itself aggregated, or called out into assembly with each other, in both physical and virtual gatherings. There are seeking non-believers in both physical and virtual aggregations so neither expression can claim to be fully church. And also, there are believers in physical churches who connect with each other online during the week and there are believers from cyber-churches and online faith communities who intentionally seek out physical meetings when possible. The dividing line between the two is therefore more artificial than actual.
Douglas: Is it possible for a virtual church to be missional, and more importantly, is it possible for a virtual church (due to its nature) to be more truly missional than a real world church?
Andrew: The church needs to be missional in both physical and virtual worlds. That means allowing the form of church to be shaped by the context, and on the internet that means the missional church will take native forms and seek to find its place inside them. Being missional in the virtual world means recapitulation over representation. It is not translating your Sunday service into a Second Life experience but rather transcoding from the ground-up inside platforms.
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and then I found this on another blog I read….
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Virtual community and a pixelated gospel.
We create media, and then media re-creates us. That’s the message Shane Hipps, author of Flickering Pixels (Zondervan, 2009) wanted pastors at NPC to hear in his interview on the main stage last night and in his seminars this morning. Shane’s latest book is a journey into the hidden power of media–and a challenge to the standard line that the message stays the same even when the medium changes.
Skye and I sat down with Shane today to ask him a couple of questions that are of particular interest on the blogosphere: how is Internet-based community different from flesh-and-blood Christian community? And what happens to the gospel when it’s translated into a digital medium such as Second Life?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJkSJmvK7eg]
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I’ll let you guys have a think about this post , I will share my thoughts when I next get a chance (off to teach now).
