Monday, April 28, 2008

Consultation on Technology and Spiritual Community

Greetings from WDC (Herndon, VA actually). I am getting ready for a day consultation of faith and technology sponsored by the Congregational Resource Guide--Alban Institute. I am going to be presenting on my research on religion and the internet and along with Brian Brunius going to be part of an interesting conversation on congregational use of new media. They have assembled an interesting group of participants from members of the clergy, media professionals, bloggers and members of a variety of Congregational group. I'll give an update tomorrow on the details of the days activities.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Is SNS being used for discipleship and intentional church planting online?

I had a request for information from Lee Behar of The Maclellan Foundation. He is looking for examples of people who use SNS or web tech to do online evangelism in non-religious spaces on the internet with the intent of making converts and then building intentional churches online out of those relationships. In Lee's words: "I’m not looking for social networks that are meant to connect people to conventional churches, but rather those that may be doing church (especially the outreach part) through social networks."

I know of people doing e-vangelism in non-religious space online but not of any who did it with the direct intent of building an online church. Most of what I have seen in building online community has been more organic or when it has been intentional it has not been motivated by an initial e-vangelism focus.

I am wondering if anyone out there knows of any examples of Christian evangelism/discipleship, even church planting effort, that is using a social networking platform as its primary path for ministry? If you do both Lee and I would be grateful to hear more about these efforts!