Parents, Shut-Ins, and Twentysomethings

Mark Brown, the New Zealand-based pastor who leads the Anglican church in Second Life, discovered via informal online research that 17 percent of those who attended the Anglican Church in Second Life attended no other church service offline. One respondent to Brown's survey shared, "I have been housebound for the last two years due to disability so, at present, this is the only church service I attend." Brown wrote in his report on the survey that the comment "highlights well the aim of the virtual Anglican Cathedral which is 'to be church for people wherever they are, whatever their circumstance.'"

Not only housebound people are constrained in time and space: Many categories of people say they would and do benefit from religious offerings that can be adapted more readily to their schedules and locations.

"The fact that a congregation wants or expects me to get into the car at certain time to educate my children or go to Torah study group is counter culture in some way. I'm used to returning e-mails at midnight," said Lisa Colton, founder and president of Darim Online. To be successful congregations should not do away altogether with real-world events, she said, but congregations should provide opportunities for members to participate in a more fluid way. "If I can't get to synagogue on a Friday night, I can still have Shabbat dinner at my house, download the rabbi's sermon, and listen to it on my way to work on Monday. That's still valuable. Congregations need to speak to people on their own terms and engage people in way that works for them."

Helen Mildenhall recalled what it was like to participate in a congregation when she was the mother of small children. "The service itself was not social; it was about sitting and listening to a bunch of stuff. And as soon as the service was over, when everyone started talking and drinking coffee, my kids grabbed me away," she said. What Mildenhall discovered, however, was that she could communicate easily online with people who shared her religious identity and interests. Mildenhall found that when she had a chance to meet offline some of the people she met online, much of the important work of getting to know the other person was already done. "When we got together, we already knew things about each other, like, 'How many kids do you have?' We had already gone through that all online."

The point for Mildenhall is that many people are in the situation she found herself in. "I still wanted to meet people; I wanted to meet people in person whether I met them first on the Internet or not," she said. "But what the Internet can do is make it convenient to get together at a time when nothing in your life is convenient."

Helen Thompson Mosher faced a challenge in her teenage years that involved not time but geographic constraints. "When I was fifteen years old, my parents changed churches, and I lost all my friends," she recalled. "Shortly thereafter, I stopped going to church—for about fifteen years." Mosher imagined what could have happened had the online tools that exist today been available to her then. "I might have been able to continue to interact with those friends and stay connected to my church community, and I might not have vanished off on this fifteen-year detour." Mosher has since reconnected with her childhood church, reading its newsletter online. "I've realized this is the church of my heart in many, many ways."

Wayne Floyd, education program manager at the Alban Institute, added that college students are much like Mosher: After four years their social worlds dissolve. "The virtual world gives them a way to sustain their friendships even after that physical community has changed."

What some religious leaders discover is that what works well for special categories like harried parents, disconnected teens, or disabled shut-ins also works well for pretty much anyone. Ann Fontaine, an Episcopal minister and blogger in Wyoming, wrote about a recent experience the Diocese of Wyoming. The diocese used Blackboard, an online utility often used by teachers, to offer a well-known distance-education program, known as Education for Ministry. "Originally we thought it would be great for rural isolated students," wrote Fontaine in a June 2008 article for the website The Daily Episcopalian. "We have discovered that it is great for those who travel for work, those who live in cities and don't want one more night out, those who have children at home and snowbirds. The intimacy and depth of sharing is beyond my dreams. When we do find time to see each other in person—we are like old friends."

Campbell said that what many people are looking for is a Cheers experience—a chance to walk into a place where, as the song to the former TV sitcom said, "Everybody knows your name, and they're always glad you came." And with the new abilities of the Internet, people are bringing new expectations of always-on, raw connectivity to the age-old desire for community. Said Campbell: "People are looking for relationships. They're looking for places where they can care about people and feel cared for. They want to know that if they don't show up in the chat room, people will actually check up on them. They want a sense of connection, and not just on a Sunday. They want a twenty-four-hours-a-day, seven-days-a-week connection to other people. They want an intimate community where they can be transparent with others and others can be transparent with them."

The next section of this resource describes how others have plunged in to the waters of Web 2.0.