What It Means for Congregations

Most religious congregations fit under the old media rubric. Being a congregational member is often synonymous with showing up in person at a certain place at a certain time on a certain day. Similarly, congregations sometimes become so identified with the building housing them that the building becomes the de facto definition of the congregation: "We are people who worship in this place." The content of congregations is not modular; it cannot be easily mixed and matched by individuals to suit their needs, tastes, and schedules.

For decades some congregations have used old media technologies—TV broadcasts of Sunday morning services, for example—to extend their reach, and now multisite churches offer the same content in different locations. At New Life Church in northern Virginia, for example, you can watch the same sermon, preached via video, in a darkened, coffeehouse-style worship service in one town or at another more traditional venue in another town. This type of congregational innovation represents a mix of the values of new media and old media and is one example of how the most cutting-edge congregational practitioners are reshaping not just the look and feel of congregational life, but also the organizational structures.

Also at stake in the new Web 2.0 world are basic questions about authority and how things get done in a congregation. Lisa Colton is director of Darim Online, a nonprofit organization offering Internet strategy consulting and professional development to Jewish organizations. To her, Web 2.0 is a new way of operating. "If your congregation creates a brochure, you can say whatever you want to say, and people will read it. If you have a website or a blog where people can comment, or a Facebook group where anyone can post, it's more of a two-way conversation."

The desire to participate actively as a layperson in everything from congregational decisions to worship itself is what drives people like Jennifer Goen, an assistant organizer of the Gathering of the Beloved in Northern Virginia, out of more traditionally organized churches. "I attended [a nondenominational megachurch] in Northern Virginia, but I would sit there during the sermon and want to raise my hand and say, 'I have something to add.' There was no room for that," said Goen. "Once you've participated, there's no going back."

Such two-way conversation can disrupt hierarchy, however, and while some like Goen may simply leave old congregations to start new, more participatory ones, others want to move existing communities into a new way of being. For the Jewish organizations Colton works with, she said the participatory aspect of Web 2.0 technology "threatens a lot of traditional assumptions and modes of working that staff and volunteers and board members have been accustomed to for ten or twenty or thirty years. When it comes to bringing a congregation online, it's a transition of mentality as much as it is a transition of technology."

The potential rewards for allowing and encouraging people to engage online, however, are many. If a congregational member can create content online—perhaps uploading photos from an event or posting a comment on a blog—he or she is "empowered," said Colton. "When people have the opportunity to actively participate, that strengthens their identification with the congregation and their relationship to it." Because congregational belonging in the Jewish context is often costly, said Colton, there is a particular need for congregations to deliver a return on investment. "If you only go to Yom Kippur services and don't do anything else, you might ask yourself, 'Why am I paying $15,000 a year?' and then let your membership lapse. Those members need to be engaged." Whatever the price of membership, however, every congregation has a vested interest in attracting, retaining, and involving members.

The potential costs of ignoring digital culture are many. As Campbell mentions, expectations have changed. If you can check your bank account balance, send a thank-you note, and call a friend online, you certainly expect to find, at the very least, up-to-date information about congregational life. Those capabilities are about Web 1.0-level website design and maintenance: the ability to broadcast information effectively online. Then the question of seeing and experiencing the congregation online needs to be considered. If a congregation's online presence is limited to a static, poorly designed website, "that actually breaks trust," said Colton, who first launched Darim Online in 2000 after finding herself "completely turned off" by the majority of Jewish organizational websites she browsed. "That has repercussions not just for a congregation attracting members, but for individuals being affiliated with a religion at all."

A congregation that fails to engage with technology is also failing to provide leadership in important areas. David Kinnaman, president of the Barna Group, recently pointed to a Barna study showing just nine percent of teenagers learned something "helpful" about technology in their church over the past year. "As each new generation becomes increasingly enmeshed with technology, these discussions and choices cannot be left to chance," said Kinnaman, while launching the Barna Group's 2008 technology study. "Control, image, relevance, immediacy, transparency, purity, truth, stewardship, and escapism are some of the many issues that technology brings to the surface, not always with benign consequences." Helping others navigate this new digital world, then, may be a new aspect of ministry, one that congregations can only embrace when they themselves have engaged in that world.