Emerging church bloggers in Australia: prophets, priests and rulers in God's virtual world

The emerging church movement is built on a postmodern critique of both contemporary expressions of traditional/mainstream Protestant Christian community, and modern forms of Evangelical Christianity that is found in the “mega-churches”. Its task is to seek a viable alternative to these apparently mutually exhaustive models of Christian community and practice.<br><br>In the offline world, emerging church communities are small groups of people who are locally based and often not connected, in any formal sense, to any other emerging church group outside their traditional denomination. Online, bloggers converse over emerging church practices and criticisms of traditional and Evangelical theology to construct a global identity.<br><br>This research aims to uncover how blogging technology is used by those involved in the emerging church conversation to construct individual and communal religious identities. This is its main question. It is expected insights into the following secondary questions will be shown:<br>•How do religious attitudes towards the Internet and blogging contribute to the way<br>people interact online?<br>•What contributions and constraints do blogging software, and people’s use of it, offer the construction of online identity?<br>•How are bloggers working together to construct an emerging church theology,<br>ecclesiology and missiology?<br>•How is authority distributed among emerging church bloggers, in relation to other<br>systems of authority both online and offline?<br>•What can be said about the place of the emerging church blogosphere in the current tensions of 21st century Australian religious sociology?<br><br>The emerging church blogosphere appears at the convergence of a number of factors that are of interest to researchers in the fields of sociology, religion and media. Firstly there is the perceived re-entrance (what Casanova calls the “deprivatisation”) of institutional religion into the public, mass-mediated, sphere of secular society (Breward, 1988; Casanova, 1994). This re-entrance is conditioned by the language of partisan politics, that tends to place religious groups and identities along a single moral-political spectrum (Thompson, 1994). Then, there is the postmodern search for a religious identity that correlates with a post-structuralist worldview against declining religious institutions and a rapidly growing spiritual marketplace (Davis, 1998;<br>Finke and Stark, 2005; Heelas and Martin, 1998). Thirdly, there is the rise of the personal, or as Castells puts it, the “me-centred”, network as a dominant pattern of sociability in late modernity, that challenges conceptions of family and embedded communities as main determinants of cultural (and religious) identity (Castells, 2001).<br><br>While the first three factors mentioned are offline, they offer a ground for the reception and use of the Internet for the purposes of religion. Highlighted are concerns and debates about the nature of “virtual” identity, community and religious experience, seen as incomplete, duplicitous, and mere “play”, or as continuous with offline identity and interaction in the quest for authenticity (Hine, 2000; Kennedy, 2006; Turkle, 1996). Internet research also calls into question the promises that the blogosphere promotes: democratisation of public voices, the blurring of public and private discourses, and the blurring of distinctions between producer, user and media text (Beer and Burrows, 2007; van Dijck, 2009). Moreover, while the blogosphere promises a parliament on the usefulness of religious practices and structures in the construction of authentic religious identity, whether it does so on certain terms is an important consideration. It must be asked, what discursive products and practices are required for entry into the blogosphere, and by what conditions are people given voice and authority (Turner, 2007).<br><br>At the nexus of these debates and theses is the theorisation of the spiritual cyborg: one who seeks to enhance their connection with the word and understanding of their place in it through connection with technology (Brasher, 2001; Davis, 1998; Gunkel, 2007). This concept, as an object of study, has mutated in the short history of research into online religion, in which Højsgaard and Warburg (2005) have identified three “waves”. In this research a fourth “wave” is proposed, informed by recent developments in Internet technology and usage. In this fourth wave it is acknowledged that:<br>•going online is no longer a discrete step (Thomas, 2006);<br>•the Internet is also a window for the world to see the individual user, and not just the<br>other way around (Thomas, 2006);<br>•research into religion online should not just consider what online content is religious and what is not, but what is religious about the project of creating online content (Lövheim, 2008); and<br>•the same research should not just consider online environments as peculiar religious spaces, but forums for considering the place of religion in all parts of life (Cheong, Halavais et al., 2008; Lövheim, 2008).<br><br>A sample of approximately thirty blog sites was chosen and articles posted in the periods 1 July – 31 October 2006 and 1 February – 31 May 2007 were collected, plus up to 28 days of comments after each post. Each blogger was invited to participate in an interview with the researcher, of whom 26 responded positively. Home pages at the end of each period were also stored for information about bloggers’ online personae not found in articles posted (including data on other blogs read and networks identified).<br><br>Informed by Marshall (2007) and Lövheim and Linderman (2005), the research understands that the construction of identity takes place in sites of social interaction in which there is sufficient social trust shared among its members. Etiquette practices, together with the proclamation and exchange of social trust, are often required for such trust to be generated. A discursive analysis is therefore employed to uncover etiquette practices among these bloggers and their commenting audience, and to identify what constitutes trust in the sample. A network analysis is undertaken<br>to explore connections between bloggers, according to links made in posts and comments. Interviews offer more information about blogging purposes and practices otherwise unknown to the researcher.<br><br>Findings from this research may be summarised in terms of four paradoxes:<br>The Cyborg paradox:<br>The blogosphere is valued as a place of safety, control and authentic expression. Bloggers find that the environment provides for a parliament on religious practices, symbols and doctrines. In this place is the potential to build an emerging church identity that places a premium value on incarnational mission in a new culture. The paradox lies in the search for a spirituality of embodiment that takes place in an environment devoid of bodies. This paradox calls for the adoption of new discursive practices and patterns of interaction, while maintaining a link to Christian tradition.<br>The network paradox:<br>It is apparent that bloggers in the sample are far from a cohesive group. Many share more interactions with bloggers outside the sample, even outside the country, than with each other. The strength of online connections appears dependent on particular interests (like communities of practice) and on offline networks and environments (such as denominations), yet among them there is a call to define the emerging church in Australia as distinct from international expressions of the movement, particularly when these other groups are reported as representative of Australian emerging church bloggers. In this is an endeavour to discursively construct an<br>Australian emerging church blogging community, while at the same time recognising that the emerging church values fluidity and diversity over conformity and structure.<br>The authority paradox:<br>The rhetoric of democratisation is upheld in posts and conversations among bloggers in the sample. Debates about theology and church authority and structure often involve questions on what groups of people are “left out of the conversation”. Yet both discourse and network analyses show bloggers that are published in other media (newspapers and books) have more authority than others, and that public discourses are favoured over private ones. This has much to do with the socio-economic and professional status of bloggers in the sample, but also with the<br>fact that, despite its audio-visual capabilities, blogging favours writing.<br>The “glocal” paradox:<br>For bloggers in the sample the Internet is a tool for maintaining or enhancing connections originally made offline. Conversations in the blogosphere are useful primarily in that they relate to religious life offline as well as online. Despite the Internet’s facilitation of “me-centred” networks, and that safety and control that it provides in contrast to offline religious settings, bloggers hold to the ideal of intimate, localised communities and call others to bring their experience of these communities to the blogosphere, and take resources from the online experience back to their own settings.<br>