Just read a post by a Wil Ranney, whom I met and spoke with at the Religious Communicator’s Congress in Chicago in April. He is writing after reading an CNN piece on Virtual preaching. I particularly like his closing paragraph:
I believe in the word made flesh. A virtual understanding of God given to us in human from. I believe that the word is still being made flesh. We take those experiences with God where we can get them, whether it’s through a hologram, on a screen, or in person. Who are we to limit God’s ability to work through those mediums. Likewise, there is a trap in becoming too reliant on those mediums to see God. The same can be said about our traditional Sunday worship as well. Life is prayer, an opportunity to witness God breathing into the world around us.
simuality: CNN Article on Virtual Preaching
I comment with this:
Wil,
I believe that online mediums can be and often ARE better encounters than TEXT, and that INCLUDES the Bible. Many of our fundamentalist friends may call me a heretic for that, but I contend that the God story was oral before it was textual (and not a contention that can refuted). I have just started a book called "Desiring the Kingdom" by James K.A. Smith, where he writes about ALL practices (even "secular ones") as value laden and "liturgical", and provides in the intro an unnamed locus of liturgical observance and ritual, which he later reveals as the shopping mall, as the "place of observance" of the cultural values of materialism and capitalism. He argues that these are "liturgical" in that they are formative and that they shape our desires (in this case, as consumers). He goes on to argue that the church has become "propositional"; stressing "ideas" and "worldviews" to the neglect of practices. Thus we have a "Bibliolatry" that downplays other modes and levels of "forming" our desires; what we LIVE out of the habits formed by a worshipping community. I am with you in that the church may well be afraid of the "virtual" and the "simualities" of the Net because it awakens the desires that we have for communion on levels other than that of "intellectual" and "doctrinal".
Dale
