Now these people are my kind of people.  I have been blogging and talking this for years.  Now someone is saying it.  (And,  it so happens to be an area in which I am uniquely situated.  I did all of my formal theological training prior to my formal training and experience in Web development and Internet server support/maintenance work. I consider it (the importance of “theologically savvy”   to be analogous to “pastoral care and counseling”.  There needs to be a “CPE”-type training program;  the way people interact online and REACT to their technology (and the technology of others)  is a major factor in our relating to one another as the body of Christ.  It HAS to be explored.

The New Media Project folks put it this way on their page where they define their project:

Theologically savvy

At the New Media Project at Union Theological Seminary in the City of New York we think religious leaders need more than primers in building websites and using social media. We believe that leaders of faith communities also need a larger interpretive framework for recognizing and evaluating what’s happening in communication today. Even though this major shift in patterns and tools of communication will have a lasting effect on the church, compelling theological interpretations of the shift have not yet been adequately developed. Nor do sufficient strategic frameworks yet exist to help faith communities move forward using technology in theologically responsible ways.

In short, we want to help religious leaders be theologically savvy about technology.

New Media Project at Union Theological Seminary | The Project

It is SOOOOO true that we need so much more than simply “primers in building websites and using social media”.  These are important and useful services,  but they often fail to encourage the churches to keep a theological eye on what is happening.   Theological discernment is crucial.  Else we become ,  in yet one more way,  a reflection of the culture around us and its tendency to uncritically adopt the patterns and motivations and values of that culture.  I often hear “Social  Media experts” and Web consultants say “the Web is just a tool” ,  and it must be used to spread the gospel.  While it is true that information can be “spread”,  it is also not true that the medium is neutral.  This fails to take seriously the insights of Marshall McLuhan  (ie “the medium is the message”).  The impact of the medium itself is a sociological and psychological (and so probably also a “spiritual”) force that alters the nature of the message.  Walter Ong wrote a book,  Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word,  that has crucial insights into the changing nature of the very meaning of and the Effects upon us of “the word”.  My post yesterday reflecting on Phyllis Tickle’s suggestion that the very authority of the Bible is undergoing a sea change in the conversations within the emerging church.  Perhaps this “emergent” conversation is on to something.  (I say this tongue in cheek,  because once I have begun meeting and conversing and spending time with people in these “emergent conversations”,  and hearing presentations about that conversation,  I have known they are “on to something”.  And surprise, surprise,  they are deeply involved in conversations online,  and experimenting with ways of being church that are deeply resourced by online communications. 

So I am very glad to see the New Media Project,  and have already begun talking with some of the people involved there.  It seems like my kind of conversation.