This statement from the NYTimes articles misses on both scores.

Beware of Convenient Fellowship – Room for Debate – NYTimes.com.

The virtual faith experience is smoother and more painless than the real-world one. But it is also less likely to foster the kind of deep spiritual growth that comes only from authentic, face-to-face community – from grappling with religious teachings and disciplines that challenge our natural inclinations and religious believers whose rough edges help us recognize and soften our own.

This seems to assume there is an agreement on what constitutes “smooth and painless”.  I don’t even know what that means to say that the “virtual faith experience is smoother  and more painless”.  Often I find it to be overly dominated by debates that spiral into flame wars.  I know the author is referring to the polite and friendly and the “likes” and all those “connection building” elements.  But the trolls abound.

And then they define the “authentic, face to face”  (loaded as that is by virtue of the combination of “authentic” and “face to face”)  community as where one can “grapple” with “religious teachings that challenge our natural inclinations” and be confronted with believers whose rough edges help us recognize and soften our own.  I find that totally useless,  since there is plenty of “confrontation” and contrast and even argument and debate that happens online.  In fact,  it seems it is actually more likely that these things get confronted online than in “authentic, face to face community”.

Now I believe there are indeed elements of  human community and interaction that are altered, omitted,  changed,  distorted,  …..different…..in ways that can be detrimental to the full experience of embodied community.  But yet,  there are elements of  online community that can reduce inhibitions (that in itself can be a blessing  or a curse),  free up individuals who feel more intimidated in certain social situations and groups,  especially when they feel new to the group.  There are certainly elements of “authenticity” that get drawn out in online settings for many people  (I being  one of them).  I am much more confident in my ability to articulate in writing,  because  I don’t have to worry about my self-perceived flaws in my face to face “delivery”;  if I stumble over a word or speak too haltingly,  I immediately sense the pressure to improve the performance,  which  feeds into increased discomfort.  That doesn’t happen all the time,  but it happens internally enough that I have  developed an innate tendency to prefer online discussion to most face to face ones.  But I still desire the face to face ones.  I wish there wasn’t such a tendency for people to keep online and offline conversations so separated.  It has been much rarer in my experience ,  than I would have thought 15 years ago,  to experience the frequent face to face conversation that begins with something  like “ what you were saying in your blog post last  night really made sense”  or some sort  of  continuation of an online originated thought.  I want to see a more fluid movement from one to the other.  Online conversations can be extensions of ftf ones.  FTF conversations can be “water cooler” conversations that exist alongside the traditional water cooler discussions that tend to use media events (some shared social event or TV show or popular movie).

I would love to see more elaborate coverage of the sociology and psychology of human interaction to use as the basis for declaring face  to face (what some call “real”  or “authentic” such as  in this article I quoted)  or online (“virtual”) community as superior or “preferrable” to the other.  Just as the church will do with “pastoral care”,  the studies in psychology and sociology inform a theological approach (and so we have such programs as Clinical Pastoral Education – CPE),  we also need to be studying the way personal and interpersonal needs are met and not met in online contexts and with the varying techologies such as mobile,  and services such as Facebook, Twitter, and Blogs.

I have embarked upon some research into this.  Something I’ve talked and written about often over the years,  and I hope to bring to light and into everyday theological parlance and awareness that there are complex sociological and psychological, and therefore also “spiritual” forces at work here to which we must give careful discernment and study.