It is Saturday night and I am waiting for a church service to begin. People are already gathering in the lobby to chat, but with one big difference. The worshippers are spread all over the world – from Oklahoma to Korea – and are ready to attend a service broadcast over the internet via .
“I love the online campus. I can attend an experience with friends from everywhere,” says one worshipper, Elizabeth C, a 48-year-old mother from Oklahoma City.
Many churches webcast their services, but Life Church, also based in Oklahoma City, is the first to set up an online community. “We have tried to create the same kind of experience that they would have if they were physically there,” says Bobby Gruenewald, a Life Church pastor who used to work as a technology entrepreneur.
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The service is part of a growing trend for Protestant and Catholic churches to integrate technology into their services. Churches around the world are now using video and lighting displays in services, creating podcasts of sermons and emailing the faithful with reminders to pray. The Vatican last week announced it is developing an interactive website for young people to study catholic texts. “The vitality and innovation that is taking place in religious organisations is driven by technology,” says Scott Thumma, a sociologist at the Hartford Institute for Religious Research in Connecticut, who has studied the implications of the internet for congregational life.
Life Church has nine physical “campuses” where people can gather to worship in four different states, connected by satellite video links. It has been running online services since April 2006, and now has an average of 1000 virtual congregants logging on each week.
Before and after each service, users hang out in a chat room known as the “lobby”, built with software developed by Los Angeles firm Userplane, a subsidiary of AOL that also provides software for MySpace and a range of dating sites. Visit the chat room and you will see a list of attendees down one side of the computer screen. Highlight a name and you can find out how old they are and where they are based. You can also watch a live video-cast of those with webcams.
At around 7 pm, the lobby starts to empty as we tune in for the service. Half of my computer screen is now devoted to a video webcast of pastor Craig Groeschel giving a sermon from the church’s main Oklahoma City campus. The webcast frequently switches to videos of him shot in various locations, including a pizza parlour and a cemetery, and clips of rock bands. Video clips are also broadcast on screens in the church’s physical campuses. The other half of the computer display is dedicated to a window where congregants can type notes for themselves during the service.
Life Church’s web presence is not limited to these weekly online services, as it also uses the internet to hunt for new recruits. A button on the website allows people to email their friends to invite them to participate in the online service, and the church also organises “micro-missions” into MySpace and Facebook. Participants meet at a specific time to pray together in the virtual lobby, and then log onto the social networking sites and attempt to persuade their friends to join the church. After an hour of this cyber-missionary work they return to the lobby to pray.
To increase its reach even further, Life Church will soon open a church in the online world Second Life, where it has already bought an island and is building a virtual version of the church’s physical campus, says Gruenewald.
Christianity, and religion in general, is not generally associated with innovation, says Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist at Intel in Portland, Oregon. “Technology gets culturally loaded with the things we associate with science, like progress, rationality and discovery. I think that’s one of the reasons why the intersection of technology and religion seems startling to us.”
But like other evangelical mega-churches that are embracing new technologies, Life Church is boosting its congregation at a time when most traditional churches are haemorrhaging members, says Thumma.
For some, the main appeal of technology is that it makes religion more “relevant” to modern life, for example, by allowing pastors to show videos alongside their sermons, with footage that applies their message to modern life. “Before Life Church, the church was irrelevant to me,” says Scott Klososky, a technology consultant who attends the services. “You can’t just stand in a pulpit and expect to reach people that way.”
Technology also offers people greater flexibility over how and when they worship, for instance, by allowing people to listen to podcasts of sermons. “People can listen to the sermons while jogging, working out or while they are in the car,” says Daniel Harrell, a minister at Park Street church in Boston who often leads the church’s “contemporary” services, which include a rock band with electric guitars and the words to hymns projected onto a screen.
However, these benefits don’t come without challenges, says Beki Grinter, a human-computer interaction researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. To understand how technology is affecting protestant churches, she and her colleagues carried out hour-long interviews with 13 pastors. Then last November they presented their results at the Computer Supported Cooperative Work conference in Alberta, Canada.
While most pastors found technology, audio and video effects, for example, to be helpful in making services relevant to a younger congregation, they also expressed worries about keeping their services “reverent”. “This is my struggle always. There is a fine line to walk between being relevant and being reverent,” one pastor told Grinter’s team. Others reported that visual aids and references to pop culture can be a distraction and “may distance congregants from the church’s biblical underpinnings”.
“It draws you away from contemplation – it can be an incredible distraction. There can be less time for solitude,” another pastor told them. However, Klososky does not believe that adding high-tech wizardry to a sermon makes it less reverent. “I don’t see it as church-lite. It’s a firmly conservative, biblical-based message.”
“I don’t see it as church-lite. It’s a firmly conservative, biblical-based message”
Grinter’s team also found that pastors are concerned about email. While they gladly send out email calls to members of the congregation to pray for others who have fallen upon hard times, they sometimes struggle to prevent it replacing face-to-face meetings. “My fear is that it changes the relationship that people enjoy with others,” said one pastor.
Harrell says he only offers counselling over the web in emergencies, and tries to use email only as a channel for encouraging someone to open up initially, after which he suggests a physical meeting.
Perhaps the biggest fear for many Christians is the internet itself, and how they can avoid the indecency and irreverence they see as commonplace on the web. To address this, there is a website called , which markets itself as a “Christian MySpace alternative”. It claims to be “safe, clean, and up to date with current internet trends”.
Others say this is the wrong approach. Kevin Hendricks, who blogs on the website , calls the site a “Christian Ghetto”, and says Christians should not be shutting themselves off from the mainstream web. “If churches, or Christians in general, want to interact with the world, it’s not going to happen on a sanitised, sanctified, Christian version of a social networking site,” he says.
Surfing for jesus
“Most religious people are using technology that was purpose-built for something else. What might technology look like if it was built purely for religious purposes?” So asks Genevieve Bell at Intel in Portland, Oregon.
Some researchers have already come up with an answer. Icthux, for example, is a version of the open source GNU-Linux operating system designed for Christians. Icthux comes with a handful of tools that make it easier to navigate the Bible. It also includes a tool that allows someone to automatically send Bible quotes via instant messaging, simply by typing in the chapter and verse.
A search engine has also been developed for Catholics using a tool released by Google called Co-op, which allows users to create their own specialist search engines that provide results relevant to them. A search for “fish” on , for example, brings up references to Jesus at the top.
Such search engines could also be a useful resource for researchers, reporters and people of other faiths who want to familiarise themselves with Christian thinking on subjects such as stem cells or evolution, says Paul Steinbrueck, who designs Christian websites and search engines.
