In Series

We, the body of Christ, cannot content ourselves to sit back and watch as these new media become the message without us; the world needs God’s story of hope and humanity to be woven into the fabric of its life, everywhere that life is found.

Part of the challenges to doing church online is in actively managing conflict, protecting privacy, encouraging participation in local communities, and gather together in-person as a church body for sacraments and celebrations.

Church culture is dramatically different than what we see happening on social media, and members entering an online church for the first time will bring their assumptions about social media into this new context. How might we bring people into this posture of cruciformity and reconciliation, when that posture is so foreign to today’s online experiences?

How can we translate Paul's concept of the church into an online context? How can we match his understanding of community, mission, and service with the technological tools and resources we have available to us today?

Let us consider how Paul structured worship and leadership in the Corinthian church, as well as how he handled conflict within the church body to maintain growth and faithfulness.

Paul's leadership and communication with the church in Corinth in the first century provides a basic framework that we can use to explore the application of an online church today.

If you ask almost any social media user today, they will tell you that the incredible potential of social media is often not fully realized—sometimes as a result of the nature of the medium itself, and sometimes as a result of the way we use it. In this post, we will examine some of the difficult realities of social media in our society today.

The emerging technologies of online connection are powerful tools. But to what extent does social media provide incredible opportunities, and to what extent does it hurt our real life communities?

Since the beginning of the 2020 pandemic, many churches have begun streaming their worship services online. But what would it look like for us to actually engage our communities in online community? Is this even something we should be talking about?

Even greater than truth is the command to love our neighbors, but how do we show love to the people around us?

In an age when reality is becoming gray, seeing the world in black-and-white is increasingly taboo. Stating your belief that something is necessarily wrong is a certain way to be labeled a hater, bigot, or worse. American society has become a place where we are almost unable to believe anything at all with conviction, but the gospel of Christ teaches us that we can — and should — rest in truth.

Christians have bought into a simplistic, primitive caricature of what it means to be a man, and we've elevated it to the level of godliness. It’s like we believe that the closer we get to achieving this model of masculinity, the closer we get to God. But our identity needs to be found in something higher.

I remember several years ago the must-read book for Christian guys was John Eldredge's "Wild at Heart: Discovering the Secret of a Man's Soul." The book presents men as unilaterally having an inner thirst for "masculinity" that needed to be quenched by "roughing it" in the woods, exerting our physical strength, and defending our women from their weaker natures. The entire time that I read it, I had to fight back questions about myself. I didn't feel drawn to any of these things that Eldredge said should be hardwired into my DNA - was I broken? was I missing something?

God's Word is very clear about how we Christians should live our lives, but we, as a culture, have become adept at setting these rules aside by either conveniently ignoring them or writing them off as metaphors or altruistic ideals.

I know my rights. It is my right as an American to say whatever I want to say. I have freedom of speech, and I have the right to exercise it.