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Church
The Thread: When Church Happens Online
by
Cathleen Falsani
We recently had a conversation about how hard it has been for some of us to reach out, ask for help, and be willing to receive it. Being merciful to ourselves is how Shani, the hospital chaplain, put it. In response, Brian, a filmmaker who is married to Sara, an artist, and who is in the midst of the arduous task of relocating their family (with two very young children) from Los Angeles to Boston, wrote: “Sara and I quote Henri Nouwen frequently of late: ‘The weakest among us create community.’ Somehow, I feel I’m on the receiving end in this thread considerably more often than I am giving out. So thanks to all.”
For me, the thread, as we commonly call it, has become what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg, in his book
The Great, Good Place
, described as a “third place.” Most people have two primary places — home and the workplace — and then there is a third place where they feel anchored and part of a chosen community. It might be a bar (illustrated beautifully in the television series “Cheers”), a neighborhood restaurant, a house of worship, or a bowling alley. Wherever or whatever it is, everyone, Oldenburg argues, needs a third place.
Heidi Campbell, a professor of communications at Texas A&M University and author of the book
Exploring Religion Community Online: We Are All One In The Network
, has been researching spirituality and the Internet since 1996. I asked her about my spiritual Facebook experience and she said it’s something she’s seeing more and more. Facebook is a kind of “mediated third place that allows people to engage or invigorate their spirituality,” she said. “In a contemporary, information-based society, it’s often hard to get that face-time connection. It becomes that virtual third place where I can kind of connect with that transcendent part of myself through conversation when maybe I couldn’t take the time out to get to church to have it.”
Or, as is the case with a few of us on the thread, find a physical church where we feel safe enough to have the conversation, as the case may be. On the thread, we’re all talking and, more importantly, all listening in a way we might not be able to do in person.
We are a group of 20 because that’s the limit Facebook places on the number of people you can have active on a single thread. A few months back, we talked about starting a regular Facebook group, where the number could be unlimited and anyone could join. But, after some discussion, we decided to keep the group as it was, intimate and, frankly, safe. Over time, a few of the original members have drifted out of the thread – too busy to keep up with the frenetic pace and sheer volume of our online conversations. When we reach 1,000 posts, we ask if anyone wants out – to take a break – and if anyone has a suggestion of someone who we should invite to the conversation. In all, about 30 people have been a part of the thread at one time or another.
“The beauty of Facebook or another online community is that you’re choosing your community,” Campbell told me. “Because it’s a lot of like minds gathering or people with a similar background, like your experience, you can develop a sense of intimacy more quickly. Some criticize that because they say it’s a false sense of intimacy and a false sense of community because it’s self-selecting, homogenous, very tightly bound grounds. But I think you could argue…it’s the way you connect with people now. As middle age is staring us in the face, we’re trying to reconnect in a lot of ways. There’s some part of spirituality that traditional religion [doesn’t] really connect with, but there’s that meaning-making, that God void, that I want to reconnect with, and so the Internet is becoming a great place, whether it’s to explore or to meet other people who are on the search.”
I’m not sure which one of us said it first, but somewhere around the second month, we began to refer to the thread as “church.” It sure feels like that to us. “Whenever two or more are gathered together in cyberspace…” Kelley, my best friend, an actress and high school drama teacher in St. Louis, said in June amidst a discussion of the nature of evil. We’ve dealt with many of the conflicts that “actual” churches do. There have been misunderstandings, hurt feelings, and arguments over interpretations of Scripture, politics, and the economy. We even had to deal with a member who was acting inappropriately and making some of the women uncomfortable. We pray together, bring our worries to one another, and share our doubts and faltering. In the six months we’ve been together online, we’ve walked with each other through divorce, childbirth, a transcontinental move, career changes, financial problems, deaths of loved ones, family members going off to war, unemployment, sickness, injury, depression, parenting issues, and — perhaps one of our greatest challenges in keeping the community honest and safe and loving — the presidential election. Short of deciding what color to paint the narthex — pink or black seemed to be the most popular options — we function much like any church, warts and all. (And we have a lot of warts.)
WHENEVER TWO OR MORE ARE GATHERED…
Earlier this year, I read with interest Shane Hipps’ Q Short titled, “Our Nomadic Existence: How Electronic Culture Shapes Community.” In it, Shane expresses his concern not only for the content of electronic communication, but also for the medium itself. He says, “If virtual community functions like cotton candy, then authentic community is more like broccoli. It may not always taste good, but it provides crucial nourishment for the formation of our identities. Authentic community will undoubtedly be marked by conflict, risk, and rejection. At the same time, it offers the deepest levels of acceptance, intimacy and support.”
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