Which continues with our theme of from last week about the difficulties/advantages of church oriented activities happening online and more specifically on Facebook (Last week we had an evangelist "Type in tongues" on her Facebook posts),,,
At the surface the article is about the popularity of a "Jesus page" on Facebook which is more popular than Justin Bieber's Facebook page (I don't understand why the New York Times would think that would be such a shocking fact)....
But the more interesting issue which the article seems to be really getting at is the validity of church communities that not only interact with members online, but also exist as a church community through online alone.
The most open to such a viable "online-only" community was a rabbi...
"There are some people who will always prefer the in-person, face-to-face experience, who love being in a room with other Jews and smelling the freshly baked challah. And some people will prefer being online,” said Rabbi Baum, 31, who is one of the leaders of OurJewishCommunity.org. “There are those people who prefer to check out our tweets on their phone or listen to our podcast. I don’t think the use of technology needs to be for everybody. But we have found a community online. Many of them have never felt a connection to Judaism before."
The Rabbi gets to a very important question.... It's not about real or virtual in terms of church. Rather, it's simply about what about those who would never go to real church in the first place? Do we draw the line of where Christianity is active/inactive and just choose to not reach out to those who will only go to church online?
3 comments:
"Forsake not the assembling of thyselves together, such is the manner of some" It really is not a complex issue.
Yeah. I can see where your coming from. But I wasn't arguing that we should abandon actual meetings.
The Bible does not specify a minimum geographic distance and you can assemble online.
Question what do we do at church?
We listen / sing along to religious songs.
We donate money.
We listen to someone talk about God.
In can do all of that on YouTube except donate money which I need to use PayPal.
There are a few rare churches where you interact with the people next to you. It is rather odd so we don't need to worry too much. We could just add a decision board or a Facebook group and it would be covered.
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