Most of a pilgrimage trip like the one that I am on is about remembrance.  So each and every new day we walk places that were mentioned in our Scripture or are contemporaneous with our Scripture or are traditional in the history of our church (that is church with a small “c”, as in church universal).  And yesterday was like the Olympics of remembering, as we visited prayed at the Western Wall, visited the Temple Mount, and walked the Via Dolorosa up to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, then continued our pilgrimage to the City of Hebron, visiting the tombs of Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and Leah, and ended at Yad Vashem, the Jerusalem memorial to those killed in the Holocaust.

Of course, in the midst of such a holy, moving day, it fell to me to provide the comic relief.  I apparently seriously miscalculated the length of my skirt for our visit to the Temple Mount and got an opportunity to experience Arab fashion first hand.

But that episode was quickly forgotten amidst the sights and sounds that surrounded us.  And brought forward the pain of remembrance with more intensity than our last visit, the visit to Yad Veshem.  I have personally avoided visiting the Holocaust Museum which is right down the street from where I live because I was not certain that I could stand the pain of that remembrance again.  But here, surrounded by new friends, I walked that walk.  And it was particularly chilling having just returned from deep within the West Bank.  There, while still below the surface, the tensions are palpable and it is the first time that we have seen soldiers everywhere.  Yes, this is a complicated land.

This land has a very complicated history and I am afraid a complicated future.  And remembering here is sometimes hard:  it was hard to focus on remembering the way of Christ, when it leads you through the Arab souk.  And it is very, very hard to walk through Yad Vashem, remembering how few Christians of that day stood up against what was going on.  It is very hard, when you have to ask yourself the question — what am I not standing up for now?

Thank goodness for a little comic relief.  I am always happy to oblige.

Today we have continued our journey with the most amazing places:  first, the Western Wall tunnels, then a walk down the Palm Sunday Road from the Mount of Olives to the Church at Gethsemane, followed by a visit with our colleagues in faith at the Bethlehem Bible College, and then a visit to the Church of the Nativity and the Shepherd’s Cave.  And all day long, at each and every place, there was music — in my head.

As we walked through the tunnels dug by Rabbis seeking access to the Western Wall when none was available, as we stared at the gigantic stones that are the foundation of that wall — all I could hear was my friend Josh’s setting of the Shema (in Hebrew, of course):

Sh’ma Yis’ra’eil Adonai Eloheinu Adonai echad.
Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One
V’ahav’ta eit Adonai Elohekha b’khol l’vav’kha
uv’khol naf’sh’kha uv’khol m’odekha.
And you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart
and with all your soul and with all your might.

As I stood on that most ancient of burial grounds, the Mount of Olives, the place where hundreds of thousands of Jews have fought to be buried as they await the coming of the messiah, all I could hear was the gospel favorite We Shall Behold Him (by Dottie Rambo):

The sky shall unfold, preparing his entrance
The stars shall applaud him, with thunders of praise
The sweet light in His eyes shall, shall enhance those awaiting
And we shall behold Him, then face to face.

As I listened to my new friend Karen deliver today’s devotion from the Mount of Olives, as I looked out over the Dome of the Rock and the magnificent view while she reminded us that we were in the place that was Jesus’ place of prayer and preparation, I heard the lyrics of another great gospel song, Standing in the Need of Prayer:

Not my brother, not my sister,
But it’s me, oh Lord,
Standing in the need of prayer.

And as our journey to Bethlehem began, so did the Christmas music, but in particular this one:

How far is it to Bethlehem?
Not very far.
Shall we find a stable room
Lit by a star?
Can we see the little child?
Is he within?
If we lift the wooden latch,
May we go in?

And the musical journey ended as we listened to a choir sing O Little Town of Bethlehem in the Church of Santa Caterina (attached to the Church of the Nativity) and  sang Silent Night in the Shepherd’s cave on the outskirts of Bethlehem town.

Or did it…because even as I sit here tonight, getting ready to walk the Via Dolorosa tomorrow, all I can think about is this great old spiritual, that pretty well sums up my day on this pilgrim road:

Over my head, I hear music in the air
There must be a God somewhere

Goodnight, all.  The adventure continues tomorrow.

The past couple of days on our Israel journey have been spent in the desert:  Jericho, Qumran, Masada, the Dead Sea…and En Gedi (or more correctly, Ein Gedi — the spring of the goats).  If you are a Hebrew Bible geek like myself, the name En Gedi conjures pictures of an oasis amid the desert, where vineyards grow (as in Song of Songs 1:14) , where warriors rest (1 Samuel 24), and where battles are fought (Genesis 14:7, 2 Chronicles 20:2, and Joshua 15:62).  Today, En Gedi is surrounded by barren desert and forests of date palms, but the waterfalls still flow and the craggy rocks are climbed by tourists and school children alike, whether in search of history or just there to enjoy a day out in the desert.

Today it was my great gift to lead the devotion as we began our exploration of this oasis and my text was 1 Samuel 24. This is one of the great humorous stories of the Biblical text, with Saul falling into David’s hands while doing what soldiers on a long campaign often do, relieving himself in the bushes — but in this case right by David’s hiding place. And in another place and time, I might have done a word study or talked about David’s history or talked about the development of the monarchy in Israel or focused on David’s use of meshiac, messiah, or anointed one, when referring to Saul.

But the point of a devotion at the archaeological site referenced in the text, to me, is to talk not just about the text, but what the journey and the text bring together for you.  And so, in my quest to learn to follow my intuition when studying text,  I went with the fact that David didn’t kill Saul when he had the chance.  And most of all, his speech that judgment was not his (David’s), but the Lord’s.   You see, if Jesus is God-made-Flesh, David, well, he’s everyman, with all the warts and faults we all carry as part of our humanness.  And if he can remember that judgment belongs to the Lord, well, there is hope for us in our struggles and disagreements.

For you see, nothing is more clear to me as I stand in this land — this land that has been fought over for millennia, this land where people of different faiths try to co-exist on such a tiny, inhospitable space, this place on which the whole world focuses both its hopes and anxieties.  Judgment is not ours.  Our job is to get along.  The Rabbi who taught my Introduction to Judaism class said that you cannot begin to comprehend the complexities until you stand on the land, and he is right.

But David’s act of forgiveness, if you can call it that, is not just about wars and battles.  It is to me a reminder that none of us have the answers.  And David says something else important in his dialog with Saul — he reminds us not to be swayed by the opinions of others but to put our attention on the word of God.  He says:  “Why do you listen to the words of others who say, ‘David seeks to do you harm?’ (v. 8)”.   As Baptists, we believe in the power of a personal relationship with God.  There is no Baptist distinctive that tells us to listen to, as our guide Doron would say, the paka-paka of others.

And so, we opened with my favorite hymn, “Open My Eyes That I May See”, and we closed with me teaching the group a song from Hebrew class:  Hineh ma’tov u’ma-nayim (Behold how good and how pleasing if brothers could sit together in unity, Psalm 133).  And in one of those worship moments that could never be planned, the Israeli tourists walking by joined in with great gusto.

As one of my new friends on this trip says often, it is all good.  And it was, it was all good.

The opportunity to commemorate the day of Pentecost in Israel was an opportunity beyond my imagining.  Why?  Well, because I am one of those people who, if I could only attend church one day a year, would choose Pentecost over Easter and Christmas or almost any other day in the liturgical calendar.  So the chance to stand on the land of the peoples who gave birth to my faith, a faith that in many ways was really born this day — well, that was a great gift.  And if you want to read about the events of the day, no one can tell you that story better than my friend Tony …

Yesterday, however, made me look at the story of Pentecost in Acts 2 just a little differently.  Yesterday, I had a good reminder of just what it feels like to have a tongue of fire over your head and maybe I finally got a real world understanding of just what that means.

If you know me well, you know that I struggle with the gift of music in my life.  I do not, frankly, always see it as a gift.  The music business is often narcissistic and to have real success you need to be able to set aside many things to make that climb — things that I hold dear, like love and community.  I will not say that you have to set aside your faith, although I think that would have been true for me.  And over these past few years of the discernment process, I have come to a place where I am willing to let go of the world’s idea of fame and achievement and just focus on the path ahead of me.  I have tried to put music down, I have considered it a burden, I have tried to walk away.  But I have com to know that I could not — I just have not been sure what place speaking through song should have in my life, if any.  But every time I have tried to set it down, something comes along to remind me that is most likely not the plan.

So when Tony asked me if I would sing something in the theatre at Beth Sha’en yesterday, I wasn’t sure.  I really wasn’t sure.  But sticking true to my belief that I just had to put one foot after another on the path ahead I agreed and selected a piece of music that I could do without accompaniment and, well, anywhere.  I chose “The Holy City”.

And I sang it.  And as that beautiful day of Pentecost unfolded afterwards, with all the amazing sights and our wonderful ride on the Sea of Galilee, the meaning of it all became clear to me.  Those tongues of fire — yes, they were the Holy Spirit.   But we never talk about what the Holy Spirit did in that moment.  After my Pentecost experience here on the shores of the Galilee, I realize that the Holy Spirit, among other things, brought to us an awareness of our individual call, our individual set of holy gifts of the spirit.  And that is apparently one of the great gifts to me of this trip.

So while I was singing a song that says so much about what I believe about a life of faith and about our obligation as disciples to open our arms and our hearts to the world, as I sang these words “And once again the scene was changed, new earth there seemed to be; I saw the Holy City, beside the tideless sea; the light of God was on its streets, the gates were opened wide;  and all who would might enter and NO ONE was denied,” as I remembered the anniversary of my licensing to the Gospel Ministry,  I too received a new understanding of my call to use my gifts, all of them.

Thank you, one and all, and especially Tony, for the chance to remember in this amazing place.

It’s all about the water…

It is late at night after a second full day of visiting Israel with the Bible Study Tour from Campbell University.  What a great experience so far – and how much I have learned.

Headwaters of the Jordan River

You see, I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about Israel and this region in a lot of different ways – historically, culturally, politically, and theologically.  And when you have devoted so much of your attention to a place, you really think that you know something about it, right?  In a short 48 hours, most of what I thought that I “knew” about this region has been swept aside with a new appreciation (I  won’t say knowledge) of its complexity and beauty.  I will write more about that as the days pass and even after I return home, because I expect the effects of this journey to unfold over the next months and years in ways that I cannot yet imagine.  But right now I want to talk about something I’ve learned these past days, something that I feel like I should have understood (and maybe I did a little) but that I clearly did not…something very important.

You see, it is all about the water.  Here, in past history and in the here and now, much that happens is all about the water – the lack of it, the accessibility of it, who controls it, how it is used…It is all about the water.

Climbing out of the spring at Megiddo

Yesterday, standing at the headwaters of the Jordan River in the Dan Nature Preserve, standing near the border with Syrian and hearing the story of the Yom Kippur war, walking into the giant cistern at Tel Hazor and today walking down those 183 steps into the cistern and out the spring at Tel Megiddo – I realized the power of water in this region and the power that comes with access to water.  At Megiddo, the specially constructed underground reservoir gave the residents access to clean, fresh water no matter what the season, no matter what the battle conditions.  In our own era, the acquisition of the Golan Heights gave Israel undisputed control of the water that flows forth from the rocks at Dan and at Banyas (Caesarea Philippi).  And with that control comes the bounty of the farms in the Golan Heights and the upper Galilee – the fruit, the wheat, the vineyards (not to mention the banana trees and the mangos).

And yet we in our own country take water for granted.  We pollute it, we waste it, we ignore it because it always seems to be there.  And yet, that is not the case for most in the world.  Just ask my friend Ben Mann at WASHAdvocates.  He’ll tell you and your church the full story.

Or come to Israel, and see the power of water in action — see it transform former swamps and deserts into green fields of plenty.  And see the results of millennia spent fighting over the control of it.

It is indeed all about the water

Having spent these last weeks deeply immersed in learning to translate Biblical Hebrew by translating the entire book of Ruth, the word sha’ar or gate has become a regular part of my Hebrew vocabulary and my thinking about community life.

You see, in the ancient world, the gate of the town was the most important place (that is, in Near Eastern culture — once the Romans came along that would switch to the marketplace or forum).  Everything happened at the gate — that was where important contractual business happened, where news was shared (or gossip, depending on your point of view), that was where you went if you needed help, that was where strangers arrived and tried to find there way.  The gate was everything.

So the great delight of my day yesterday (there were many, many delights but those are topics for other times) was seeing what is known as the “Abrahamic Gate” at the Tel Dan archaeological site.  The first delight?  I was able to read the Hebrew sign — hasha’ar.  The second, standing in a place, preserved by the accidents of time and geology, that represented so much in the life of a human community.  Whether or not Abraham actually walked through that gate as it says in Genesis 14:14, I was standing at a place so important in the lives of a people, the kind of place I simply can’t imagine.

Because, folks, were are our gates today?  Today, a gate is something to keep people out or to keep something in….and yes, a gate served somewhat that function in the days of Abraham.  But we have no place of welcome and information like the gates of his day or of the story of Ruth and Boaz?  Where do our elders sit?  Where is the place in which our community centers all of its activity?

In our recent past, in many places, the answer to that question would have been the church.  But not today.  Not today as churches struggle for survival, as they struggle to have their message heard in a world with too much information.  But I think, having seen that magnificent gate, that there is still hope for the church to be just that in our day — the place where the essential information is clear and shared personally, no matter what is going on in the culture around us.

That’s what I was thinking about as I saw the Solomonic gate at Tel-Hazor, and the Israelite and Abrahamic gates at Tel-Dan.  I’m sure I’ll see more gates today and other things that make me think.

If you are following the itinerary, we are switching things up today because it is the Sabbath here…today we will head toward the Mediterranean and visit Caesarea Maritima, the site of Herod’s city, then come back through the Valley of Jezreel, stop at Tel-Megiddo (also known as Armageddon) and then Bet-Sheaarim and Harod Springs.  Tomorrow, Pentecost, will be our big day of the Sea of Galilee, so stay tuned!

Greetings, one and all, from the shores of the Sea of Galilee.  After a very long day of travel (well, more than a day), I am here safe and sound, and, after a great dinner and a decent night’s sleep, I am ready for our first day of exploration.  It is hard to call it sightseeing and I don’t feel quite holy enough or at the moment theological enough to refer to it as a pilgrimage.

But what I can tell you is that I am here…and true to form, I feel nothing that I expected to feel.  As usual, it took some sleep and a little exercise to bring the words to explain what I was feeling yesterday as I arrived.  I must admit that I felt none of the excitement that I felt as I arrived in Istanbul or many other places that I have had the great pleasure to visit, places that I had dreamed about for a very long time before I actually arrived.  I thought it might have been jet lag or just too many modes of conveyance in too short a time.  But over the last year I have learned to sit with the feelings I don’t understand, until they become clear in their own good time.

And so, this morning, as I got up and dashed out to the shores of the Sea of Galilee to get that precious sun rise shot (which I can now see out my window I was not patient enough to wait for), I understood my response to this place – you see, everything here (at least so far), feels simultaneously familiar and new.  Not familiar because of the linkages between Israel and the U.S. (because so far the cultural linkages are not that apparent), but familiar because in living a life of faith and study, part of me has always here.  I’m pretty sure that I had to wait to come here until I could understand that.  And I am so glad to understand it at the beginning of this journey.

So, Pastor Amy, I am happy to report to you that on my early morning walk this morning I not only saw God in the sunrise and in the hundreds of birds and fish that populate these shores, but I saw God in my life and my heart and in everything and everyone around me.   And in the sunrise, of course.

For those of you interested in following our itinerary, today we explore the Upper Galilee and the Golan Heights.  We begin at the Mount of Beatitudes, then drive up the famous ancient road that has caused so much fighting for this land – the Via Maris, visiting Tel-Hazor and Tel-Dan then Caesarea Philippi and finally ending with some more modern history, visiting sites from Yom Kippur war in 1973.

I’m sitting in the Starbucks at the Raleigh-Durham airport right now, with my first year of seminary behind me and a great adventure before me, an adventure I have waited many, many years to undertake.   I’ve been so busy with school and my own formation and a bit of singing here and there, that I just haven’t mentioned it much.  And I must confess that even as I boarded the plane at Reagan National this morning,  I wasn’t clear enough from the fog of study and preparation to be sure that it was real.  But as I sit here, waiting for the rest of my travel group to arrive, it has struck me that it really, really is real.

I am at last going to Israel.

If you keep up with my musings on my blogs, you might say, hey, wait, didn’t you go there in the fall?  I mean, you wrote about it…here’s the piece I wrote.  But that trip was cancelled because of geo-political stuff.  So when the chance to go this spring came around, I decided to take it.

At first I was not sure — it would mean leaving a week before the spring term was over.  And at the time, I didn’t really understand that it was going to mean writing and writing and writing to get a whole lot of papers and projects done over a week early.  Oh yes, and then there was taking the Hebrew final many days early.  But I decided to go for it, and now, on the other side of all that effort, I’m glad I did — for a lot of reasons.  First, the last two weeks of my life have proven to me the truth of the old adage that a task will expand to fit the time allotted to it.  So less time combined with some careful planning and everything still got done.  Second, the other lesson was — sometimes there really just is “good enough”.  Questions that drive me to write and think and pray are not going to be solved in a 6 week class and the resulting reflection paper.  Those questions will still be there, new answers will be found and on and on and on….

So here I am.  I’ll do my best to share a little of my adventure each day with those of you who have been so supportive and encouraging this last year as I studied and…well, whatever it was that happened this year.

Let the adventure begin, that’s what I say.  My camera and my notepad are ready.  And I am too…at last.

I had the opportunity to pursue some independent study this semester along with my more conventional classes.  And as my chosen project to explore the use of new technologies in faith development and congregational life, I decided to make a movie.    Susan, a movie?  You decided to make a movie?  Yes, indeed.

Why, you might ask?  Well, for a lot of reasons.  First, I like to stay current with technology and I live in world now where every time I turn around someone is taking a video of something and posting it somewhere for the world to see.  Second, of all the technologies that are “current”, video was the one about which I knew absolutely nothing at all.  I can edit a photo a little bit, I can design a web site, I can edit audio and I can manage a blog…but I have really never tried my hand at even the simplest of video techniques (and that means even shooting them, except for the occasional 30 second picture of the ocean surf as a reminder of a great vacation).

So as I was looking for a project that would let me get me feet wet and hopefully produce something useful as an end product, I thought about the series on our church web site called “Meet a Member.”  We are blessed at Calvary with a very articulate and engaging congregation of interesting people, and hey, wouldn’t it be interesting if a person could have a conversation with a member instead of just read about them.  I still think that it is a good idea, but my personal learning curve has been a bit steeper than I at first imagined, and there is still work to be done before I have something that I am ready to say is complete.  But I have a good start, which I will turn in as my class project, and I will continue to work over the summer to create something that I think Calvary will be able to use.

In the spirit of my “What I’ve Learned so Far” series, I would like to share with you just what I did to get the project this far, and what I think needs to happen to move it to a releasable product that will really portray the depth of spirit in our congregation.

Getting Started

The first step was to talk to the pastors and see if they agreed with my great idea.  I am very lucky;  we have a loving community and the whole congregation is on board with the idea that Calvary is a teaching institution.  That means when a crazy congregant such as myself says, hey, I’d like to make a movie, they say, Great!  With their blessing on the project came a list of people that they thought might be willing to participate.

The next steps were:  1) create a rough storyboard design for the project, 2) gain permission from some willing subjects, and 3) make decisions about the tools I would use (cameras, software, etc).   Creating the storyboard involved developing a list of questions and thinking about the kinds of additional graphics the video might need.   During this design process, I got the idea that it might be interesting to give each subject a camera and let them walk around the church for a Sunday and film the things that were important to them about Calvary…to create footage from their viewpoint that I could include with the interview.

Choosing My Tools

As I said earlier, when I started this project I knew absolutely nothing about video.  I do a lot of still photography, but have never really gotten involved in video.  So the first priority was to choose my tools.  And, since I live in a Windows-based world,  I knew that some of the most user-friendly ones were not available to me.  After looking through a lot of literature about creating video, I decided to use my new DSLR camera to create the video interviews and my Kodak flip for the subject-generated content.  For my text is used the book Creating DSLR Video: From Snapshots to Great Shots by Richard Harrington.  I chose this book for several reasons:  first, it was very recent and so included the latest technological information;  second, it was very clearly written with the novice in mind; and third, because it included a lot of introductory information that a newbie such as myself really needed.  The concepts in the book helped me work both with my DSLR and my Flip and gave me insight into picking a setting and getting a lot of content down so that I had plenty to trim and edit.

As my editing software, I chose Adobe Premier Elements 11.  I also looked at products like Google’s new free Web video editor, but I have a lot of experience with Adobe products for web design and still photography, so I thought that I would stick with a brand I knew well.  It was not expensive ($69 at Amazon.com), easy to download.  Like many Adobe products, start-up was easy.  It contains a great depth of features, but for a beginner like me, it was easy to learn the basics of editing….just enough to get me started.

Designing Content

With the technology needs solved, I could turn my attention to the most important thing…the content.  What I wanted was to create something where the individual member really came alive.  I wanted something that would invite the stranger to come and meet this person and see what this thing called Calvary was all about — because they were drawn in by the human face in the video.   To that end, I kept the questions simple:

• What brought you to Calvary
• What keeps you coming back
• What is your favorite story about Calvary,  and
• What one thing would you like to say to someone considering coming for a visit.

The answers to those questions, combined with the footage from the subject’s walkabout, would be my raw material.

What I Learned

I learned a lot of things during the course of this project, practical things and process things.   And I have much more to learn.  But here are some things that I would like to share.

• When you are working with other people, try not to be on a tight timeline (like producing something as a class project).  People in DC are busy and while they are generous with their time for such things, you need time for a project like this and time to make multiple appointments.
• Not everyone knows how to work with video, so the instruction “Take this flip camera and capture what is important to you about Sunday’s at Calvary,” is not enough.  With most people participating in a project such as this, you will need to spend time teaching them about the camera and talking to them about the kinds of things they might capture.
• Learning to edit video takes time.
• The more you learn about a new medium, the more you will know what you don’t know and still need to learn.

Meet John Taylor

The video that I have produced as my class project is called “Meet John Taylor”.   While I have gathered raw material for a second video, because my focus was on learning the basic techniques of design and editing, I have put together only one video at this time.    The graphic transitions are placeholders, there is not yet a soundtrack, and the timing is off in places.  These are all things that I still need to understand as my learning process continues. And, I do not as yet have the look and feel to the video that I want, because I have not yet learned enough about video effects.

What I did get, however, was something that meets my original requirement.  I have a video of a wonderful Calvary member, talking about what our church means for him and why it keeps him coming back to join in worship with our little band of disciples.   I am grateful to my friend John for his honesty, his patience, and for just being the man that he is.

And What Is Next?

I have a lot more to learn about video and there is yet a lot of work to do.  But I have the summer ahead.

Through this work, I am convinced that I am on the right track and that there is room for this kind of video in our formation program.  In the end, I may not be the person to do the actual editing and creation.  Or I may, one never knows.  But I will keep working on it for now.

I am fascinated by this simple fact:  no matter what I am reading, no matter what I am studying, no matter what paper I am writing, the question, ultimately, stays the same.  And that question?  What kind of disciple are you called to be and how, on your own journey? Can you be of help in the formation of those who choose to walk along beside you, and if yes, how? Everything, always, comes down to the question of discipleship and formation, at least, for me.

Today’s task is to complete one of two blog posts for my independent study course about technology and faith.  The paragraphs which follow share some information about the book I chose as my reading assignment:  Digital Religion, Social Media and Culture:  Perspectives, Practices and Futures, edited by Pauline Hope Cheong, Peter Fischer-Nielsen, Stefan Gelfgren, and Charles Ess, published by Peter Lang in 2012 as Vol. 78 of their Digital Formations series, a series devoted to the discussion of  issues raised by the ongoing digitization of almost every aspect of our human culture.  This particular volume in the series looks at the intersection of digital culture and religion through a series of essays about what the editors (and others)  have called “Religion 2.0″.   Religion 2.0 is most often defined as the “church” that results from the interaction between the global world of faith as represented by specific traditions and Web 2.0, that summary designation given to the electronic world of blogs, social media, wikis and apps in which many of us now find ourselves living.  Religion 2.0 is not a church in which the traditional is replaced by the electronic, but one in which the faith community becomes an assembled mixture of real world and virtual practices (pg. 2).

And here is where the discussion turns to discipleship.  The editors Cheong and Ess offer an interesting discussion about  theories of individuality and self-identity, how that identity relates to our beliefs,  and how the type of self we create in our own spirits and those around us influences the ways in which  we adopt and express  our relationship with faith and spirituality.  It is a very interesting discussion;  they suggest that  the Protestant mainline traditions are very much tailored to the children of the Enlightenment, those who value rationality and learn through literature and the written word.  The introduction of social media and a type of digital reality have altered the type of individuality experienced by each of us, however, and that new self-identity is no longer compatible with simple written communication.  We are now entering the age of what they call the networked individual, someone exposed regular to sensory input that is not just written but also graphically visual and auditory in nature.  This expansion of the sensory viewpoint of those receiving  information has returned the field of  emotional response to the mix — rationality is no longer sufficient to persuade the believer nor to hold their attention to the community and the tradition.  Cheong cites  as illustration of this point a study of subjects with a regular micro-blogging ritual (Tweeting).  The data suggests that the brain’s sense of reality may actually be rewired, leaving the subject open to a less rationalized and more experiential understanding of the relationship between their individual nature, the other, and the Divine (pg. 11).  Or, to use more standard faith language, it seems that our return to a kind of communication that involves all of our senses may herald the return of the mystical tradition to our faith (my summary, not Cheong’s).   As a follow up, Cheong points out that Protestant traditions that emphasize the theology of being “born again” are more attractive to an individual expressing this kind of networked identity that the more rationally oriented traditions.

And so the authors return to my eternal question.  For any faith community to grow and thrive, it must first ask the question about what kind of individual and individuality do they wish to form and to foster.  The second question is then, with that mission clearly understood, how do we use a combination of the traditional and the new media to put that calling into action?  Individual  = disciple.  Individuality  = discipleship.

The volume actually contains a group of essays centered on these questions and includes discussions of theories that apply to digital religion, some empirical investigations of specific practices, and a set of discussions that attempt to create a theology that fits to the new world of digital religion.  As an example of the type of work included, let’s take a close look at a couple of those essays.

The first is one of the so-called empirical studies in the volume.  ”Voting ‘Present’:  Religious Organizational Groups on Facebook” by Mark D. Johns is interesting but I find it hard to truly classify it as an empirical study, since the group studied is not truly quantifiable.  It is, however, an interesting reflection of the nature of Facebook groups formed around religion.   Johns gives us some interesting facts about online use:  he quotes the Pew Internet and American Life project, noting that one fourth of all adult internet users have searched for faith information of some kind online.  In fact, according to Johns, religion-related activity online is secondary in frequency only to that related to pornography (note that most of his date comes from 2008).

Using as his evaluation criteria the four categories of online activity cited by Heidi Campbell (2006) in her work “Religion and the Internet” published in Communication Research Trends   (information gathering, participation in online rituals, online missionary activity, and formation of online religious community), Johns examined a subset of the over 500 religious groups he found on Facebook in 2008, and declared none of these activities present.  Instead, he concluded that participation in these groups was inherently passive.  Most joined groups not for the sake of interaction, but as an affirmation of the goals or viewpoint of the group they selected, and, as a public statement of their own beliefs.  According to Johns this constitutes a fifth type of religious activity not cited by Campbell:   a confession of faith.  Whether or not that act of confession generates any true faith identity formation is totally dependent on the reaction to the declaration.

If Johns evaluation is correct, we have a group of people (his focus was those in youth and young adulthood), taking that risky step of stating their faith identity with no one really  listening.  The question for those of  us interested in faith formation is this:  is it a true act of declaration if you shout out and no one is there, and if he is correct that this is happening, how can we as educators see to it that someone hears the cry of these young people?  I don’t have an answer.

The second essay I selected is one filed under the heading “Historical and Theological Examinations.” Peter Horsfield, in his essay, “‘A Moderate Diversity of Books?’ The Challenge of New Media to the Practice of Christian Theology” writes about the ways in which the medium has changed the message throughout the history of Christianity.  According to Horsfield, the medium influences communication  in four ways:  first, by the importance of what senses are engaged by that medium and the way those senses influence the physical characteristics of the presentation; second, by the way in which the medium stores, retrieves, and reproduces the cultural knowledge that it contains; third, by the the way in which a medium positions people in relationship to each other and to the information, and the social relationships that develop because of this positioning; and fourth, by the relationship between the medium and power (pg. 246-47).  The basic medium for theology is language:  oral, written, printed, visualized, sung or screened.  We have already seen the changes in theological expression as it encountered the evolution from oral to written to printed express and the changes that occurred as society itself moved from majority illiterate to majority literate in character.

Horsfield suggests that as theological discourse moves from the printed book to digital media, we will experience a further paradigm shift in modes of theological discourse.  The biggest challenge will be to the idea of theological authority.  As we see the extension of the discussion past the usual academic and institutional circles, theologians are forced to enter the marketplace of ideas.  No longer can institutional authority be the sought after imprimatur   Theological ideas, to survive in the marketplace, must be seen by the individual consumer to support their personal consideration of the big questions about the meaning of life and the ultimate human condition.  No longer can the theologian seek to be “right” or to simply spark discussion within a narrow academic circle.  In the new media age, they must reach out and build a relationship with the seeker, a relationship of mutual exploration.

While Horsfield’s article talks about the type of theologian we will need for the future, it too is a statement of the kind of disciple we can expect to encounter in this brave new world.  It is no longer sufficient to tell someone what to believe.  Those who do continue to seek a relationship with their God, whatever that might be, will use new media to do their own type of questioning, their own exploration.  For those of us involved in formation activities, that means that we have to work even harder to provide forums for discussion and thought-provoking materials that can be accessed in many different ways.

I am not certain how useful this book is for someone trying to do the actual work of formation in a church setting.  I am not certain how useful it is for someone examining the question of how to respond to the technological  innovation that surrounds and beckons us.  It does not successfully argue for or against the use of technology in formation.  It does, however, provide some thought-provoking discussions for those who might be interested in crafting a “theology of technology.”  Digital Religion is a volume with many more questions than answers, but they are thought provoking questions that need our consideration.