Our Age of Anxiety is, in great part, the result of trying to do today’s job with yesterday’s tools and yesterday’s concepts.” So wrote Canadian communications theorist Marshall McLuhan in his book The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects, published in 1967.
McLuhan argued that Gutenberg’s fixed linear type introduced fixed linear logic to Western thought and that the move to what he called electric media, beginning with the telegraph, shattered that comfortable rational world, creating his famous interconnected global village.
“Innumerable confusions and a feeling of despair,” he said, “invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transition.”
After a long media career, I turned to McLuhan, who early shaped my mindset, as I reflected on what we might call Numerical Decline Anxiety Syndrome in mainline churches.
McLuhan, a devout Roman Catholic, died a decade before the invention of the internet. What would he have to say about the 21st – century media landscape?
“He’d have a lot to say,” says Eric, one of McLuhan’s six children. “It’s disorienting. All the new media are. All our accustomed forms have become obsolete. There’s not a lot to fall back on. Our sense of the private identity, private goals and ambitions, our individualism are gone.
“New media don’t allow for those things. Private identity is only possible with disengagement. And private identity is fundamental to our forms of worship. If you want to preserve private salvation, you need a lot more time with the alphabet. New media is the death of Protestantism, which is based on private sensibility.”
Most cyberspace labourers refuse to accept this death sentence. Google produces 1.1 billion hits for “church” and 43.5 million for “church websites.” Google itself has entered languages around the world although it was not even a word until it was coined by two kids at Stanford University in 1996. Where, then, to begin?
The Presbyterian Church’s communications office is designed as the centre of the church’s evolving communications concepts. Barb Summers, the associate secretary responsible for the office, has overseen the introduction of a new website. The main focus was to make it significantly easier for people to find information.
Summers reports 350,000 annual visits to the site, and the national church has ventured into social media with 501 Facebook friends and 598 Twitter followers.
“We try to strike a balance,” she says, “both for a global audience and those already familiar with Presbyterian terms and doctrine.”
Colin Carmichael, Summers’ predecessor, works today in healthcare – industry communications and is an elder at Central, Cambridge, Ont. As a now – independent voice, he’s asked if he can identify the best PCC church sites and admits there’s not a single shining example.
“You might expect that churches with the most resources would have the best sites, but that’s not necessarily true. It really often depends on one keen person, but then he goes off to university and a month later the site’s out of date.”
That’s one advantage of PCCWeb that Summers says is now being used by more than 250 congregations. The technology allows anyone who can set up a Gmail account to manage a church website.
Carmichael, however, puts this progress within a cautionary framework. “Somehow most mainline churches missed a century. We never got into radio or TV in a big way, so we’re playing catch up. But cyberspace goal posts are forever moving. Websites have basically replaced bulletin boards of 20 or 30 years ago. They’re a home for information. They don’t have to be fancy and complex.”
The younger generation has moved so rapidly from websites and e – mail that universities are now using mass texting to reach them. Facebook has replaced many of the informal interactions so much a part of church life but increasingly rare in busy cities and lives. Carmichael, for example, interacts with his elder’s district via Facebook.
Although there is little Canadian data about church social media, that is not the case in the U.S. where a Google search for best church websites presents dozen of lists. Surf a few minutes and you’re sure to come across the Centre for Church Communication and its brash spin – off, Church Marketing Sucks, where Kevin D. Hendricks is editorial director.
“The web is constantly changing and in some ways you have to get used to that dynamic,” says Hendricks. “The best you can do is to try to stay connected and most of all pay attention to how your own site is working, or not working, and tweak it as needed.”
According to all surveys, 18 – 34 is the highest “unchurched” demographic. In this “global village” age, do we have to change our language from traditional biblical to 21st – century spiritual without, somehow, losing the message of Christ?
“Yes, we have to update our language,” Hendricks says. “Using insider lingo is a problem in every industry, but the church is especially prone to it because we give our churchy language a sheen of the holy. Somehow we’re losing Jesus if we don’t use words like transubstantiation. We need to speak in a way people can understand. It’s simply good communication. And if you’re losing the message of Christ in the translation, then you’re doing it wrong, horribly wrong.”
Hendricks offers some free advice. Tone down the churchy language so a potential member can understand what you’re talking about. Design the site from an outside perspective and make information for new people easy to find. Showing sermons, upcoming events and announcements show potential members what life in your church is like.
How will you ever know if your website, plus all the social media, is actually working?
“Google Analytics is great for web stats, but that’s not necessarily reach and impact. Many of the things we really want to know—how people are growing in their faith—you can’t measure with Facebook likes, web stats or even Sunday morning attendance.”
He offers a link to a useful and thought – provoking series on his website called Church Websites 101, described as “a quick and dirty series about how to start or restart your church’s website.” Hold onto your hat, the first line reads: “Church websites are woeful.”
There are, however, PCC cyberspace pioneers like Rev. Wally Hong of Drummond Hill, Niagara Falls, Ont.
“Back in the ‘90s,” he recalls, “we tried holding session meetings online because two – thirds of our elders travelled extensively, but presbytery didn’t know how to handle motions proposed at 4:00 a.m. by someone in Australia and seconded seven hours later from Brazil.”
Hong has explored some of the exciting options available—videoconferencing for the PCC’s church doctrine committee, Skype so students can read the lessons during a service, blogging for young people carried away from the congregation by school or careers, and another startling concept:
“As convener of the church doctrine committee, we’ve been examining videoconferencing Communion online. Say that a member has gone off on a two – year stint in Saudi Arabia. If there was a Christian community, they might be able to share Communion together, but what if there’s not? It’s not like watching a televangelist doing, bring your own juice and bread. Without that community, what do we do?”
We’ve come a long way from Paul penning letters from a Roman jail cell even if those first – century blogs changed the world. Hong doesn’t claim to have all the answers, but understands the question: “How do you extend the faith community to those out there?”
We have but begun to explore this strange new cyberspace planet and Google CEO Larry Page told Charlie Rose on PBS recently that we have seen but one per cent of what’s to come. Those seeking the frontier in search of numerical salvation might wisely bear in mind Marshall McLuhan’s warning that “we look at the present through a rear – view mirror. We march backwards into the future.”
