Chapter 2

The Dis/Embodied Church:

Worship, New Media and the Body

Tim Hutchings

Introduction

Online Christian communities have been describing themselves as ‘churches’ since

the 1980s (Burke et al. 1999), but this category of new media activity continues to
elude sociological definition. The title of ‘church’ tends to be claimed by groups
that have developed online forms of worship and prayer, but there are exceptions
even to this basic observation; some churches do not worship together, and many
worshipping groups do not describe themselves as church. Other common – but
neither universal nor exclusive – activities include preaching, evangelism, mutual
support, social conversation and debate. The title of ‘church’ may be contested
even within a particular community, claimed by some and rejected by others. To
be a church online is simply to do that which a church does, a matter on which
Christians are unlikely to reach agreement.
Academic researchers and Christian critics have been attracted to online
churches since the 1990s, describing and evaluating the emergence of new forms
of ritual and ecclesial community. One key element of these discourses has been
an interest in the significance of physicality, specifically the body, as a component
in church practise. According to the majority of Christian commentators, online
community and online worship are disembodied and therefore not just undesirable
but spiritually dangerous.
Sociologists of religion have at times expressed a related concern, arguing
that online worship cannot be compelling because it lacks physical engagement.
Christian critiques of the Internet can be disappointing, poorly informed and
38 Christianity in the Modern World / Hutchings

unoriginal in argument, but the central concerns raised by these texts frequently
indicate questions and approaches that repay much detailed sociological research.
This chapter will explore the role of the body in online churches, mapping
ways in which online worship relies on, incorporates and distances itself from the
physical world. These arguments are based on my own extensive investigation of
online churches since 2005. I conducted virtual ethnographies of four examples
– i-church, St Pixels, the Cathedral of Second Life and LifeChurch.tv’s Church
Online – between 2006 and 2010, joining each as a participant observer and
interviewing one hundred leaders and congregants by telephone, text chat, email
or face-to-face. I also undertook an archival study of a fifth, Church of Fools,
which had already closed down. I include the real names of those churches where
relevant, but have disguised all participants with pseudonyms. Each of these
churches fosters a complex array of practises that incorporate and set aside the
body, supporting fluid networks of relationships and activities that commentators
have scarcely begun to understand.

Academic Studies of Online Churches

Online churches have attracted persistent attention among scholars of religion

and media. Ralph Schroeder, Noel Heather and Raymond E. Lee’s early study of
‘E-Church’ (1998) sets out the basic themes of this strand of research: a largely
unsuccessful search for new forms of religious practise, focused particularly on
virtual worlds. The prayer meetings of E-Church relied on language patterns
and structures of authority instantly recognizable to participants familiar with
charismatic house groups, and subsequent scholars have repeatedly discovered
this preference for the traditional and familiar.1
Reliance on well-known patterns in visual design, leadership or liturgy can
support experimentation in other areas. Schroeder et al. (1998) drew attention
to the openness of online communication, Nadja Mizcek reported innovative
designs of virtual architecture (2008) and I have previously noted the presence of
untrained laity among online worship leaders. (2011) The re-creation of familiar
styles serves a range of functions in online churches, but one of the most important

1
For a full literature review, see Hutchings (2010: 63).
 The Dis/Embodied Church 39

is the authentication of the unfamiliar. Mark Brown, the minister and founder of
the Anglican Cathedral of Second Life, commissioned a stone edifice in Gothic
style. Brown explained to me that this recognizable virtual building ‘grounds what
is actually a fairly amorphous experience, it is literally out of body. I think if
you’re too esoteric in your architecture … you’ll just trip people out’.2
Stephen D. O’Leary and Lorne Dawson have both suggested that online
worship is inherently flawed by its separation from the body. ‘Whatever the
potential of the Net to mediate religious experience’, Dawson observed in 2005,
‘it is not happening much yet’. (44) The Internet, he suggests, ‘is ill-suited to
the mediation of religious experience’, ‘a too exclusively ocular, image-driven,
textual, change-oriented, individualistic, detached and disembodied medium’. (19)
O’Leary makes a similar point regarding online paganism: ‘I do not believe that
any cyber-ritual … will ever be able to replace ritual performance in a physical
sacred space … the participant in such ritual remains too much of a spectator,
separated from the virtual space by the box on the desk’. (44) According to Mark
Brown, the use of familiar symbols and styles frames the online experience within
a tradition of embodied and local practise, helping to overcome this limitation. If
so, this strategy suffers from one obvious limitation: visitors who are not already
socialized into the styles and expectations of that particular Christian tradition are
unlikely to embrace it.

Disembodied Church? Christian Critiques, 1997–2011

Academics are not the only observers interested in the strengths and weaknesses of
online religion. Christian commentators have published theological reflections and
practical guides for Internet users since the 1990s. Online churches appear in these
volumes only in passing, but their treatment has to date been almost exclusively
negative. Fears of disembodiment play a central role in these critiques, in which
the concerns of Dawson and O’Leary take on weighty theological significance.
In 1997, Patrick Dixon defined ‘cyberchurch’ in two ways: as the collective
body of all Christians who interact online, and as ‘an electronically linked group
of believers, aiming to reproduce in cyberspace some aspects of conventional

2
Interview with author, Guildford, 2008.
40 Christianity in the Modern World / Hutchings

church life’. (1997: 159) Dixon is a fervent supporter of the first of these
cyberchurches, encouraging Christians to see the Internet as an opportunity for
evangelism, but he rules out the second kind altogether: ‘The Internet can never
replace face-to-face human relationships – never be a substitute for fellowship and
Christian community’. (156) Dixon fears the development of a superficial kind of
Christianity centred on human preference, in which the individual chooses when
and how to connect and disconnect, and sees online churches as the most extreme
form of this dangerous tendency.
This focus on the physical and face-to-face dimension of churchgoing is echoed
in many other Christian critiques. Douglas Groothuis argued in the same year
that ‘embodied spiritual community’ was irreplaceable. (1997: 159) The Church
of England’s report Cybernauts Awake! mentions an online church founded in
1985 ‘in which the organizers claimed that for the first time people could worship
in spirit and in truth and not be distracted by others who might be “fat, short,
beautiful or ugly. People are pared down to pure spirit”’. (Church of England
Board for Social Responsibility, Archbishop’s Council 1999: chapter 5, found
at: www.starcourse.org/cybernauts/) The authors’ response turns immediately to
the physical: we listen to body language in our communications, and Christians
participate bodily in worship. Similarly, the Catholic Church published two reports
on the Internet in 2002, which echoed these concerns. The Internet, they wrote, is
a gift from God and enriches the Church, but the faithful must lead one another
‘from cyberspace to true community’:

The virtual reality of cyberspace cannot substitute for real interpersonal

community, the incarnational reality of the sacraments and liturgy or the
immediate and direct proclamation of the Gospel … Even the religious
experiences possible there by the grace of God are insufficient apart from real-
world interaction with other persons of faith. (Foley et al. 1999: 3–4)

The last three years have seen a proliferation of Christian Internet publishing
from a generation of writers with much more impressive first-hand experience of
online activity. Contributors include prominent bloggers (Challies 2011), online
evangelists (Friesen 2009; Hipps 2009; Thomas 2011) and numerous pastors.
(Vogt 2011) Brandon Vogt has published a Catholic guide to social media complete
 The Dis/Embodied Church 41

with a Foreword by a Cardinal and an Afterword by an Archbishop. (2011) The

online marketing of Christian products has intensified dramatically in recent years,
and many of these volumes have been promoted through elaborate social media
strategies that would themselves merit scholarly attention.
This rush of new publishing has included one book-length defence of online
churches, written by scholar and pastor Douglas Estes. (2009) Estes sees virtual
worlds as the future of online communication, reflecting the popular hype
surrounding Second Life at the time of his research. Online churches are vital to
Christian ministry in these virtual spaces: ‘It’s possible that if a synthetic world
cannot contain a real church, that world is unreachable; the cause of Christ is lost
in that world’. (38) Academic researchers have generally seen online religion as
a resource that supplements local attendance (Clark et al. 2004), but Estes insists
otherwise: local churchgoers are only marginal among online congregations.
(2009: 40) Evangelism should be a priority, but leaders must abandon their reliance
on the familiar and experiment with new worship styles, including online baptism
and communion, to take advantage of this opportunity.
Few Christian commentators have embraced Estes’s ideas. Bob Hyatt posted
a series of refutations to Christianity Today’s blog Out of Ur, following the now-
classic formula of critique: online churches are dangerous because they promote
an easy, gratifying Christianity that is safe from difficult face-to-face relationships.
Physicality is, again, key to this argument:

To be a part of the [Church] Body requires you to be present, fully present, to

others in a way you can’t be online. Internet tools may enhance that presence
when you are apart, but they can’t replace it. And nothing we do as a Church
should ever communicate that they can. (Hyatt 2009)

L. Roger Owens reviewed Estes’s book SimChurch for Baylor University’s

Christian Reflection magazine, and his conclusions are even more severe. ‘When
people are allowed to play church in the virtual world and led to think it is the real
thing, they might be missing salvation itself’. The Church must be understood as
‘God’s embodied community in the world’, demonstrating God’s message of new
life by living and praying together. (2011: 92) In a virtual church, where bodies are
absent, ‘the gospel itself has been erased’. (93)
42 Christianity in the Modern World / Hutchings

These arguments appear yet again in Tim Challies’s The Next Story. (2011)
Cyberspace promotes a ‘digital disincarnation’, encouraging users to leave their
bodies behind and shed the limitations of presence, and this is heresy – ‘the New
Gnosticism’. (100) Challies dismisses Estes’s arguments, claiming that online
church ‘is never a replacement for the real thing’ (emphasis in the original), and
focuses particularly on physicality and control. Mediated community connects
users ‘at the cost of immediacy, of true presence, of the truest manifestations of
love’. We can ‘control who worships alongside of us’ online, when and where we
connect, but desire for control is incompatible with God’s work of changing lives.
(112) These concerns are closely related to Challies’s attack on pseudonymity.
Usernames insulate the media user from the social consequences of their actions,
promoting irresponsible behaviour. The ideal Christian media user, he argues,
ought to tie all of their online personae continually and transparently to their
offline identity.
From Dixon to Challies, critics have emphasized three arguments: online
church replaces local church for users, thereby undermining community; it
intensifies the individual’s control over their connections, reducing accountability;
and it negates the body, weakening relationships. Little effort has been made so
far to synchronize and build on the work of earlier writers, and each tends to recite
these arguments afresh. This limitation may fade as Christian Internet writing
becomes a mature genre with a recognized canon and established readership.
The demonization of online churches within these texts serves a significant
function, however, and may well endure as an authorial strategy as the genre
matures. ‘Online churches’ appear in these volumes not as a diverse cluster of
Christian communities inhabited by real individuals with real experiences, but as
an iconic type, a symbol in which all the dangers of the Internet appear at their most
intense. Each of these texts warns of the power of digital media to isolate users
from meaningful and accountable relationships by offering simulated, simplified
electronic connections. Online churches represent the end-point of this beguiling
process, the final step that snares the believer in a parallel world where constant
entertainment conceals the lack of real nourishment. This is a classic plotline of
myth and fairy tale and echoes earlier concerns about novels, television and video
games. The mythic power of the Pool of Narcissus may continue to outweigh the
more mundane stories told by actual online churchgoers.
 The Dis/Embodied Church 43

Online Worship and Everyday Life

The three themes I have identified – replacing the local church, giving new power
to the individual and devaluing the body – have all provoked extensive academic
study. All three of these concerns deal with questions of physicality and presence,
directing attention to the complex and multi-layered relationship between online
and offline regions of activity.
Researchers have long established that radio and television ministries are
patronized primarily by audiences closely tied to local churches, despite the
evangelistic claims made by their pastors and the conversion testimonies shared
in their broadcasts. My own research has indicated that this basic principle applies
also to online churches: in each of the five I examined (see above for the list of
churches), available statistics and content analysis of communications indicated
that most participants continued to worship offline. It is simply not the case that
online churches lure participants away from local congregations, despite the fears
of their Christian opponents.
Heidi Campbell has noted a transition over the last decade from interest in
the Internet as an isolated phenomenon to studies of its integration into everyday
life as ‘simply one part of an individual’s overall religious involvement’. (2011:
241) This change in focus echoes a shift in conceptions of the Internet among
users, expressed particularly well by Pam Smith, web minister of the Church of
England’s i-church. ‘In 2004’, she explains, ‘when i-church started, people still
thought of the internet as a place – “cyber space” – which you went to through
your computer’. By the time she was appointed in 2008, ‘“going online” was no
longer an experience that took you into a parallel world of virtual reality but had
become an extension of everyday life for many people’. (Smith 2011: 88)
These observations should not lead scholars to overstate the continuity of online
and offline religion. While the majority of participants in each church I studied
were members of an offline congregation, a sizeable minority – from one-fifth
to one-third – were not. This constituency has understandably been emphasized
by online church leaders as evidence of their success in evangelistic outreach
(Brown 2008), but these individuals are rarely newcomers to Christianity. My
own observations found in almost every case that these were former churchgoers
44 Christianity in the Modern World / Hutchings

returning to Christian community after a period of separation due to illness,

geographical isolation, negative experiences or theological differences.
Esme, a regular participant in i-church, described a gradual transition from
local community through isolation to online community, motivated by medical,
social and theological pressures:

Owing to the timing of medical treatment and other health issues I have over
the years found it more and more difficult to attend a church building or even
go to midweek house fellowships and Bible studies. ... The emergence of true
churches on the internet has been a boon for me. It has been something I have
waited and prayed for. The feeling of worshipping with other Christians and
talking about theological issues with like-minded people … has been restored
to me.3

Other separations from local church are temporary. Several members of St

Pixels suffered periods of illness or moved house after joining the online church,
and discovered during these times of isolation or dislocation that their online
community became a crucial source of relational and spiritual support.
Theological isolation can also be a key motivation for engagement with online
community, as Robert Howard has demonstrated in his excellent recent study of
the ‘virtual ekklesia’ of online fundamentalism. (Howard 2011) I have interviewed
many online practitioners who perceive themselves to be at the margins of the
Christian landscape, including fundamentalist Protestants, conservative Catholics,
gay and lesbian evangelicals and radical liberals; each of them found online a
chance to escape their local limitations and connect with like-minded others.
Others wish to share in a tradition that is more common in another part of the world:
Christina from Austria attended online broadcasts of the American megachurch
LifeChurch.tv, and explained that no church in her own region met her desire for
‘real, relevant and relatable’ preaching.4
Online churchgoing emerges through these accounts as a located, contextual
activity. Each participant engages with online resources out of their own specific
situation, and it is this prior setting – including the presence or absence of other

3
Email to author, 2008.
4
Email to author, 2009.
 The Dis/Embodied Church 45

community allegiances – that gives meaning and purpose to their online practise.
The specific collection of resources used can be highly fluid, shifting over time
as the individual undergoes changes in their health, employment and interests.
One of my most recent interviews5 illustrates this fluidity particularly well. At the
time of our conversation, Jackie was a volunteer Host for LifeChurch.tv’s Church
Online, welcoming visitors to online services and praying with them when needed
through the website’s private chatline. She had only been attending online events
for eight months, as a response to serious health problems that prevented her from
attending her local congregation. Leaving her local church had given her time to
build relationships with her neighbours, and she was now in the process of setting
up a church of her own ‘in the common room of my apartment complex’, based
around watching online broadcasts. Jackie had not completely severed contact
with her former congregation, and continued to make use of their youth and study
groups. Her story is complex and cannot be verified from our single conversation,
but I include it here as an account of an interesting alternation of attention and
activity back and forth between local and online connections.
Stories like these offer qualified support for some of the assertions of Christian
critics. Online activity can indeed offer an opportunity for Christians to evade
local accountability, shifting the focus of at least some of their spiritual and social
activity to mediated global networks that offer opportunities and resources that
churches in their local community do not support. These mediated networks
may preserve a sealed world of discourse, as demonstrated by Howard, whose
fundamentalists were driven out of Christian Usenet groups by hostility to their
speculations about End Times prophecy. The virtual world of Second Life includes
a number of churches and chapels that promise safe space for LGBT Christians
and their allies to meet, worship and in some cases perform online marriage
ceremonies. Both of these groups use online networks to connect with like-minded
others and exclude their critics, exerting power to define the boundaries and norms
of their social environment that may be denied to them in local churches and more
public online settings. For other users, online churches provide opportunities for
wide-ranging debate and discussion that local congregations discourage.
In each of these cases, the key shift made possible by new media is a centring
of connective power on the individual, who gains new freedom to gather and shed

5
Interview with author, online chatroom, 2011.
46 Christianity in the Modern World / Hutchings

resources, allegiances and relationships. Barry Wellman has described this social
change as a move toward ‘networked individualism’, the latest stage in a long-
term process that began with the development of electronic communications and
the automobile. ‘Rather than fitting into the same group as those around them,
each person has his/her own “personal community”’, supplying ‘the essentials of
community separately to each individual: support, sociability, information, social
identities, and a sense of belonging’. (Wellman 2001: 227) Digital media do not
create this situation, but facilitate and intensify it by offering new opportunities for
flexible, self-directed connection. There are clear parallels between this social trend
and shifts observed in religious activity, including the growth of a convenience-
oriented consumer mentality among church congregations recently described by
Rob Warner. (2011) Challies is not entirely wrong when he suggests that new
media change the relationship of the individual to the community around them
by empowering personal choice (2011: 112), even though he grossly overstates
the actual degree of control exerted and underestimates the extent to which social
selection already operates in local congregations. The fluid connections and
disconnections observed in online churches reflect much broader social trends.

Embodying Worship

The discussion so far has explored some of the ways in which online churchgoing
can be integrated into, shaped and motivated by embodied local contexts. There
are many further examples that could be explored here, examining the ways in
which online routines are shaped by the microcontexts of the household, family
and workplace. Sandy joined St Pixels to find a level of intellectual conversation
she ‘craved’ after years of caring for small children, connecting several times a day
in breaks from housework. Her online practises derive their shape and meaning
from the limitations of her specific offline context, in which – she felt – the social
role of ‘mother’ had obscured other aspects of her social and spiritual needs.6
Anthony visited LifeChurch.tv’s Church Online every Sunday before going to his
local Pentecostal church in Wales, but his worship was curtailed by the location

6
Interview with author, telephone, 2008.
 The Dis/Embodied Church 47

of his computer in a room adjacent to his still-sleeping parents.7 Daniel is one of

many respondents who began concealing his identity behind pseudonyms to ensure
that his conservative local church would not discover his tentative explorations
of liberal theology as a member of St Pixels.8 This theme can also be examined
in reverse, however, and is what I shall examine in some detail with the space
remaining to me here. Online activity is sited within embodied contexts, but the
body itself can also be incorporated into online practise. The physical body plays
vital roles in online worship, through gestures and emotions, visual representations
and topics of conversation.
As we have seen, Christian critics object that this form of community is
‘disembodied’, devaluing the flesh. Careful analysis of actual online practises,
experiences and discourses suggests a more complex picture. The early online
church referred to in Cybernauts Awake! may have claimed that ‘people are pared
down to pure spirit’ online, separated from the distractions of their physicality,
but throughout the history of mediated religion practitioners have sought ways to
reinscribe their material existence into their worship and communication (Church
of England Board for Social Responsibility, Archbishop’s Council 1999: www.
starcourse.org/cybernauts/).
Tona Hangen argues that radio both preserved and transformed the ideas and
practises of conservative American religion. (2001) Radio afforded an intimate
illusion of direct contact between preacher and listener quite different from the
style of crowd revivalism. It allowed preachers to access the cultural authority
afforded to broadcasters and forced them to develop sophisticated new fund-
raising strategies. It succeeded because listeners felt connected through radio to a
national movement dedicated to upholding traditional doctrine and evangelizing
the nation, offering continuity, familiarity and optimism through decades of social
uncertainty.
Listeners expressed their sense of connectedness in the prayer requests and
appreciative letters they wrote to their pastors. These letters continually return to
the body and its trials, describing illness, hardship and troubled relationships. As
physical artefacts, they served to enact and symbolize the relationship between
preacher and audience, read out on air, published in newsletters and arranged

7
Interview with author, telephone, 2008.
8
nterview with author, telephone, 2008.
48 Christianity in the Modern World / Hutchings

in studios as tokens of connectedness. (Hangen 2001: 49) These letters also

demonstrate the importance of the body in the experience and practise of listening.
Accounts often gave details of bodily responses to prayers and preaching,
including clapping, kneeling and gathering to worship. One letter from 1926
records something of the physical and emotional experience of prayer, prompted
by the radio preaching of Paul Rader:

I was alone when brother Rader gave the invitation to come forward. Oh, how I
longed to be there to give myself to the Lord. I bowed my head and closed my
eyes and prayed, and as I was praying, someone began to talk to me … He was
right there in the room with me. (Hangen 2001: 47)

Similar accounts of physical response to physical experience can be found among

readers of written and printed text, but the simultaneity of communication and
reception made possible by radio offered new opportunities for shared ritual. Aimee
Semple McPherson developed styles of radio healing in the 1920s, encouraging
listeners to kneel and place their hands on their radio sets. (Hangen 2001: 74) The
invitation to place hands on a radio or television set later became one of the most
derided aspects of electronic evangelism – reflecting the domestication of media
devices from startling demonstrations of divine power to banal items of furniture.
Radio and television ministries also sought to increase their impact by gathering
audiences together. Paul Rader devised a study group scheme in the late 1920s,
‘intended to evangelize through face-to-face contact and to remain localized and
small scale’. (Hangen 2001: 51) Similar strategies were developed by the earliest
televangelists in the 1950s, encouraging local churches to gather their friends and
neighbours to discuss weekly broadcasts. (Bekkering 2011)
All four of these facets of embodied media use – discussion of the body,
physical experience, physical response and local gathering – can be found among
online church ministries. William from Ireland delivered a video testimony as part
of a Church Online broadcast, and his story is filled with physical details:

I came across Church Online, and it was about 3 o’clock in the morning, and
I cracked a beer open and I see this chat thing going on, and I see there’s live
music playing to the left, and I just sat and listened to it and it was beautiful, it
 The Dis/Embodied Church 49

was really beautiful, really engaging, and I went over at the end and I logged on
and I kept saying to myself what on earth am I doing, I’m sharing with people on
some chat thing, these could be anybody, and I started to talk with [the Campus
Pastor]. I felt as if I was breaking down ... I finished the beer and went to bed,
and I know people say this but I woke up the next morning and I was a different
guy. (Gruenewald 2009)

We don’t know much about William – his testimony didn’t mention his age, for
example, or give many details about his background and occupation – a weakness
of data shared by studies of the letters written by radio and television audiences.
Even without this information, however, we can see the importance of time,
location, emotion and embodied actions in his narrative.
Invitations to touch the screen are found among certain charismatic and
Pentecostal preachers. One testimony sent to T. B. Joshua’s SCOAN church in
London describes a healing experienced through watching a clip of the prophet
on YouTube:

Then suddenly he started to pray very strongly. He said, ‘Viewers around the
world, touch the screen’. As I was lying there, touching the screen of my laptop,
my whole body just started to shake. (Anonymous 2011)

Music plays a role in online events for a much broader range of Christian
traditions, and it is common for participants to report that they are joining in through
singing and gestures. I have frequently seen such comments in St Pixels services,
while two i-church interviewees related anecdotes of hymn-singing conference
calls. Arthur, the Welsh Pentecostal, sings along when he attends Church Online
and assured me he would get up and dance if there was room around his computer
desk. This may seem surprising to some readers, accustomed to sitting still at their
computer screens, but for Arthur this emotional, embodied response to music is
part of his understanding of what it means to worship God. He sings and dances in
his local church – why would he not do so when he hears and watches a worship
event at home?
Many online churches organize offline meets, a practise shared with other
types of online community. Meets form a particularly central part of St Pixels
50 Christianity in the Modern World / Hutchings

culture, with up to twenty organized annually. At the largest of these gatherings,

the local event forms the focal point of a constant sphere of media activity.
When St Pixels met at a retreat centre near Derby in 2008, absent community
members participated by mailing presents to those who could attend telephoning,
demanding photos and joining online services. Many brought children and
partners, integrating their online activity into their wider social contexts. Church
Online participants have organized journeys to Oklahoma to visit the home of
LifeChurch.tv, sometimes soliciting baptism as part of their trip. LifeChurch.tv
also encourages participants to form ‘Watch Parties’, reinventing the viewing
groups of early radio and televangelism. Hosts invite friends and neighbours to
share food and watch a broadcast with them in their homes. Such gatherings are
not common, and their significance is at least partly rhetorical: sharing stories
of successful Watch Parties serves to remind solitary viewers of the importance
of community and to demonstrate the success of the church as an evangelistic
enterprise.

Building Virtual Bodies

These examples demonstrate some of the continuities between online churches

and earlier electronic ministries, but the body also features online in more unique
ways. The online churchgoer can participate directly in the church environment,
joining conversations and entering virtual spaces, and these interventions are
frequently personalized through the adoption of a username, icon or avatar. Text
communication can be augmented or replaced by webcams and voice links.
Communities develop local norms of appropriate and inappropriate conduct to guide
and evaluate these genres of self-presentation, reflecting specific interpretations of
the connection between online activity, ‘real’ self and the physical body.
Some of the complexity of these processes can be seen in the virtual world of
Second Life, where users and environments are represented through a combination
of sight, sound and text. Participants can invest considerable time and resources
in designing, selecting and purchasing bodies, clothing and accessories for their
virtual characters. Churchgoers can advertise their faith and group memberships
through Christian jewellery, branded T-shirts and clerical outfits. Communities
 The Dis/Embodied Church 51

must decide on the boundaries of self-representation, choosing to accept or reject

avatars who appear naked, non-human, masquerading as priests or experimenting
with gender. The spoken voice is demanded by some churches as proof of ‘real’
gender and rejected by others as an impediment to legitimate role-play. The
Anglican Cathedral of Second Life permits most forms of masquerade, celebrating
experimentation with attire, body shape and species as a legitimate form of play,
but even here participants have worried over the theological implications of
allowing a member to lead worship in the form of a dragon. Individuals with
cross-gendered avatars were tolerated in the congregation, but policies have
shifted over time regarding the degree of continuity between avatar and ‘real self’
expected of church leaders. Norms emerge from the intersection of group theology,
denominational heritage, sense of mission and engagement with in-world cultures,
and distinctions between sin and play are by no means consistently upheld across
groups.
Some degree of distance between online and offline personae is almost
always permitted in the churches I have studied. Deception and play are carefully
distinguished. When my research first began, i-church insisted that members
register their real first names, but surnames were commonly omitted. St Pixels
members selected colourful pseudonyms, but many later replaced them with real
names. Church Online had no registration system at all, and participants could
pick a new name every time they joined an online event. Members of St Pixels
and the Cathedral used Facebook as a space for further social communication,
but several constructed false profiles under their online usernames to ensure their
online church connections did not mix with their wider social networks.
The representation of disability and illness is a particularly problematic issue
among online communities. St Pixels has been devastated by the discovery that a
member had falsely claimed to be suffering from a terminal illness. At the Cathedral
I encountered one able-bodied individual who created a wheelchair-using avatar
out of curiosity, to see how she might be treated, and aroused no particular
controversy for doing so. There is an obvious difference in intent here – in both
communities, any attempt to win emotional support through misrepresentation
would be severely criticized – but at the Cathedral it is possible to create an avatar
that plays with visible disability without necessarily attracting censure.
52 Christianity in the Modern World / Hutchings

It is also possible, of course, for visibly disabled individuals to create Second

Life avatars that pass as able-bodied. I encountered one Cathedral-goer who had
adopted this strategy, enjoying the chance to dance and fly without her chair.
This is entirely acceptable to the Cathedral community, but a problematic issue
among disabled users of Second Life. I also interviewed a male wheelchair-user
who had selected a wheelchair-using avatar. This individual insisted that erasing
disability from Second Life allowed prejudice to persist unchallenged, and spent
much of his time in-world trying to persuade other wheelchair users to follow his
example. Issues of representation intersect with wider social issues of perception
and categorization, not just with community-defined notions of ‘authenticity’,
‘acceptable play’ and ‘deception’.
A number of Christian commentators have begun arguing that online
pseudonymity and role play are inherently opposed to Christian values. Tim
Challies’s suggestions demonstrate some of the assumptions and concerns
underlying this idea:

Don’t fabricate for yourself an identity that is vastly different from your real-
world identity … Be the person that God has made you to be, even in the online
world … Simply by removing the anonymity of the web we can guard our
hearts. (2011: 86)

Consideration of online communities suggests that these arguments may be

much less straightforward. The distinction between honest and dishonest self-
presentation does not follow the distinction between real and assumed names, but
reflects more complicated and context-specific boundaries of authenticity, play and
trust. St Pixels members might bring their families to meets, and Church Online
visitors often publicize events through Facebook, but these efforts to integrate
online and offline activity are based on individual decisions about the boundaries
between online spaces. In many of the examples given above, it is specifically the
distance between the online network and the physical body – the promise of new
opportunities or space to think new thoughts – that generates the value of online
churchgoing.
 The Dis/Embodied Church 53

The Distinctiveness of the Online Church

Online churches are part of the everyday and embodied contexts of their participants,
but they are also separate. The relationship between the online congregation and
the participant’s wider social and religious networks can be articulated in quite
different ways. I have elsewhere modelled these possibilities as points along
a continuum that stretches between two poles, ‘integration’ and ‘isolation’.
(2011) Practitioners carefully construct and maintain their own unique balance
of integration and isolation, sharing some kinds of information and withholding
others, performing some acts in public and others in private, discussing their
online activity with certain offline friends while concealing it elsewhere. Online
worship is worthwhile because it offers meaningful embodied experiences, but
also because it overcomes certain limitations of the embodied context, including
both physical access and social expectation.
This model is by no means unique to online ministry. The televangelist and
radio preacher are integrated into the lives of their audiences, claiming space
in daily routines, encouraging emotional response and embodied action. These
media figures also generate value through separateness, offering access to exciting
preaching and participation in apparently successful evangelism to viewers whose
local context may be spiritually unsatisfying. Media consumers locate their viewing
practises along this continuum, deciding how to watch, listen, respond, discuss or
conceal their media activity with their family, friends and local churches.
What, then, is new about the online church? The differences between online,
electronic and local ministries appear to be ones of degree rather than kind, partial
rather than absolute, but this does not reduce their significance. Online churches
enable new forms of leadership and participation, and these new forms reflect a
shift in the balance of integration and isolation.
The financial burden of starting and maintaining a church can have a very
significant impact on the style of minister and of ministry that emerges. An online
church is cheaper to operate than radio, television or local ministry, so online
pastors can support their work through smaller donations. LifeChurch.tv reminds
viewers to tithe in every broadcast, but this is a brief and low-key item in the
schedule. A unique website or virtual world built requires some programming
talent, but basic templates are now available at very little cost, including the
54 Christianity in the Modern World / Hutchings

software behind Church Online. LifeChurch has given away its system to pastors
worldwide to encourage the emergence of online churches in languages other
than English. These low costs contribute to an online church landscape that is
much more diverse, fluid and small-scale than its local and electronic equivalents,
populated by many hundreds of short-lived experimental ventures alongside the
giant American online campuses.
Digital media also support new kinds of participation. Television and radio
preachers read out and prayed over letters and employed banks of telephone
workers, but online churchgoers can communicate directly with their pastors and
fellow congregants. For the first time, a media ministry doesn’t need a preacher or
leader at all: the conversation and flow of prayers between congregants can itself
become the church. St Pixels has only volunteer administrative staff, without
spiritual authority, and many members write blogs and forum posts without
ever venturing into worship services. Even at Church Online, viewers engage
in their own exchanges in a chatroom alongside the video broadcast. Regular
participants can volunteer to become Hosts, encouraging and moderating these
conversations and praying with visitors on behalf of the church. The multi-way
communication made possible by digital media allows users to integrate their
online conversations into social spaces shared with friends, family, colleagues
and members of their local churches, or to carefully separate those spaces with
pseudonyms and passwords.
The responsibility for negotiating these dynamics has shifted toward the
choices of the individual. According to Barry Wellman’s theory of ‘networked
individualism’, introduced above, the distinctive affordances of digital media
facilitate the latest stage in an ongoing series of shifts in the focus and significance
of ‘community’. The individual now owns the portal through which they connect
to their networks of social relations, and – with the rise of Internet-enabled
smartphones – that connective device is with them wherever they go. Online
churches are communities with distinctive norms and cultures. Challies is quite
wrong to suggest that the online worshipper can simply choose whom to worship
with, but the basic argument that there has been a move toward more individual-
centred religious choices is well-supported and not isolated to the Internet. The
Internet does not deliver complete freedom of association, but digital media does
enable the individual to choose when and where to connect to different communities
 The Dis/Embodied Church 55

and collectives, and how to maintain or perforate the boundaries between those
groups, creating a distinctive balance between integration and isolation.

Conclusion

Christian critics have objected that online ‘church’ communities are distractions
from local fellowship, unhealthily reliant on individual autonomy and disembodied
in worship and relationships. Physical proximity is elevated in these critiques to
become a defining feature of ecclesiology, but the observations and interviews
cited in this chapter show that such perspectives are incomplete. Local churchgoers
are not abandoning their congregations for the comfort of their computer desks,
nor are they slipping into some new form of Gnosticism. Local fellowship remains
important for online congregants and shapes the styles of online worship, and the
body plays a key role in online discussion and practise.
These popular critiques do, however, raise issues of real importance, drawing
attention to the physicality of online activity and its relationship with local
contexts. Emotion and embodiment are key dimensions of religious experience,
and researchers could fruitfully reflect further on how these embodied aspects
are engaged by online worship. Concerns about control and convenience echo
theoretical models of media-supported social networks suggested by media
researchers, and much work remains to be done before these ideas are fully
integrated with the insights of sociologists of religion. It is certainly important to
appreciate the continuity of online and offline religion, a point that continues to
evade many Christian authors, but researchers must also attend to the many ways
in which these spheres of activity are deliberately kept apart by practitioners.
This perspective suggests a significant challenge for the religious groups and
discourses now emerging within mainstream social networking sites, where such
distances are likely to prove more difficult to maintain. Conversations between
supporters and critics of online churches, pursued both online and in print, should
continue to repay the attention of academic researchers as valuable sources of
questions and challenges, and provocative guides in our efforts to understand the
patterns of online religion.
56 Christianity in the Modern World / Hutchings

References

Anonymous, ‘Healed Through T.B. Joshua’s Prayer on YouTube’, SCOAN

LONDON blog (4 May 2011), http://scoanlondon.wordpress.com/2011/05/04/
healed-through-t-b-joshuas-prayer-on-youtube/.
Bekkering, Denis, ‘From Televangelist to Intervangelist: The Emergence of the
Streaming Video Preacher’, Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 23(2)
(2011): 101–17.
Brown, Mark, Christian Mission to a Virtual World, brownblog blog (April 16,
2008), now online at http://issuu.com/mbrownsky/docs/virtualmission.
Campbell, Heidi, ‘Internet and Religion’, in Mia Consalvo and Charles Ess (eds),
The Handbook of Internet Studies (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 232–50.
Challies, Tim, The Next Story: Life and Faith After the Digital Explosion (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 2011).
Church of England Board for Social Responsibility, Archbiship’s Council,
Cybernauts Awake! Ethical and Spiritual Implications of Computers,
Information Technology and the Internet (London: Church House Publishing,
1999). www.starcourse.org./cybernauts/
Clark, Lynn, Stewart Hoover and Lee Rainie, ‘Report: Faith Online’, Pew
Internet (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 7 April 2004), http://www.
pewinternet.org/Reports/2004/Faith-Online.aspx.
Dixon, Patrick, Cyberchurch: Christianity and the Internet (Eastborne: Kingsway,
1997).
Estes, Douglas, SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 2009).
Friesen, Dwight, Thy Kingdom Connected: What the Church Can Learn from
Facebook, the Internet, and Other Networks (Grand Rapids: Baker Books,
2009).
Gruenewald, Bobby, ‘Why Church Online?’, Swerve blog (13 August 2009),
http://swerve.lifechurch.tv/2009/08/13/why-church-online/.
Groothuis, Douglas, The Soul in Cyberspace (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1997).
Hangen, Tona, Redeeming the Dial: Radio, Religion, and Popular Culture in
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2001).
 The Dis/Embodied Church 57

Hipps, Shane, Flickering Pixels: How Technology Shapes Your Faith (Grand
Rapids: Zondervan, 2009).
Howard, Robert, Digital Jesus: The Making of a New Christian Fundamentalist
Community on the Internet (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
Hutchings, Tim, ‘The Politics of Familiarity: Visual, Liturgical and Organizational
Conformity in the Online Church’, Online: Heidelberg Journal of Religions on
the Internet, 4(1) (2010): 63–86.
Hutchings, Tim, ‘Contemporary Religious Community and the Online Church’,
Information, Communication and Society, 14(8) (2011), 1118–35.
Hyatt, Bob, ‘Virtual Church in STILL a Bad Idea’, Out of Ur blog (27 October
2009), http://www.outofur.com/archives/2009/10/why_virtual_chu.html.
Miczek, Nadja, ‘Online Rituals in Virtual Worlds: Christian Online Service
between Dynamics and Stability’, Online: Heidelberg Journal of Religions on
the Internet, 3(1) (2008): 144–73.
O’Leary, Stephen D., ‘Utopian and Dystopian Possibilities of Networked Religion
in the New Millenium’, in Morten Højsgaard and Margit Warburg (eds),
Religion and Cyberspace (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2005), 38–49.
Owens, L. Roger, ‘Virtual Reality Comes to Church’, in Robert Kruschwitz (ed.),
Christian Reflection: Virtual Lives, a Special Edition, 38 (2011): 88–93.
Schroeder, Ralph, Noel Heather and Raymond E. Lee, ‘The Sacred and the Virtual:
Religion in Multi-User Virtual Reality’, Journal of Computer-Mediated
Communication, 4(2) (1998).
Smith, Pam, ‘A Pioneer’s Story’, in David Male (ed.), Pioneers 4 Life: Explorations
in Theology and Wisdom for Pioneering Leaders (Abingdon: Bible Reading
Fellowship, 2011).
Thomas, Adam, Digital Disciple: Real Christianity in a Virtual World (Nashville:
Abingdon Press, 2011).
Vogt, Brandon, The Church and New Media (Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor
Press, 2011).
Warner, Rob, ‘How Congregations are Becoming Customers’, in Michael Bailey
and Guy Redden (eds), Mediating Faiths (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 119–30.
Wellman, Barry, ‘Physical Place and Cyberplace: The Rise of Personalized
Networking’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 25(2)
(2001): 227–52.
This page has been left blank intentionally
 Chapter 3

Refugees’ Encounters with Christianity

in Everyday Life

Bereket Loul, John Willott and Simon Robinson

Introduction

With the rise of ‘super-diversity’, the dynamic mix of ethnicities and cultures
characteristic of many large cities (Vertovec 2007) and the postmodern era,
Christian identity in the West seems to be increasingly less clear. The monopoly of
state religion is itself hard to sustain given the diversity even within the Church of
England. It is hard for a particular religion or denomination to claim core spiritual
and moral values when these are perceived differently within the institution and
when general humanist values seem similar if not the same. (Robinson 2008)
In turn, these issues raise many questions. What does belonging involve in the
context of cultural and religious diversity? How are different narratives handled in
the development of identity, meaning and purpose? One test of such questions is
to see how newcomers react to this in their pastoral, spiritual and cultural journey.
In the case of refugees, especially, one might expect a strong desire for clear belief
to provide the basis of coping in an unfamiliar and diverse society.
This chapter will examine evidence emerging from ongoing research with
refugees in the UK that suggests that belonging and belief are often focused in
engaging diversity, even after the experience of forced migration.

Refugees in the UK

Asylum seekers are those persons who have lodged an asylum claim (in the UK
with the UK Border Agency, part of the Home Office) and who are awaiting a