Saturday, I participated in a gathering of the Episcopal Church in Connecticut called “Living Local; Joining God”. This is an effort by the Episcopal Church in Connecticut and a few other diocese to explore encountering God with our neighbors. The Episcopal Diocese of Maine describes it this way:

The world has changed. More and more of our neighbors are encountering God in places other than church buildings and services. And more and more, if we want to encounter God with our neighbors, we have to go out into our neighborhoods and see what God is up to.

At one point during the gathering we expressed concerns and I shared my concern that too often people think of their neighborhoods geographically. As a social media professional, I asked people to think about their digital neighborhoods. I asked people to talk about their community of interest neighborhoods and their professional association neighborhoods. My comments appeared to be appreciated and led to a great discussion over lunch.

During lunch, I talked a bit about Marc Prenskey’s great essay, Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants. I noted that it seemed like almost everyone at the gathering was a digital immigrant, someone who had grown up in a non-digital world but now lived in a digital world. I noted that I often identify as a digital aborigine. If you know where to look, you can find stuff I wrote online from 1982. There may be older stuff still online, but I haven’t found it.

As a digital aborigine, I often talk about living in a digital world, in digital communities and digital neighborhoods. My digital immigrant friends talked about a future that was becoming more and more digital, and often spoke of that as if it were a bad thing. I think some of that may simply be because of them looking at the world from a pre-digital perspective.

Prensky write, “The “digital immigrant accent” can be seen in such things as turning to the Internet for information second rather than first.” I pushed this a bit further and suggested that viewing online relationships as being inferior to face to face relationships may also be part of digital immigrant thinking. I met my wife online. We were married in an online community before we were married in a church. Our relationship is enhanced by both its online and its physical aspects.

Online relationships often lead to face to face relationships. They have advantages for people who have problems communicating face to face, including people on the autism spectrum, or even simply introverts. My fourteen year old daughter has many deep meaningful online relationships. Some have not yet led to face to face interaction, for example because of distance. Others have started off online and have become empowering face to face relationships. We need to be connecting with people online, even if we are digital immigrants or digital introverts.

Another issue that people expressed was the concern about sacred space. I’ve visited physical spaces considered so sacred that you must take off your shoes before entering them. Surely, people suggest, there are places so sacred that digital technology should not come in. I think this is an important point. We need to think about how we view sacred spaces in relationship to digital technology. We also need to think about sacred digital spaces. It is an area I haven’t thought enough about. Like a good digital aborigine, as I wrote this, I did a quick Google search of sacred digital spaces and found various links I’ll explore later:

Intervarsity has MINISTRY IN DIGITAL SPACES with the hashtag #thisisreallife. It reminded me of discussions back in the nineties I had talking about “real life” and “virtual worlds”. I maintained back then, and today, that our interactions in virtual worlds are part of our real lives.

As I explored their website, their digital neighborhood, if you will, I found, Pokemon Go: a modern day well. At the event this morning, when we went out to ‘map the neighborhood’. One of the first things I noted was that the church we were starting out from, like many churches, is a Pokestop. Churches should own this part of their space.

Another article that caught my attention was Thin Places in Digital Spaces written by Kimberly Knight who describes herself as a “Minister of Digital Communities”. It is an article I want to go back and read more closely later and includes this:

We at Extravagance—myself and the other two ministers, Jo Hudson and Lawrence Tanner Richardson—work to create and sustain community through a variety of online ministries, such as live Bible studies on Zoom.us, asynchronous Facebook retreats, and ancient spiritual practices using Livestream.com. We even engage in frequent pastoral care through private messaging on Facebook, email, and text messages.

The discussion about digital sacred spaces is an important one to have.

So, people asked me if I was posting during Social Media Sunday. Yes, I intend to, although as I’ve written elsewhere, I am a little ambivalent about it. It often feels to me like digital immigrants promoting physical spaces instead of living digitally. To use the language of Living Local; Joining God”, it feels a bit developmental instead of transformational. It feels like one of those programs we feel we should be doing to reach the unchurched, instead of something we are doing to transform ourselves and our relationships with our neighbors. It doesn’t feel, to me, at least, especially missional.

Yet it is very important, just like attracting young families with checkbooks to church on Sunday morning is important. I offer these comments as a challenge, to invite people to try on a more missional approach to social media, as well as part of my own search for people who are living and worshiping in digital spaces.

So, I ask you, if you’ve managed to make it to the end of this long blog post, “What sort of transformational digital sacred spaces do you seek, envision, or participate in?”