Will Facebook kill the church?

Wayne Slater writing on The Dallas News Religion Blog asks six religious leaders if Richard Beck's essay challenges the church:


In How Facebook Killed the Church, author Richard Beck argues that our new connectivity online is not necessarily a good thing for organized religion - at least in one respect. He says it offers a replacement for the important social function that houses of worship have long provided. One reason that millennials are leaving, he says, is because the digital world is providing a sense of community that has been an aspect of churches and other communities of faith.

Obviously, religion provides something substantially more profound than a sense of community. But isn't social affiliation a part of it? Isn't a sense of community part of the institutional strength of our places of faith?

The question is similar to last week's Texas Faith question, but explores more directly the place of new media and the community that religious institutions traditionally provide. So is the broader digital world is providing something our places of faith once did - a center of social networking? Is that a problem? And if so, what do we do about it?


Read the answers here.

Read the essay here.

Posted by Ann Fontaine on March 1, 2011 9:30 PM | |
Comments (3)

Chuckle. All we need now is for someone to declare Facebook the new Antichrist and we have our next culture war.

Our parish is growing in attendance. We use Facebook. Go figure.

Posted by Richard E. Helmer [TypeKey Profile Page] | March 1, 2011 11:03 PM

To paraphrase Mark Twain, "The reports of the Church's death as the hands of Facebook are greatly exaggerated." I can't get a hug, share a meal or feel a hand of blessing on my head online, so Facebook isn't going to replace the Church for me. Being embodied creatures, some of us still like genuine human contact and community, not a digital mimicry of it that keeps people simultaneously, ironically, "in touch" and at bay. As useful as electronic media and computer technology are, they are hardly the be-all and end-all of human experience.

Posted by Gregory Orloff [TypeKey Profile Page] | March 2, 2011 10:12 AM

Given that I go to church to worship and commune I do not think that even if God were to get His own Facebook page it would no suffice as a substitute. Besides, we all know from reading scripture that he would get a lot of "friends" requests but that nobody would ever put a positive comment on one of his posts.

Posted by C. Wingate [TypeKey Profile Page] | March 2, 2011 1:46 PM

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