Yesterday I took part in a Premier Christian Media ‘Digital Church’ webinar on ‘A Church without Walls’, alongside Revd Albert Bogle, Sanctuary First, Falkirk Presbytery; Revd Andy Fishburne, SThie, Isle of Mann; and Revd Laura Digan, Minister, Church of Scotland.
The event was chaired by Revd Dr Peter Philips, Head of Digital Theology at Premier Digital and Research Fellow in Digital Theology at Durham University.
You can find more information about the Reimagining Church webinar series here.
Bogle was part of the ten-person commission that produced the Church of Scotland’s influential ‘Church Without Walls’ Report (2001). He reflected on the legacy of that report and described the online activities of Sanctuary First. Fishburne spoke about the online community of SThie (Manx for ‘At Home’) on the Isle of Man, while Digan offered a closing meditation on Habakkuk.
My contribution was a mixture of academic and personal reflections, including on my recent research on how churches in Ireland have moved online during the pandemic, and previous research on the Emerging Church Movement and extra-institutional religion. I’ve reproduced my remarks below. (It’s longer than a conventional blog post …)
Reflections on a Church Without Walls
More than a decade ago, I started a personal blog as a place to reflect on the results of my research in the sociology of religion. With admittedly little regard for the Church of Scotland and its ‘Church without Walls’ programme, I made ‘building a church without walls’ the tagline of the blog.
I was influenced by my location in Belfast, living as I did at the time within 400 metres of one of the towering ‘peace walls’ that separates Catholic from Protestant communities. I also quite liked the irony (or the impossibility) of ‘building’ something without walls. In the ‘about this blog’ section of my website, I still describe the rationale for my tagline this way:
My idea of Building a Church Without Walls is inspired by Ephesians 2:14-15:
“For Christ himself has brought us peace by making Jews and Gentiles one people. With his own body he broke down the wall that separated them and kept them enemies.”
For me the ‘church’ is people from all backgrounds working together, no matter their denominational loyalty, to break down walls of social, political, and spiritual division and to build up something better – a more just and loving world for us to live in.
I think that many, if not most, of our Western church institutions are broken and not up to this task. I think our best hope lies in people realising that we are the church, and reforming or replacing those institutions. This is not just a task for clergy and pastors; it is for all of us.
In the very first post on my then-new blog, I noted that I had attended mass on the Sunday before the release of what is now known as the Murphy Report, a 2009 dossier on clerical child abuse in the Dublin archdiocese. The priest had told the assembled faithful about a website that instructed people about how to leave the Catholic Church. I couldn’t remember then the point that the priest was trying to make, although I knew he was not urging people to leave the Church. At the same time, the priest’s acknowledgement of the very existence of such a website tapped into my sense that ‘our Western church institutions are broken’.
As a sociologist of religion, I have spent a good part of my research career studying people who are working earnestly and urgently for the reform of church institutions, Protestant and Catholic. My sense that traditional church institutions are broken and need to be replaced by ‘new models’ is undoubtedly influenced by my research experiences.
Today, I’ll talk briefly about the ‘new models of church already in place’ that I have observed in my research, including Emerging Christianity and ‘extra-institutional religion’; as well as my more recent research on how churches on the island of Ireland have moved services online during the Covid-19 pandemic.
I realise that this webinar series focuses on the ‘digital church’. What I have to say about Emerging Christianity and extra-institutional religion may not seem immediately relevant to digital church. But bear with me, because I think it’s important to situate our conversation about digital church within what I see as a wider ‘spiritual’ (if that is the right word) context that is at one extreme anti-institutional towards religion, and at the other, places very little importance on ‘institutional’ religion at all.
Emerging Christianity
I am co-author, with Gerardo Marti, of The Deconstructed Church: Understanding Emerging Christianity, published in 2014. This is one of the first comprehensive studies of the trans-Atlantic ‘Emerging Church Movement’ (ECM). With all the caveats that academic writing involves, we included both the Church of Scotland’s ‘Church without Walls’ and the Church of England/Methodist Church’s ‘Fresh Expressions’ programmes within Emerging Christianity.
And to quote from the introduction of the book: ‘… our research leads us to conclude that the ECM is one of the most important reframings of religion within Western Christianity in the last two decades’ (page 5).
So we were claiming a lot!
Our conclusions came after ethnographic observations of emerging congregations, pub churches, neo-monastic communities, conferences and online networks in the US, UK and Ireland. As many of you doubtless know, one of the defining characteristics of the Emerging Church is that the people who sociologists like me try to classify as part of the wider movement resist identifying with it: Emerging Christians simply shun labels.
So, Gerardo and I wrote of Emerging Christianity as a religious orientation rather than a religious identity. That religious orientation encourages individualism, deep relationships with others, new ideas about the nature of truth, doubt, and God, and innovations in preaching, worship, Eucharist and leadership.
Another important feature of the ECM is that groups do not generally measure success in terms of ‘church growth’ or ‘converting’ others or perpetuating their own religious community.
In short, many Emerging Christians are anti-institutional and they would rather see their congregation or group ‘die’ than perpetuate a lifeless form of Christianity. Pete Rollins, a founder of the now defunct Belfast-based ikon community, has spoken about the power of ‘pop up’ churches that exist for a short time, before ceasing to exist or transforming into something else.
To sum up: It doesn’t actually matter that much if the ECM simply withers away or people stop using the Emerging label. But it has already made a significant contribution to contemporary Western Christianity through its flexible religious orientation, which not only influences groups within the ECM but also within traditional denominations (Church without Walls and Fresh Expressions, as I have already mentioned).
Ultimately, Emerging Christianity chimes with wider processes of religious individualization, as described in Ulrich Beck’s A God of One’s Own, signalling that it is better equipped than most traditional denominations to engage with people where they are.
Extra-Institutional Religion
‘Extra-institutional religion’ is a concept I developed in my 2016 book, Transforming Post-Catholic Ireland: Religious Practice in Late Modernity, and expanded on in a 2019 article in Social Compass. This concept was based on empirical case studies of congregations, parishes and other groups and helps explain how individuals who are committed to their faith continue to practice it in what I characterize as a ‘post-Catholic Ireland’.
I defined extra-institutional religion as the practice of religion outside or in addition to the Catholic Church, Ireland’s historically dominant religious institution. People who practiced extra-institutional religion were quite individualistic, like the Emerging Christians I studied with Gerardo. But their individualization was moderated by the dominance of the institution in how they thought about and practised their religion. Even those who defined themselves against the Catholic Church maintained some links with it. They might still attend mass in their local parish, for example, while at the same time drawing their most significant spiritual nourishment from a small group outside their parish.
Of course, the relationship between the Catholic Church, the Irish state, and Irish identity on the island of Ireland is complex and Ireland is a very different from the UK, which is the main focus of today’s discussion. But I wanted to bring extra-institutional religion into today’s conversation because I think it has insight for other contexts, including the UK. And the main insight is that even if Western church institutions are broken (as I so subtly put it on my personal blog!), they still matter quite a lot, particularly in terms of their preservation of fundamental Christian beliefs and practices. Thinking about extra-institutional religion helps us see that the best answer might not be abandoning those institutions or tearing them down altogether, but thinking about how they might be reformed or reformulated to engage people where they are.
Digital Church?
As lockdown restrictions made gathering for church impossible, churches across Ireland began scrambling to move services online. It was clear that the pandemic would accelerate the practice of religion online.
I also was surprised by research commissioned during the early stages of the pandemic, which indicated that surprising numbers of people were accessing religion online or on television or radio: 24% of people in the UK (Tearfund), 27% in the Republic of Ireland (Iona Institute), and 39% in Northern Ireland (Tearfund). These surveys also found that people were praying more than usual. Other surveys by Christian Aid and Durham University’s Centre for Digital Theology confirmed these trends.
In May 2020, working in partnership with the Irish Council of Churches, I conducted a survey of faith leaders in Ireland about how they were responding to the pandemic. I titled the report ‘People Still Need Us’, a phrase used by a Catholic priest in answering one of the ‘write-in’ questions on the survey. His phrase encapsulated the main insights of the survey: faith leaders and communities were playing important roles in providing pastoral care and social services during the pandemic; and there was evidence of increased prayer and surprisingly high levels of online religious practice.
We asked some focused questions about moving religion online, and the results were striking. Prior to the pandemic, 56 percent of faith communities provided some form of online worship, led by Catholic Religious (79 percent), Catholic Diocesan (62 percent), Other (58 percent), Presbyterian (48 percent), Methodist (25 percent), and Church of Ireland (24 percent). Livestreaming was the most common form.
But now, 87 percent of faith communities are providing online worship opportunities, led by Presbyterian (98 percent), Other (93 percent), Methodist (90 percent), Church of Ireland (88 percent), Catholic Diocesan (82 percent), and Catholic Religious (65 percent). In addition, 71 percent of faith communities have provided other opportunities for online fellowship, using platforms like Zoom, WhatsApp, and Facebook, for activities like prayer meetings, bible studies, children’s and youth groups, book clubs, and more.
Online Religion
| Provided online services before pandemic | Provided online services during pandemic | |
| All | 56% | 87% |
| Presbyterian | 48% | 98% |
| Other | 58% | 93% |
| Methodist | 25% | 90% |
| Church of Ireland | 24% | 88% |
| Catholic Diocesan | 62% | 82% |
| Catholic Religious | 79% | 65% |
Further, 70 percent of faith leaders agreed they would retain at least some online ministries when restrictions on public gatherings are lifted, with 21 percent saying they did not know and 9 percent saying they would not retain any.
Retain Online Ministries when Restrictions Lifted?
| Yes | No | Don’t Know |
| 70% | 9% | 21% |
You could say that for most churches in Ireland, a hybrid digital/in person model is now in operation. Despite the reportedly high numbers of ‘viewers’ (far exceeding those who would attend services in person), it’s not yet clear if these digital offerings are effective evangelization tools for the de-churched or the un-churched, if we can use those terms.
And although pre-pandemic studies of digital religion have found that practising religion online, by and large, complements rather than replaces in-person involvement in religious communities, there is anxiety among some Christians in Ireland that some people will never return to church.
Another Iona Institute poll, released just this month (September 2020), found that only 36 percent of those who were attending mass on a regular basis before the pandemic have returned. When asked why they were currently not attending 45 percent said due to fear of Covid-19, 22 percent said limits on numbers in church buildings, 20 percent said other reason/don’t know, 7 percent said they have lost the habit, and – interesting for our purposes today – just 6 percent said they are happy to watch online. Further, 19 percent reported that they ‘don’t know’ if they will return to mass when restrictions end.
Since only 6 percent said they are happy to watch online, we cannot assume that this substantial group of ‘don’t knows’ will be enthusiastic participants in digital church.
So where does that leave us?
I want to return to the point I made earlier about situating our conversation about digital church within what I see as a wider ‘spiritual’ context that is at one extreme anti-institutional towards religion, and at the other, places very little importance on ‘institutional’ religion at all.
If you consider that Emerging Christians and those practising ‘extra-institutional’ religion are people who really care about Christianity – and they are deeply suspicious of institutional churches – where does that leave those who are searching for meaning, and increasingly doing that searching in cyberspace?
In May/June 2020, a Theos/YouGov poll confirmed that during the pandemic people in the UK engaged in activities that could be considered part of a search for meaning, but found this did not necessarily translate into accessing resources from traditional, institutional religions.
The September 2020 Iona Institute survey replicated some of the questions from the Theos poll and found similar (though proportionally higher) numbers of people in Ireland engaged in activities that could be considered searching for meaning. And like the UK, this did not necessarily translate into increasing practices associated with traditional, institutional religions. The table below provides percentages of people engaged in a range of activities:
Q: Outside of formal religious service, which, if any, of the following have you practised/experienced since the beginning of the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic? (tick all that apply)
| Theos/YouGov UK May/June 2020 | Iona/Amarach Ireland Aug/Sept 2020 | |
| Spent time in quiet reflection | 26% | 40% |
| Feeling a deep connection with nature/the earth | 18% | 26% |
| Prayer | 14% | 26% |
| Meditation | 12% | 21% |
| Reading a holy book/scripture | 6% | 6% |
| Reading other religious or spiritual writings | 5% | 5% |
| Learning more about religion or spirituality | 5% | 5% |
| Seeking out places which feel sacred or holy | 2% | 6% |
| Magical practices | 1% | 2% |
| Pilgrimage | 0% | 1% |
| None of these | 58% | 37% |
So we cannot just assume that since churches have made more content digitally available during the pandemic that people who are searching for meaning will think of them as their first point of contact.
Concluding Thoughts
I said earlier that Western church institutions are broken; I also said that they still matter.
One way in which they are still broken is in their relative unresponsiveness to the ways that people outside their walls are searching for meaning. Too often, our churches are providing answers to questions that no one is asking.
But one way in which our church institutions could still matter is by sharing their literally thousands of years’ worth of wisdom about the power of quiet reflection, connecting with nature, prayer, and meditation. As churches create hybrid digital/in-person models going forward, a good place to start may be prioritizing online spaces that facilitate those activities.
Some might worry that this simply encourages an individualized spirituality of religious consumerism. But in my research on Emerging Christianity and extra-institutional religion I have seen seemingly individualized spiritualities prompt the creation of new communities, or ‘churches without walls’ to use the terms of today’s conversation.
I think the jury is still out on whether ‘institutional’ churches can help create and coexist with potentially new ‘churches without walls’, or whether having helped create them, they cannot resist trying to build walls around them.