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Marla Frederick, Professor of African and African American Studies and the Study of Religion at Harvard University speaks on the history of religion and media.
The public, free one-day conference at Union Theological Seminary in New York—Digital Church: Theology and New Media—has been rescheduled for Friday, February 8, 2013.
Social and mobile media will overtake television as the most widely used and accepted mass medium for religious consumption.
You know who is not online at night? Most churches.
I don’t see posts or quotes or blogs coming from my church friends and listservs at night. Presumably, they are getting a good night’s sleep. God bless them.
Why should the church engage in the virtual world?
This is the opening invitation to a conversation about the virutal church.
In the midst of the massive shifts occurring in digital communication today, the New Media Project explores how pastors and lay leaders might employ new technologies to strengthen their communities.
When I first traveled to the Washington, D.C., area to do a case study of Community of Hope AME Church (COH) in Prince George’s County, MD, I expected to see a church of people age 35 and under. After all, I had watched worship online and danced to a gospel song with a D.C. go-go beat from the comfort of my kitchen. The church website includes the words “hiphop” and video games
This implies that black churches—if they are interested in reaching black people—should be active on Twitter. While I haven’t seen any statistics on the religiosity of the black people on Twitter, if the recent Pew study is correct that African Americans are more religious than the U.S. population as a whole (as measured by things like belief in God, church attendance, and frequency of prayer), then it’s worth assuming that some of the black people on Twitter have a decent level of interest in church.
Indeed African Americans utilize social media differently than their white counterparts. While African Americans represent approximately 12 percent of the U.S. population, 25 percent of blacks online used Twitter in May 2011. Recent numbers indicate that as many as 40 percent of Twitter users are African American.
