by social@thebtscenter.org | Apr 12, 2018 | 21stCenturyCulture, 21stCenturyMinistry, Becoming Church, DigitalMinistry
A decade and a half ago, Heidi’s book, Exploring Religious Communities Online, documented how traits of early forms of online religious communities emerging in the late 1990s posed both a potential challenge and opportunity to offline churches. These early “virtual...
by social@thebtscenter.org | Oct 27, 2017 | 21stCenturyCulture, 21stCenturyMinistry, DigitalMinistry, Re-mediating Religion
Editors Note: Each month, Bearings contributors offer insights on a key theme in the practice of life-as-ministry. As the final installment in the issue, The BTS Center’s scholar-in-residence Pamela Shellberg, PhD reflects on the articles in the issue and poses...
by Kay Ahmed | Oct 20, 2017 | 21stCenturyMinistry, DigitalMinistry, Re-mediating Religion
For more than a decade, new media, religion, and digital culture scholar Heidi Campbell of Texas A&M has been exploring the ways that the internet, social media, and other digital technologies engage with the religious and spiritual practices of ordinary people....
by social@thebtscenter.org | Oct 12, 2017 | 21stCenturyCulture, 21stCenturyMinistry, DigitalMinistry
I thought about writing this piece the old fashioned way, with words forming sentences forming paragraphs and so on. But I realized that instead of writing an essay about hashtags, Twitter, and the good news of social media, the piece itself should embody its own...
by social@thebtscenter.org | Oct 6, 2017 | 21stCenturyMinistry, 21stCenturyMission, DigitalMinistry, Re-mediating Religion, Themes
Lately I’ve been thinking about a passage from the Gospel of John in which Jesus reminds Peter that our youthful vigor and self-determination will always fade. “Very truly, I tell you” Jesus says, “when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go...
by social@thebtscenter.org | Jul 28, 2017 | DigitalMinistry, Websites
You may remember a commercial that DirectTV ran back in 2002, touting its then state-of-the-art DSL internet service. The ad featured a guy sitting in front of his huge desktop computer. He supposedly was able to surf online so fast that a message popped up on his...
