What is in Kelvin's Head?

Should churches use e-mail? Or indeed blogging?

17/01/2013

Yesterday’s post about the internet and what we can learn from the demise of HMV didn’t raise that many comments but it certainly did the rounds, being more shared on Facebook than anything that I’ve written in months. It was picked up as a conversation topic by the Anglican Church of Canada’s The Conversation too. I think The Conversation is a private social network which that church runs. I’m interested in that in itself but I’m going to leave learning about that for another day.

Today I want to pick up on something that was said in the comments. This came in from Bosco:

Iâ€™m not as convinced as you about the value of email. Convince me. I suspect it is a dying medium â€“ but we should still hop on while it is still alive, conscious that young people donâ€™t use it. It is still-useful last millennium technology.

I know what Bosco is talking about. The use of email is often said to be falling and falling much faster amongst the young than the old.Â (Oops, I mean younger and older, don’t I?).

I’ve a feeling that email is not going away quite that fast. More that it is changing. It seems to me that as people are getting more and more ways of communicating then they naturally choose the most appropriate for what it is they want to communicate.

If you want to meet up with friends, it is much easier to plan things on a social network than by email. However, that presumes that you are all on the same system.

Ubiquity is the thing here. Most people I know are on Facebook. However just about everyone I want to communicate with has an email account.

Email is good for some things. Twitter for others. Facebook for others.

Depends on audience, urgency and what I’m trying to say.

As a sideline, I’d say that I’m seeing a decline in blogging. And paradoxically a continued rise in the importance of blogging.

It seems to me that there are fewer blog posts being written. Quite a number of people who have tried the blogging lark are finding it a bit of a bind and giving up. After all, social networks beat blogging as a way of letting your mates know what is in your head every minute during the day and that was what a lot of people were using blogs for.

The blogs that are lasting are, unsurprisingly, those where the author has a clear idea of what they are trying to communicate. I think I’m like a number of people who are keeping up the stream of consciousness on twitter whilst saving blog posts for more substantial posts. Fewer blog posts – better quality. What’s not to like?

I think that I primarily use blogging to perform and converse, email to inform and converse and preaching and social networks to beguile and converse. However that may just be me. The primary thing is that they are all about conversation.

Some of the choices that people make about their choice of online communication medium are all about tone. Email has become a relatively formal way of communicating. My guess is that it is still the case that most people communicate more by using email than social networks when they are working whilst the opposite may be true when they are not working.

Am I right about that?

church communications, death of email, young

23 responses to “What if this is the end of the Eucharist?”

Thomas Scott

06/05/2020

Just noticing here that DGD (of happy memory) seems to have left out of his catalogue of joyous, sad, perilous, and solemn occasions any instance of celebrating during a plague or pestilence. I’m not worried about the mass. The eucharist need not be celebrated as though it were a car battery, as if not offering it now would somehow allow the power to run down. It is not at risk, we are, which I think is your point. The questions asked are worth asking, of course.

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Mo Nicholson

06/05/2020

Mo Nicholson. This is an intriguing discussion and what I would like to add to it is the observation that I have had to learn the hard way that participation in the Eucharist being made impossible in no way diminishes an individual’s ability to worship God or be in fellowship with other believers. I am barred from receiving Holy Communion in the Catholic church because allergies make this impossible for me. The pain induced by this has little to do with feeling separation from God, in fact nothing at all as I do not feel that. It comes from feeling excluded from the community, different sections if which regard it as desirable or tolerable that a member of the community should be excluded in this way. This experience has made me understand as never before that if we place prime value on liturgical celebrations, ir indeed anything else, above charity, compassion, welcome and inclusivity, in other words love, then we have become the sounding gong which St Paul warned against. If we truly believe that God is love, as I do, then it is obvious that it is love for one another which makes us true children of God our Father, and in light of this we could begin to look at these present challenging circumstances as simply an opportunity to love more, to reach out to one another in whatever way possible in the knowledge that this is what actually matters and always did. Only perhaps we were tempted to almost make a fetish of our rituals, sacraments and so on. And perhaps this can show us a better way more adapted to the world we are supposed to serve.

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Lynsay Downs

06/05/2020

You and your conversation with Dave Roberts prompted me to write this. Does it resonate for you?

https://astonishing.community/2020/05/06/conversations-in-coronatide/

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1. Kelvin
  
  06/05/2020
  
  Thanks Lynsay – yes, it does resonate with me very much.
  
  I’ve shared it on facebook. I think it is really helpful.
  
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Fr Keith

06/05/2020

Thanks again for such a thoughtful piece. With the Eucharist central to much of, at least Anglican/Episcopalian, worship in recent generations, we perhaps forget that the Church in these islands was, between the Reformation and the liturgical revivals of the 19th and 20th centuries, sustained by Mattins and Evensong as the regular diet of worship on Sundays. I’m not advocating a return to such times, but there is, as you suggest, work to be done on non-Eucharistic worship (though not defining it as a negative). Thanks again.

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Fenland Boy

07/05/2020

For the record, I’m not in favour of lay presidency at the Eucharist. I believe, for better or worse, in an ordered church.

Why are you concerned about lay Presidency?

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Chuck

08/05/2020

May I say respectfully, lighten up. Many Anglicans/Episcopalians lived on the edges of civilization in the nascent U.S. and various elements of the British Empire. Priests to celebrate the Holy Eucharist and to baptize were seldom seen, at most twice a year in many areas. (Bishops, only every several years.) The Church carried on in this manner decade after decade. If circumstances require, the Church will carry on again despite our profound sense of loss.

I should add, to those who grew up under threat or reality of war, persecution, oppression, famine, other disease, etc, the present difficulty is not unfamiliar in many respects.

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Miriam MacCarthy

08/05/2020

Thank you! It is wonderful to read these serious, personal thoughts about the Eucharist. My feeling is that it has become celebrated to the point of boredom. Church, and what we do in it, is in danger of becoming simply a habit. It could just as well be crackerjack for a fast-asleep congregation. My heresy is that the direction Jesus gave is to “do this in remembrance of me”, and that means everything we eat at any time, whether alone or with others, in thanksgiving. If that is seriously done, it has vastly more meaning. It really gets ones attention and requires preparation. Would not become popular or usual, I predict!

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