Attitude of Congregation to ICT
Name
EDUC 3009 - Technology and Education
2022
Attitude of Congregation to ICT
According to Ukah AF (2003), technological advance has brought rapid changes to dominant
media forms. With these cultural changes have come calls for changes in homiletic presentation
that correspond to the new ways in which people receive information in an age increasingly
characterized by the widespread use of digital and image-based media. People communicate
differently in the age of Google, Facebook, and Twitter. The church must acclimate to a
changing world, or she will destine herself to irrelevance or even extinction. What this means
for the pastor as spiritual environmentalist is that he must understand the changing environment
in which the church has been called to serve. One of those dramatic changes in our environment
is the shift from words to images.
According to Fogg S (2011), where traditional preaching models involve a consistent content
specific message delivered by a single speaker, Pagitt suggests that with progression dialogue
“the message will change depending on who is present and who says what. This kind of
preaching is dynamic in the sense that the outcome is determined on the spot by the participants.
New homiletic forms within the various streams of the Emergent church do not necessarily
involve the incorporation of digital media into preaching. In fact, Pagitt raises concerns about the
use of media to increase the hearer’s retention of the message.
According Gunton L (2011), this, does not mean that there is no relationship between the major
shift toward digital media forms and the introduction of new homiletic forms like those
advocated by McLaren and Pagitt. Though he does not use the specific language of progression
dialogue, Shane Hipps writes from within the Emergent movement and favors a dialogical
preaching form which closely resembles that advocated by Pagitt. The Emergent worship scene
described by Hipps includes a pastor who “periodically shares a Bible verse and a few brief
thoughts, eliciting dialogue and feedback but being careful not to exude an aura of too much
authority. Hipps attributes the current changes in preaching forms to shifts from word-based print
media to image-based digital media. He claims that participatory and experiential changes in
Christian worship, including preaching, were anticipated in the work of media ecologist Marshall
McLuhan.
According to Cheon YC (2011) McLuhan observed that image-based media, like television,
engaged more of the human senses than printed media. This led to a feeling of deeper
engagement and participation with image-based media and to a preference of moving images
over the printed word. McLuhan has argued that the same new preference for depth participation
has also prompted in the young a strong drive toward religious experience with rich liturgical
overtones. The liturgical revival of the radio and TV age affects even the most austere Protestant
sects.
According to Ihejirika W (2010) building on the work of McLuhan, Hipps attributes the longing
of many for participatory worship experiences to the shift from word to image-based media.
Even though he does not necessarily advocate the use of digital media in worship, he has argued
that the arrival of the digital age has inclined people to seek out the kind of dialogical preaching
that characterizes Emergent church worship. He concludes,
According Feijter I (2006), the Electronic Age has led to these emerging worship gatherings.
Three distinct positions can be identified to summarize the current conversation regarding the
content and medium of the Christian message. First, there are those who advocate the preaching
of content specific Christian orthodoxy by means of the spoken-word homiletic form (same
content/same medium).
According to Feijter I (2006) experiment in preaching will avoid regular dependence upon visual
aids and other gimicrackery in the pulpit. Such nonsense is not experiment with, but
abandonment of, preaching – for preaching is the business of the spoken word. Second are those
who understand themselves as maintaining the historic Christian message but advocate using
new media forms to communicate it (same content/new media).
2.6 Challenges Faced By the Church in Adoption of Information Technology
According to Cheon YC (2011) history would reveal the dangers of abusing the privilege of
informational accessibility. An unfortunate consequence of the Reformation was that the laity, if
not instructed properly, could embrace an individualistic reading of the Scriptures. The modern
repercussions of that were not lost to Stanley Hauer was, who wrote that no task is more
important than for the Church to take the Bible out of the hands of individual Christians in North
America, for they read the Bible not as Christians, not as a people set apart, but as democratic
citizens who think their common sense is sufficient for the understanding of scripture.
According Chandler AS (2004), such a communications revolution can inflate the self by, as
Graham Ward warns, approximating modernity’s Prometheans which is the vision of human
potential. Where human beings can become whatever we will, even children of God. The point is
that advances in communications often empower us to think that we are all we need, that human
progress is solely in our hands. It makes it possible for us to think that because we have so much
information readily available to us we can indeed play Creator and fashion a virtual world that is
the consummation of our hopes and dreams. Now, virtual worlds, where individuals exist and
interact among each other as digital avatars of themselves, do indeed exist. But these worlds are
merely created worlds upon which the hopes and ideals of the real world are projected. The
result, of course, is what Ward describes as an implosion of secularity where “humanism,
contractualism, freedom, democracy, liberalism, progress, dialogue, consensus have collapsed
upon themselves and, now inverted, are celebrated in and through simulacra.
Individuals who were represented in the simulator as their virtual avatars would attend church,
hear a sermon, and sing songs of praise. Since these individuals do not attend a physical church
in person, theoretically these parishioners could “attend church in their pajamas,” or even not
needing to leave their beds. Such a conception of the church is problematic for two reasons. First
of all, such a time and place does not exist in the real world; they are only simulated, Bolu CA
(2004).
According to Andrade AD (2007), some people, in fact, participate in these simulated worlds
because they have encountered disappointment in reality. Thus, these virtual realities are all the
more attractive because they offer a refuge from—or, in extreme cases, a replacement of—the
world. By starting a “church” within the virtual spheres the church legitimizes a withdrawal ethic
instead of offering a real place of sanctuary in the world. Of course; it is true indeed that there
are many who recreationally participate in virtual worlds. But if it indeed is so, then everything
in the virtual world is recreational. Exchanges, interactions, and other forms of actions in the
virtual world would simply be that. Whether walking into a virtual store to purchase goods or
driving a half-dead avatar to the virtual hospital, all activities would be recreational activity, as
would attend a church. Thus the church is robbed of her ontological witness; she is denuded of
her identity as the God-created and God-shaped institution, and becomes one that is created and
shaped by the world. For anything within that virtual world is a creation of the real world. It has
no identity apart from it because is simply a human-constructed simulation of reality.
2.7 Summary
Information communication technology has been widely adopted especially the socio media
which accounts for a very huge population of users. In some instances the church has embraced
the use of information technology through video conferencing and use of modern technology like
use of ipads in spreading the gospel from the pulpit. However, information technology has been
regarded with some form of negativity with some regarding it as immoral and a way of
substituting the physical church with virtual one by use of socio media like Facebook and
tweeter yet others regarding it as a perfect way of uniting Christians.
