Virtual versus Reality

John la Grou has recently posted an interesting piece on his blog, Microclesia, in which he discusses the pros and cons of lecture-style preaching compared to virtual preaching via anyone of a number of different methods. One of his commentators points out that perhaps la Grou's approach of listening to great preachers on MP3 is just as 'consumerist' as expecting people to sit quietly and listen to a preacher in a church with a stage.

How do faith-based organizations respond to virtuality? The hardest part may be convincing the community that there’s a good reason to sit and stare at a stage, listening to a religious lecture. The virtually-connected church now has on-line access to the finest teaching imaginable, accessible at their convenience, 7 x 24 x 365. Of what value is physically proximate information (e.g., stage-centric pastor) when the average person can now access the best sermons, preaching, teaching, and cross-referenced commentary on-line?

The rest of the post is here.

Goodbye Radio, Hullo Internet

It was once thought that radio was the most economical of the large-scale broadcasting opportunities for evangelism. Now it looks like the Internet is taking over in this area too.

Many churches around the world are filing podcasts on their websites, and thus making the churches' sermons and other material available to those who might have listened to the radio in the past. And it's being done at almost no cost, which means that even small ministries can play a part in reaching listening audiences.

Only a couple of years ago, podcasts were virtually unknown to those outside the elite areas of the Internet world; now they're being downloaded enthusiastically by all sorts of Internet users. And since they can be transferred onto MP3 players, they're as accessible as radio was. (Remember when people used to carry 'trannies' on their shoulders in order to listen to music? Trannies were monoliths compared to the technology now available.)

Only a few months ago a question was asked in our church: what did people think was the most used part of the church website? It came as a surprise to most of us that the downloading of sermons was the top feature - and not by church members, but by people in various parts of the world.

Incidentally, Radio NZ has a screed of podcasts available. Check them out. And here's the link to the DCBC podcast page.

The symbol at the top of the page is that used by Apple to represent podcasting.

The Faraday Institute for Science and Religion

Lacking some resources in the area of religion and science? The Faraday Institute provides resources par excellence!
Just to list the most obvious:
1. Short lectures, articles and commentaries relevant to current issues in science and religion. These are posted under Current Issues and vary from time to time. As of the time of writing, there’s a piece by Nick Spencer on Darwin’s Religious Beliefs, but earlier pieces are available in links.
2. The Faraday Papers: these provide the general reader with accessible and readable introductions to the relationship between science and religion, written by a broad range of authors who are expert in the field.
3. Faraday Lectures: lists up and coming lectures, but also has an archive of earlier ones.
4. The Multimedia page. This archives dozens of papers, talks, discussions, lectures, many of them available as MP3s, or streaming video. Most can be downloaded as videos, and a good number are available as htmls or pdfs. They cover a wide variety of topics from bioethics to cosmology, and others that link religion and science in different ways.
5. A number of news items are archived.
6. Half a dozen research projects are listed and described.
7. Archives of seminars, including news about up and coming ones.
8. The shop sells CDs, DVDs, books and papers.
9. As if you hadn’t had enough, there’s a page of links to other sites of interest.
There now, that should keep you busy on your morning off!