The United Church of Canada has officially launched a media campaign targeting the 30 – 45 demographic. The church is facing the fact that the majority of Canadians (& people everywhere), while regarding themselves as spiritual, no longer see spiritual value in church communities. The UCC response to this perception is twofold: 1) we need to raise awareness of our presence; 2) they are right; we need to do some changing on our own if we are to meet the needs of a changing world. So taking $10.5 million in hand (all of it was a special bequest) it has launched a media campaign that will stretch over the next 3 years. It will include:
• print advertising
• viral video
• the creation of an online community
• support for local congregations to welcome those whose curiousity is sparked
Go to wondercafe.ca and check out the print ads, the video & check out the chat. [Site no longer exists. See update below.]
Initial impressions: the ads & video are great! They meet their objective, which is to get people talking. But as for the chat room, well that’s another matter. Maybe this has turned into more than the UCC bargained for. Being a liberal church, the UCC wants to welcome everybody, no matter what; and that’s exactly who has shown up to chat—everybody, including a whack of people who are astonishingly intolerant or downright stupid.
So, for example: “This is not about being anti-gay. It is about love. It is an act of love to point out sin. God wants people to be holy. Fornication and homosexuality do not in any way give glory to God. Impure /sexually immoral acts do not honour God. Fornicators and homosexuals want God to bend to their rules. How ridiculous?”
And then poor daisy13 responds to this sort of thing by posting: “I am tired of people stating the “word of God” as an excuse to make remarks that are attacking and closed-minded. I realize that these people aren’t the voice of the UCC but they don’t make it easy to theorize and discuss so rather than contribute to them getting their message out there I’m no longer going to participate.”
This raises an interesting question:
Are there times when the church should make attendance conditional? I’m not talking about conditional upon prescribed beliefs. But conditional upon prescribed codes of behaviour. Can the church say: I’m sorry, but your presence is so toxic to the spiritual health of others that I’m afraid we’re going to insist that you leave? This is an easy thing to do online—the administrator just bans the IP address. But it’s much harder to do this when you have to look the person in the eyes.
If a minister or spiritual leader finds himself in such a position, he inevitably risks the accusation of being judgmental. Maybe the angry recipient of the request throws back a quotation, like “judge not that you be not judged,” or levels a charge of hypocrisy, wondering what happened to the claim that we are supposed to be an open and welcoming church. Still, could tolerance be toxic if it fails to stand firm against the kind of intolerance that undermines the very conditions of meaningful exchange? If believing is supposed to happen, at least in part, as a communal experience, then there must be a few ground rules if community is to serve as a place for spiritual nurture.
Oddly enough, in this wondercafe free-for-all, I take my faith from “God,” a user who breezes in periodically to puncture the many sanctimonious balloons floating around in there. Thank god for God.
Update (August 2019): The Emerging Spirit Campaign’s mandate was only for three years. Eventually, the Wondercafe.ca site came down. There is a wondercafe Facebook group and an independent wondercafe2 web site. I think the church held unrealistic expectations for engineering a viable social media portal. The internet’s relatively brief experience with social media suggests that successful platforms arise organically and by accident. Also, there may be something inherent in social media design that is inimical to the kinds of conversations a liberal religious denomination aspires to facilitate.
