Abstract
To understand the spatial world of today’s media and its influence on congregational life and practice, this study explores the interplay of technology, communication and culture, with a particular focus on the way new media influences Christian identity. The context explored by this thesis is New Zealand Protestantism, especially those congregations who are broadly classified as Evangelical-Charismatic-Pentecostal (EPC) churches. The study utilises media ecology as the hermeneutic method and draws on the interdisciplinary findings of this field to explore the central question of the thesis: “To what extent is the media ecology of a congregation a formative factor in shaping Christian identity?” It probes the significance of media as ecology by locating Christian identity within the gathered-space of a congregation’s place of worship and aligned practices. In this space, a congregation’s symbolic gestures of doing and making are subject to technologies and devices of the media it inhabits and interacts with. Since new media extends the sensitivities of place, perceived places of dwelling can often become ambiguous. In Chapter One, a theology of place discusses the ubiquitous nature of space surrounding new media and its implications for Christian worship.
Chapter Two addresses the historical development of communication in Western Culture and describes various spatial paradigms concerning technologized media forms. A picture emerges of new media and its scope to transmute signs into desired modes of existence. It describes the way meaning materialises and gives palpability to constructed symbolic representations that lure the imagination toward sensitivities that may undermine Christian identity. With the advent of electricity, the body’s senses have extended well beyond the natural order of being located in one place, marked by time, space and distance. A new order of spatial existence emerges where words, images and sounds create worlds where the body’s mode of existence becomes an object of the mind’s making. Chapter Three builds on that history to describe media ecology, grounded in the seminal work of Marshall and Eric McLuhan. Against this backdrop, Chapter Four describes Visual Culture as a subset of media ecology and expands this discussion by exploring pictorial forms and their power to make arguments and construct identities for a determined cause.
Chapter Five describes the way that St Augustine’s Confessions articulates a vision of Christian identity. His confession of faith epitomises Christian life as desiring and loving the Triune God. Scripture, memory, time and desire, along with other motifs, signal existential realities in which a distinctively Christian way of being is imagined and embodied. Visual images have been used throughout Christian history to reinforce some of the themes described by Augustine, including memory, desire and the Bible. The concluding chapter analyses and discusses two digital devices, data projectors and smartphones—present in most EPC congregations in New Zealand—as examples for how to engage with and understand the effects of a congregation’s media ecology.
This thesis argues that narratives of being Christian are cemented through the uptake of images and stories, ideas and practices, shared in the same congregational space. Moreover, it proposes an alternative yet plausible landscape where the adoption of new media forms over time embeds and changes the poetic infrastructure of a congregation’s sense of Christian identity. This situation presses deep into the implicit world of a congregation, as ministers and other leaders utilise a variety of media to express and affirm the congregation’s Christian identity and existence. This form of knowing sits at the intersection of a congregation’s communicative processes and practices, creating media infrastructures of being through which congregants act and are. The advent of heightened self-conscious modes of knowing alters the spatial world of a congregation’s remembering. Its tradition, as the ground on which a congregation dynamically discerns its place in God’s story, increasingly becomes uncertain.
New media, and a congregation’s unmitigated use of digital artefacts and devices, create a situation in which Christian congregations are immersed within a new spatial paradigm of communicative forms they are largely unaware of and unprepared for. As prolific users of new media, leaders of EPC congregations in New Zealand have enabled an array of unintended consequences by uncritically embracing the offerings of digital technology to extend their presence and propagate their message of Christian faith and practice. At stake are those memories and traditions that lie front and centre of a congregation’s own historical narrative of place. Immersion within this new environment of heightened sensory forms, instant connectivity and individual autonomy orders meaning in new ways. Those long-established practices a congregation has utilised to mediate its love for God, like listening and reading the Scriptures together, passively gazing on the Lord’s table in worship, and enacting baptism through quiet confession, are subsumed by new media in ways that hollow out their meaning and significance. This thesis makes an original contribution to scholarship by demonstrating how the media ecology of a congregation is subject to the spatial properties of new media: digitality as a horizon of meaning alters a congregation’s imaginary of Christian faith and practice because the unmitigated use of technology skews communicative modes of meaning and making through unseen properties. This brings into focus the enthusiastic adoption of digital technologies in EPC worship in New Zealand, and the need to think critically about the media ecology of churches, especially the formative effects on congregant belief, practice and understanding of historical themes of Christian identity.