From The Guardian:

A few years ago the Church of England produced a report called Mission-Shaped Church. It excitedly announced that new things were happening on the fringes of the institutional church: Christians hanging out in cafes, organising alternative services on weekday evenings, that sort of thing. These things are known as “fresh expressions” of church, or “new ways of being church”.

St Pixel’s is a Methodist attempt to get fresh. “Christians are increasingly creating churches in many different forms, from traditional ways through to things as yet unimagined”, says Rev Mark Kerry. “St Pixel’s is one of these new ways of being church, allowing Christians to gather online to worship God, support each other, and to pray for the world.”

It’s not St Pixel’s itself that I object to. I have nothing against Christians chatting on the internet, or organising some feeble simulacrum of worship if it amuses them. In fact I approve of such experiments. What I object to is the way in which the institutional church hovers in the background, grinning like mad. “Look at this exciting new project; you can’t call us fusty and irrelevant now!”

I find the whole rhetoric of “new ways of being church” vacuous and cynical. The truth is that the institutional churches want to promote innovation in order to control it, to own it. A website on which people pretend to be at church is supremely unthreatening. Perhaps it will impress one or two onlookers as far-sighted. Its real function is to reassure those in the churches that they belong to a daring organisation.

By playing with trendy gimmicks the churches are evading the scale of the crisis they face. Christianity cannot recapture the cultural imagination by means of such trivia.

The Mad Priest gets this comment in. (Given how Real Live Preacher has been introspective lately about blogging, depression, being honest - I hope he reads Mad Priest’s comment - if for no other reason than to than to realize his understanding, uncertainty, anxiety and doubt is most definitely not unique to ministers blogging online.

I produce an anything goes, Christian blog that, in less than a year, has grown in size to such that it now has more than 80 times more visitors in 1 day than the entire congregation of St. Pixels (according to figures in last week’s “Church Times”). My readers are, on the whole, people who feel excluded from the Church - gays, mad people, free thinkers, radicals, heretics, atheists, searchers. Though we don’t do worship, my readers tell me they view themselves as a congregation and many people have emailed me to say they have come to faith, returned to Church and, most important, stayed in the Church because of the conversations that take place on my site.

I did not set out to produce anything more than a personal blog - what happened just happened. My blog is an ongoing experiment. You would think that the Church might be interested in the results of this experiment. But they are not, for exactly the reasons Theo identifies in his article.
They are not in control of it (heck, I’m not in control of it - it just emerged, to use a trendy word). They cannot advertise it as their “right on” initiative. There are no books with clever titles attached to it. There have been no seminars, conventions or even meetings about it. A committee does not run it. It is not part of a movement.

It is dangerous.

It is not the only such blog on the net. There are many successful sites catering for all types of believer and they build up through links to a very substantial voice within Christianity. But it’s a voice that the Church, in the main part, does not want heard.

However, I have no real wish that this should change but it does make me laugh when they show off their piddling little exercises like St Pixels as if they are a major achievement. In reality, such ventures become just an opportunity for humour at the Church’s expense, in the real blogosphere.

Most of my readers (2500 per day average) already go to Church. My blog is not a church but it seems to be turning into a community.

My point is that the Church doesn’t understand the nature of internet communities and so ends up looking like the proverbial motorcycling vicar. They could learn but that would involve conversation with church people outside of the existing power structures within the Church. They don’t seem keen to do this.

It matters little to me because what’s happening on the net is happening anyway. It’s just a bit embarrassing being a priest in a church that doesn’t realise that phrases like “mission shaped church,” and words like “re-imagining” just set us up for ridicule.

I very much doubt Theo (Guardian post author) would disagree as he is an outsider by choice.