Digital Church Workshops: From On Campus to Online in Spring 2020
The Centre for Data, Culture & Society has supported colleagues in hosting four workshops on ‘Digital Church’, from early March through to June of this year. The workshops were presented to academics and other interested groups by New College, School of Divinity, in conjunction with the online church Sanctuary First and the Centre for Digital Theology at Durham University. Along with CDCS, the Centre for Theology and Public Issues and the Edinburgh Futures Institute supported this programme of workshops.
While the first of these workshops was held on campus, the latter three workshops were held online with a high level of engagement, reflecting the need for churches to move to online spaces in the current crisis.
The first three workshops focused on essentials of faith expression in a digital space, the ways in which this re-invents and re-moulds traditional forms of church, and the role of artistic and musical creativity in digital church. More than 80 participants registered for the final workshop, ‘Time to Fish’, which was hosted online on Monday 8 June and centred on the quest for spirituality in online cultures, and key questions of personal identity and the responses of faith to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic.