Tag: Church of England

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Digital Event

[EVENT] #DigitalLabs Conference by @ChurchOfEngland

CofE Header

The last couple of days have really made my brain work… but I’ve really enjoyed the mix of sessions (strategic and practical), and been able to listen to a number of them whilst doing other bits and bobs, whilst capturing some of them for Twitter! It’s encouraging to se how much the Church of England digital work has moved forward over the last few years (I used to run training sessions at Church House, London, especially on ‘Social Media for the Scared’, and always felt more was needed).

I found the Whova app really straightforward to use (I’ve only used one other online conference platform – Hopin)… although of course there will have been work put into thinking how to use this well. I used a mix of the web platform and the mobile platform – and aside from having to manually connect to the audio for each session – it was easy to find each session in the agenda, and connect to the associated Zoom. I can look back at each session and see the Q&A and chats that happened down the side, though I never quite made it to the community chats (which looked very busy). Delegates could contact each other, upload photos, comment/enage (and there was a competition with scores for those who engaged the most) – and the slides were available at the end of the event – plus a few other bits of functionality.

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Media & Press Media - Audio

[MEDIA] Talking to @TWRuk about @ChurchofEngland Social Media Guidelines

Earlier today, the Church of England released guidelines for the use of social media within the church (and impacting the world more widely), and this was launched by the Archbishop of Canterbury on Facebook:

This was covered in the Guardian, CNN, ITV, and other places. If you look back through my Slideshare, you’ll see that I ran training for the Church of England (and other churches) in the past, before they got a digital team together two years ago. December 2018, I also had an academic article published on Social Media, Peer Surveillance, Spiritual Formation, and Mission: Practising Christian Faith in a Surveilled Public Space, which this seems to tie in with:

Social media has become a part of everyday life, including the faith lives of many. It is a space that assumes an observing gaze. Engaging with Foucauldian notions of surveillance, self-regulation, and normalisation, this paper considers what it is about social and digital culture that shapes expectations of what users can or want to do in online spaces. Drawing upon a wide range of surveillance research, it reflects upon what “surveillance” looks like within social media, especially when users understand themselves to be observed in the space. Recognising moral panics around technological development, the paper considers the development of social norms and questions how self-regulation by users presents itself within a global population. Focusing upon the spiritual formation of Christian users (disciples) in an online environment as a case study of a community of practice, the paper draws particularly upon the author’s experiences online since 1997 and material from The Big Bible Project (CODEC 2010–2015). The research demonstrates how the lived experience of the individual establishes the interconnectedness of the online and offline environments. The surveillant affordances and context collapse are liberating for some users but restricting for others in both their faith formation and the subsequent imperative to mission.

Not forgetting, of course, that the subtitle of my book, and the force that drives most of my work is ‘Enjoying the Best, Avoiding the Worst’!

I was asked to speak on this on TW Radio this morning. Here’s the interview:

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Event

[EVENT] Picking the ideas for @ChurchofEngland at #CofELabs

So, yesterday, I really enjoyed attending the Church of England ‘Live Labs’ digital sprint. Last year was the first year that the Church of England digital team (first formed in 2016) tried this, and they gave everyone attending an open brief to come up with an idea that the Church of England could use… this resulted in some grand ideas, and also two very useable ideas that the church has taken up in the past year:

Over the past couple of years, the digital team has been working very hard to get all of the basics in place – a solid website, putting resource behind A Church Near You (ACNY), and developing a strong social presence on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

So, for this second event, people were invited to apply to take part, around 200+ applied, with participants chosen based upon their skills-set, joined to a private group, with an invitation to think about 3 problems that the digital team identified as important, to be considered from a digital perspective, including how this could encourage church attendance:

  • How do we maximise reach of our church-finder tool A Church Near You for our key audiences?
  • How do we better equip young people and students who are Christians to reach out and share faith with their friends?
  • How do we encourage daily Christian rhythms and rituals in people’s lives?

I joined at lunchtime (at The Lowry, Salford), along with the other judges (after presentations, including on young people):

By this point, the 50 people working on the brief were being led by James Poulter and James Doc through a sped-up version of the Google Sprint Methodology (5 days work in 5 hours), so had come up with ideas, put their ideas on post-it notes, been given 3 dots to assign to their favourite projects, then split into 5 groups to develop those ideas. As the day went on, they continued to develop and fine-tune the ideas, as we joined at points to overhear discussions, as well as chatting amongst ourselves.

The groups created presentations to submit to the AV team before dinner (lovely curry), before presenting to us. There was 5 strict minutes for each presentation, and 5 minutes each for the judges to ask questions to seek to understand the audience, feasibility, and impact of the projects, before we disappeared to make our decisions – and whether 1 or 2 projects would be taken forward for development, thinking about the potential of all 5 projects… with the 2 ideas taken forward a set of plug-ins for ACNY to enable greater social interaction and time-saving, and a daily creative brief (a bit like #oneminutebriefs) to encourage creative responses to the daily lectionary (although rather than for 3 years, to be for key seasonal times). A very intense day, but very positive…

Below is all the (unsorted) tweets collected, as well as links to a couple of Instagram posts and Facebook live feeds from The Church of England official presence.

 

Categories
Digital

[WAKELET Collection] #CofELabs Collected Tweets

On Saturday the Church of England ran an all-day Hackathon, with ‘techies and creatives’ considering options that the Church of England could support, utilising digital to underpin the core purpose of church – faith, discipleship, etc. The unsorted tweets are collected here (500ish tweets).

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Speaker

[SPEAKER] Experiencing God in a Digital Age #theconvo17

I’m at ‘The Conversation‘ in Canterbury today, in an event hosted by the CofE, asking “How can we change the dominant church culture from ‘conquering and keeping’ to ‘nurturing and releasing’ the children and young people in our midst?”.

I’ve got 20 minutes to put across some ideas about the digital:

Experiencing God in a Digital Age (Children/Young People) from Bex Lewis