USAToday on church shopping via the web

Interesting, if shallow, report in USAToday about the increasing number of people who check out a church’s website as one way of discerning whether they want to attend or not. Typical concerns are expressed:

"The Web has allowed people to be cowards about profound religion," says Bandy. "It allows us to hide behind our e-mail, jargon names, URLs and stuff like that. But religion is really an act of courage — to submit, to surrender, to be vulnerable to the other, to that which is beyond yourself."

I suspect that this quote is supposed to support a concern that people who “shop” online for churches are only interested in what “works” for them, and that such a concern is too consumer-oriented to be faithful. But what about those of us who over and over again have “made ourselves vulnerable” to each other in specific church settings enough to have learned that some communities are simply too dysfunctional to inhabit with health, and therefore checking them out online is a first step? After all, if you can’t figure out when and where a liturgy is happening from a website, that’s a pretty good sign that that specific community is not very welcoming.

I will admit to huge skepticism these days towards the work of any researcher who draws critical or negative conclusions from the behavior of people faithful enough to be looking for a church to go to! These days there are few enough people even vaguely intrigued by institutional church that we ought to be interested in those who are actively searching for such connections.