On a recent Sunday morning, Leanne Staeger, dressed in faded jeans and sneakers, was giving out curt, military-style orders to her four-person crew.
Their eyes were locked on a bank of monitors that showed a middle-age priest in white vestments delivering a sermon in the church across the street. Then, he did something that made everyone in the room gasp and burst out with laughter:
He jumped. Then he jumped some more.
“This is going to be known as ‘the jumping sermon,’ ” said Staeger, 40. “They’re going to love it online!”
Recent polls have shown that Americans are losing confidence in religious institutions, but at the same time, an interest in spirituality has been on the rise. In search of new alternatives to brick-and-mortar houses of worship, a growing number of people are moving from pews to Internet portals to find God in cyberspace.
The idea of online spirituality is not new.
People have been using the Internet since the late 1980s to form communities, discuss religion and pray online. In 1996, a group of Tibetan monks even consecrated cyberspace so they could meditate on the Web.
What is new is the way cyberworshipers harness the latest technologies, said Dr. Heidi Campbell, professor of communications at Texas A&M University and author of “Exploring Religious Community Online: We are One in the Network.”
“What I mean by that is the examples like the Godtube Web site that emerged earlier last year,” Dr. Campbell said. “And so we also see Christian versions of social networking sites, and even just the whole godcasting as podcasting.”
But many churches, temples and mosques have been lagging behind, said Steven Waldman, who in 1999 created the spirituality network beliefnet.com.
“In the long run, churches which don’t use the Internet to expand their communities will suffer,” Waldman said.
Last month, Bill Tikos from Sydney launched a nondenominational Web site called dear-god.net, where users from around the world can write to God, offer thanks, ask for forgiveness or vent their anger in a blog-like form.
The response has been overwhelming: Six days after the site went up, it received 40,000 hits, and people from places such as Toledo, Ohio; Stockholm and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, posted about 60 letters to God on various topics, including family, sex and death.
PREACHING TO THE WIRED
Got a question about the Bible?
You might want to head to the Massachusetts Bible Society Web site, massbible.org.
As one part of its attempt to reinvent itself for the modern era, the MBS created the site that allows readers to ask a professor a question about the Bible.
“The old ways of communicating the Gospel, while not ineffective, at this point are not reaching more and more people who rely on 21st-Century technology for their information,” said Rev. Anne Robertson, executive director of the Massachusetts Bible Society. [THE BOSTON GLOBE]
