Church in cyberspace

"He'd have a lot to say," says Eric, one of [Marshall McLuhan]'s six children. "It's disorienting. All the new media are. All our accustomed forms have become obsolete. There's not a lot to fall back on. Our sense of the private identity, private goals and ambitions, our individualism are gone. 'Tes, we have to update our language," [Kevin D. Hendricks] says. "Using insider lingo is a problem in every industry, but the church is especially prone to it because we give our churchy language a sheen of the holy. Somehow we're losing Jesus if we don't use words like transubstantiation. We need to speak in a way people can understand. It's simply good communication. And if you're losing the message of Christ in the translation, then you're doing it wrong, horribly wrong." "Back in the '90s," he recalls, "we tried holding session meetings online because two-thirds of our elders travelled extensively, but presbytery didn't know how to handle motions proposed at 4:00 a.m. by someone in Australia and seconded seven hours later from Brazil."