Virginia Episcopalian Magazine Spring 2014 Issue | Page 26

Putting the “E” in Formation Churches explore online learning and e-formation Emily Cherry Strengthening Existing Congregations “ hat would you do if the families in your parish were W exceptionally regular in their attendance at worship, but only a few were committed to church school?” asked Day Smith Pritchartt in a recent post on the Virginia Theological Seminary’s Center for Ministry of Teaching Key Resources blog. For St. Andrew’s, Arlington, the answer was to shut down Sunday School. In its stead, the congregation has launched a pilot program: Families Integrating Sunday and Home (FISH). Smith Pritchartt, executive director of the Evangelical Education Society and minister to families at St. Andrew’s, designed a FISH website with weekly Gospel stories, discussion topics and prayer starters, with some assistance from Kyle Oliver of the Center for Ministry Teaching at VTS. A blog promotes comments and conversation, and in-person potlucks add another dimension to the experience. The idea is to bring faith formation outside the church walls and into the home, with all of the different in-person and online encounters supporting one another. St. Andrew’s decision to explore electronic faith formation – or e-formation – is a trending one. In a recent post on the same Key Resources blog, Oliver discussed the concept of Hybrid Networks. The idea with such networks is “to stop offering programs … and start nurturing networks,” wrote Oliver. The “hybrid” part means that such groups have both online and in-person components. So a group with a particular interest might meet together once a month – at the parish, at a coffee shop, in someone’s home – and then supplement their in-person time by discussing their shared experiences online. The integration of e-formation into a traditional church setting has the benefit of being easily accessible to participants on their own schedules. But for some, it still begs the question: When does online discussion shift from being a supplement to human interaction to being a replacement for it? For St. Paul’s, Ivy, the search for an e-formation program stemmed from a desire to supplement an already-successful Sunday morning adult forum, which usually has an attendance of 40 to 50 people. “We were looking for ways to engage people outside of that traditional Sunday morning time,” said the Rev. Eric Liles, rector. So Liles worked with the church’s Adult Formation Committee to evaluate a couple of different products. Their main priority was to find something that could be accessible to parishioners at any time. They looked at several different curricula, including Animate Faith and the Work of the People. But the option they ended up with is a platform called 24 Virginia Episcopalian / Spring 2014 ChurchNext. The church pays for a subscription, which is then accessible via a password. Parishioners can log-in on their own time to watch a video and participate in a quiz or discussion questions. Folks can access the various modules – like “Handling the Work-Life Balance,” or “Developing Christian Patience” – from their computers or mobile devices. For two Sundays, they demonstrated to folks how to log-in to the program, and how to participate. St. Paul’s only implemented ChurchNext [