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
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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
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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 [