Book Announcement: The problem with church in digital culture
As a Lutheran and a former Google employee, I find it interesting that as fewer people show up at church on Sunday morning, increasingly more are searching for God on Google's search engine. Most Christian denominations lost 3-4% of their membership between 2007 and 2014 , a slide that has accelerated every year since. Based on these trends, some forecast that entire mainline denominations, the ELCA included , may fold entirely by 2041. Yet the Google search engine saw three times as much search volume for the query “who is Jesus” in 2017 than it did in 2007. It’s a question that grows in interest every single year in every state in the Union. It is among the most frequently “Googled” religious queries, second only to “what is the Bible?” The “Googlification” of Christ’s identity and the significance of the Bible points to an accelerating trend: people are developing their faith through questions, asked outside of the church. They are developing their spiritual selves not th...
