ABSTRACT
Online churches have attracted a great deal of attention from Christian commentators and academics, beginning in the mid-90s and accelerating rapidly after the mid-00s. This discourse is not just a matter of ethnographic curiosity: even when online congregations were very small, they were already being used to represent something much greater than themselves. The online church has been treated by scholars primarily as an experimental laboratory, a test case in which we might expect to identify the first signs of new ideas and practices. For Christian writers—with a few notable exceptions—online church has tended to feature as an extreme, self-evidently dangerous case invoked to demonstrate the limits of acceptable online activity.
