c. 1997 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ Trappist monks selling caramels on the Internet. A chapel flashing huge, peaceful scenes of waterfalls in the sanctuary to calm and welcome Christian worshippers. Solitary browsers finding a place to convert to Hinduism in cyberspace.

“Every single religious group is having to reassess how to be who they are in the new electronic culture,” said Frances Forde Plude, communications professor at Cleveland’s Notre Dame College of Ohio. “It’s very big stuff. It’s as if all the tectonic plates the churches stand on are shifting beneath them. And what they are experiencing now is an earthquake.”

Plude was among more than 125 church representatives who met recently at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, to participate in a conference called “Sharing the Gospel in the Electronic Age.”

“The Gospel is still the same story _ the story of hope and love _ but we need to consider telling it in the new media so that folks might hear it,” said Jennifer Proudfoot, a United Methodist symposium organizer. “We have churches at all different stages.”

Robert J. Eiber, president of Conference Masters in Bedford Heights, Ohio, has expanded his business to install large, computer-operated projection and sound systems in churches. Some churches have spent tens of thousands of dollars to spiff up their electronic presentations.

“When you are able to look up on the screen, it’s an uplifting experience,” said Eiber. “It’s a very different experience from everyone with their head buried in a hymnal. …

“These systems appeal to the thirtysomething crowd with a 4-year-old son or daughter,” he said. “And these are churches willing to take risks. They are musically oriented, child-oriented and they like their energy levels high. Projection in the sanctuary appeals to these folk.”

Colleen Jones, Conference Masters’ project manager, put it even more bluntly: “A pastor told us that to get young people in church, you don’t show them video games, but you come close.”

This strikes many as sacrilege.

Eiber, a former elder at Old Stone Church, a downtown Cleveland Presbyterian landmark, said his pew mates never would tolerate watching adult baptisms, music lyrics or children’s Easter pageants projected into their sacred space.

But the old world of lovingly typed church bulletins, denominational newspapers and well-thumbed Bibles is stuck in 19th-century technology now in rapid decline, said the Rev. Thomas E. Boomershine, a United Theological Seminary professor and expert on Christian media.

“The technologies of communications change and these have a major effect on the formation of community,” Boomershine said from his offices in Dayton, Ohio. “What’s happening now is the church doesn’t know how to think about this constructively. In a way, it’s like the battle that goes on in every home between reading and TV.”

For all three Abrahamic traditions _ Christianity, Judaism and Islam _ the Bible is sacred, often memorized, said Boomershine, the keynote speaker at the Baldwin-Wallace conference.

“In all three religions, the word has been made sacred,” he said. “It’s not just a book, it’s the Holy Book. It’s not just a word, it’s the word of God. If you look at the Sistine Chapel, over half the figures are reading or writing. And in Orthodox Christianity, one of the most important Jesus icons shows him pointing to a book with letters around his head.”

All this makes it particularly hard for religious traditionalists to wrest themselves from old habits and to shed the suspicion many carry for newer, electronic technologies, Boomershine said.

But pious people are learning, communications experts report. In the Jewish arena, Project Genesis, a Baltimore-based Orthodox outreach on the Internet, reaches 15,000 subscribers with online classes.

Pope John Paul II has also championed the new media.”With the advent of computer telecommunications and what are known as computer participation systems, the church is offered further means of fulfilling her mission,” the Roman Catholic pontiff said.

Boomershine predicted that holdout churches and faith groups who refuse to get with the age of electronic communications won’t survive.

“We need to do, in our context, what the writers and translators of the Bible did in their contexts throughout history _ to bring the religion into the communications systems of our culture,” he said. “I’m absolutely certain it will be done.”

MJP END LONG