How Online Media Deforms Christian Disciples

In this world of online community, within Christianity there exists numerous online sub-groups that offer lively and personal communal hubs for various people. In the six way fracturing framework previously laid out by Michael Graham and myself, you find the formation, recruitment, and sustaining of subgroups centered around shared experiences or theological interests. While, certainly, at times such grouping has just, correcting, and therapeutic results - as seen in the exposing of sin in things like #churchtoo or the confronting of theological error as in the debates surrounding EFS - there is also a tendency within these groups to absolutize their own particular understanding of Christianity. The perpetually online Christian descends deeper into sub-groups within sub-groups, confirming and reinforcing certain ideas, narratives, and views concerning the church, its leadership, its theology, and its expression today. In doing so, one might find themselves replacing the role of the church, as instituted by Jesus Christ, and the role it is meant to serve in the lives of believers.