The New Divide: Online Segregation in the Church

As I've been getting into the social networking world with sites like MySpace, FaceBook and LinkedIn, I've been seeing more how the digital divide is morphing into a new divide--online segregation. As I look through social networking sites and people's friend lists, I can see how segregated our country still is. I remember reading a Newsweek article a year or so ago that said that we are now more segregated than we were before the 1960s. A recent article by Dana Boyde highlighted the class divisions between MySpace and Facebook as an example. Several urban ministry bloggers have recently commented on this including Jeremy Del Rio's Blog and Rudy Carrasco's blog.

My focus has been to assess the online segregation in the church. Many people have read the book Divided by Faith, which explores how segregation in the Church perpetuates injustice.

I've been interested in how this segregation in the church is translated online. I have been working on a model to assess the costs of this online segregation in the Church. The summary is that it seems likely that online segregation in the Church results in a net transfer of about $432 million per year from ministries serving under-resourced communities to resourced ministries. Since, every Biblical notion of justice says that the resources should be flowing the other way, I thought that many people would find this significant.

Since it seems like this issue is becoming very current, I decided to publish this on our site. I would love for others to contribute their comments and add to it in their blogs.

1. You can find the draft article "The New Divide: Online Segregation in the Church".

2. You can review and comment on the model of the cost of this segregation.