Photo by Highbrow AV

By Debbie Gin

Can you be present to someone online? Can you practice presence online?

These are questions we’ve been asking in our work with theological schools. More officially, our
questions have centered around: Can people be formed online? (Formation can be about your spiritual
life, your faith, your pastoral skills, your intellectual skills or knowledge, your capacities for human character, your commitments to justice or social justice, etc., but this is for another blog post.) Whatever your context includes in “formation,” can that occur online?

Given how women in ministry and the academy are having to multi-task so much these days — taking on the lion’s (sole?) share of caring for (multiple!) children or elderly parents, maintaining the household, being a student, working (often, by cobbling together several part-time positions), making ends meet financially, and caring for self — connecting with other relatives or community members can be a difficult commitment to keep, even when you know how much you’ll enjoy the connection when you can make it happen.

I’ve connected with good friends by videochat recently and have enjoyed deep conversation, as we talk through our laptops, hearing…and seeing…each other. I’ve also committed to calling my parents daily, even for a 5-minute check-in by FaceTime, and have grown closer to them as a result; I talked with them only two or three times a month when we lived in the same area. In these two examples, full schedules do contribute to the need to connect via this medium, but more important is the fact that online engagement has provided badly needed access to my communities because we are physically distant from them.

No one would argue that the online medium helps to fill an access gap. But in terms of engaging someone, is online better than being in person? Could online contexts help us be formed better? Do online modes make us more present? I say: it depends. Some types of online engagement are better than others at helping us be present. (Consider the depth of engagement in a videocall vs a pic of your latest meal — apologies, foodies! — or the level of authenticity in an ongoing email discussion vs. a character-limited tweet.)

Since 2012 — when ATS Standards began including a category of “comprehensive distance education approval” — the number of ATS schools approved to offer distance education has grown almost 50%. Today, there are more schools with such approval than those without and nearly 150 fully (or almost fully) online programs offered by ATS schools. Through an ongoing project to explore educational models that will be needed in the future, we’ve looked carefully at the effectiveness of formation in online contexts. Here’s an excerpt of what we understand so far:

1. Course-related and co-curricular dimensions of theological education both contribute to formation. So formation is not limited to just one venue.
2. In online learning, the role of the school shifts from the center to one among many resources of learning. This means that learning and formation can occur in church settings, among students’ various communities, in online forums, etc., in addition to the school classroom.
3. The online environment is both broad and not-so-broad. Online engagement provides greater access — with potential for inter and cross-cultural experiences — but because the student stays in her/his local setting most of the time, the risk of provincialism is great.

We’ve also named some myths about in-person formation. If you remain skeptical, perhaps they will prompt you to reconsider. I’ve reworded them for this blog post on presence:

• There is no community online — or, you can’t be truly present online.
• We know what “community” means — or, we know what being present means.
• In-person formation — or, presence — has been effective and consistent.
• Formation only happens if we do something intentional to make it happen — or, the fruit of presence is experienced only when we intentionally meet in-person.

Don’t get me wrong: there are immense benefits to physically being with people. Even I, as an introvert, experience deep joy when I get to visit family and friends in LA twice a year. Ultimately, however, online engagement is here to stay. What we do with it is what matters. Will it help us to remain better connected to our communities, will it help level the playing field (i.e., provide access to those in under-privileged areas), will it open up our views to more global contexts and make us better world citizens, and will it make us better at practicing presence with people? The capability exists even now, but will churches and schools take advantage of it? I hope so.

Several years from now, we’ll read articles like this and wonder what all the fuss was about. It reminds me of the day when my high school friends and I all piled into this new “ride” at Disneyland: we’d heard so much about it. Seated in the room, we pushed a button, then more buttons, then suddenly we could hear and talk to another friend at home…altogether! Speakerphone.

Dr. Debbie Gin is Director of Faculty Development and Research at The Association of Theological Schools/Commission on Accrediting, the support and accrediting organization of most seminaries in the US and Canada.  She was formerly Associate Professor of Ministry at Azusa Pacific Seminary and Fellow for Faculty Development and Evaluation in the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Assessment at Azusa Pacific University.  She and her husband currently live in Pennsylvania.