They Will Be Done on Earth as It Is on Instagram. Gentrification has changed the way we see our neighborhoods. Some have been changed from popular, middle-class environments to upper-class, posh places. Where you used to be able to buy your groceries, you can buy muffins, cupcakes and get a nice haircut. Everything’s become “urban” these days, and not even churches escape from it.
Church or fancy café? (@egliseecclesia)
The urban evangelic church Ecclésia
located in Saint Jerome, a little city on the outskirts of Montreal, makes its mission clearly on its webpage. They believe that “the message from the Bible should be told in an interesting way, adequate to the 21st-century reality.” They’re already immersed in the current spirit – they’re on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, where it’s also tagged within the #TBT (Throwback Thursday) hashtag. If we look into that hashtag, what we’ll see won’t definitely look as a church, but as a fancy bar where they serve hot chocolate.
This movement is getting more and more popular all around Quebec, but it’s in Montreal that we find the most “connected” churches. The église du Plateau Mont-Royal is a good example. Its pastor, Bradley Morrice, wears a long beard and a lumberjack shirt which make him look like a pure hipster. The church has declared the wish to take part in a spiritual, social and cultural renaissance of the neighborhood where it’s located. It also has its own hashtag – #egliseduplateau.
According to Jean-Philippe Perreault, professor at the Laval University in Quebec, this trend is what “modern” Christians are looking for. “It coincides with the end of short-ranged parishes. Today, youngsters are always moving and creating their own communities. That’s going to create the need to widen the relationship institutions have with social media.”
Has this trend hooked your neighborhood up, too? Do you know any church 2.0?
