People search for meaning and spirituality. The Christian faith with a population of over 2 billion remains the world’s largest religion. Yet there is a steady decline of Christianity in Western cultures. Rather than focus on this decline, my wife Theresa’s Reimagining Narratives doctoral project launched recently to discover what good is happening in the Christian faith and what Christianity in the West could look like in the future.
The research
People are leaving the Christian church en masse even though spirituality and religious beliefs in various forms are flourishing. Popular research and the media highlight this discrepancy and promote a general negative view of Christian spirituality.
It is easy to focus on the negative. The challenge is that we tend to see what we focus on. If I study bad things or assume the worst, everything tends to be painted with a negative brush. An alternative to this is what is called an appreciative inquiry approach, which asks what is the good that is happening and how can we get more of it.
This is the approach taken by Reimagining Narratives. The goal of the research is to capture and share as many positive experiences in Christian spirituality and understand what an ideal future form of Christian spirituality looks like. The intent is to hear from as many perspectives as possible, including those who identify with the Christian faith, other faiths, and who do not associate with any form of organized religion. Case in point, about a third of research respondents in the first few weeks did not align with a faith, but still had a story to tell about a connection to spirituality.
The research captures people’s stories, both through one-one-one interviews and an online tool. The outcomes of the research will be presented through arts-based formats to engage with as wide an audience as possible. The artwork will create a common ground for people to reflect and connect with their own spirituality and that of broader society.
I do not have conversations about spirituality in my current day job in all things digital. Yet when I talk about the premise of the research project, people are interested. As much as people can be turned off by the preconception of Christianity, many have a desire to see “good”, to belong, to make a difference, and have a connection to something outside of themselves. As Jewish philosopher and holocaust victim Viktor Frankl proposes, “Man’s search for meaning is his primary motivation in life”.
Presenting the outcomes through art forms aligns with current trends in information consumption. I think back a century ago to when great care was placed in creating the written form. Now, wisdom is distributed in 800 word blog posts, three minute YouTube clips, and pictures of sunsets with pithy sayings in Facebook streams. I am not saying this is good or bad, only that contemporary consumption habits align with engaging in narrative through easily digestible chunks.
The end expression of the research is initially a book, with a corresponding art exhibition directly resulting from the research. This will allow people to engage with both the art medium and aspects of other’s stories. They can then reflect on what other stories mean to their own spirituality, defining meaning relative to themselves through the interaction with others. A phase two being considered is to then open the project to the wider art community to have expressions and exhibitions in each region share stories about what a positive form of spirituality could look like.
The project – creating a campaign
The research project is an expression of art in itself and a lesson in creating an online campaign. Aspects of the research are outlined below in the event it may be of benefit to someone launching a research project of their own… and to talk about what has occupied the last few months of our lives.
Website and research tool
We looked at a few off-the-shelf options for the research tool. None of the survey tools such as Surveymonkey, Lime survey, or WordPress plugins were flexible enough in design or functionality to easily customize in the way we wanted. I ended up dusting off my ColdFusion programming skills and re-purposed the tool I created for the My Pizza Personality project. My code is not necessarily pretty and I received a few smirks from my team when I told them what I was doing, but it does the job.
It took us over three months to pull it together. Theresa’s design and illustration was more efficient than my coding speed, and I imagine someone more skilled in programming could pull something together in a week of focused effort.
We used the Tersus WordPress theme as the base, which I copied in order to get some semblance of responsive design to ensure the survey would mostly work on mobile devices. We wanted the site to be an art piece in itself, with a banner that acted as a progress bar animated using Spritely. There is a copious amount of JQuery around the site and I am infinitely grateful for help from my team and to the generous development community that posts code on the Internet for me to freely copy and paste.
Promotion video
Late in the game we decided to throw together a promotional video, as all the cool kids in social media seem to do when they launch their projects. Theresa spent a day searching audio sites finding an appropriate sound clip and did up the story boards. I then spent a four-day weekend putting it all together in Flash. Flash did not play nice in exporting to avi or mov for importing to YouTube. I had to re-frame everything to 30 frames per second in order for the Free SWF to AVI converter to render without stuttering.
The result is below:
Social
The social campaign for the project is emerging as we go. Theresa writes blog posts about selected interviewees to both raise awareness as well as promote their work, and is cross-posting on her personal Flavor Yellow blog. There is a Facebook page for the project for people who want to connect there (if that is you, please “like” away). Rather than setting up dedicated accounts, Theresa is using her personal LinkedIn and Twitter accounts for the moment to get the word out. Pinterest is planned, but only once the art-based outcomes begin to materialize.
Theresa is putting a lot of work into getting the word out, and we appreciate those who are passing the word on through their own channels. Please head over to the site and take the survey. The research is after as many perspectives as possible, yours included. If you feel there is value in what you see, please share the project in your own circles as you deem appropriate.
And if you have any perspectives on this blog post, please feel free to share your thoughts below.