Performing Religious Identity through Digital Media: The Epic Church

From the previous posts, I have supported, built, and claimed that the Epic Church's mission is the following:

"The apparent mission of the Epic church is centered on drawing in new believers, youth, minorities, and Philadelphians into the faith. They want to pave the way for a tight-knit yet diverse community centered on Jesus' teachings through casual communication and a relaxed atmosphere, one formed by the blending of the very community's offline and online life."

In the process of building this claim, I showed various examples. The most notable ones being:

• The Welcoming Video: The video is found in both the Home Page the About Page on The Epic Church's website. This video is the website's welcome video and without any audio, it still showcases a diverse and tight-knit community. It shows various scenes, such as members talking, a coffee talk, a pastor leading a service, a band playing music, members entering campus while talking to each other, and many other scenes. All these scenes put together reach an effect on the audience where we see a church centered on showcasing their diversity and close-knit community.
• The Service Video and #ForPhilly: One of the things that stood out to me the most was in the last few minutes of the service, during this same conversation about people who are 'good soil', when the preacher addresses the world outside of the church: "I want our church to be full of people who are good soil. [...] and that's what it's gonna take to reach our city which is full of people who are victims of the devil's schemes." [37:00] And the theme of 'our city' is clearly stated by the preacher, something that is part of my original assessment of the Epic Church due to the clear visual and textual references to The Epic Church's mission of being #ForPhilly in the webpage. 
• The About Text: Directly in the website, The Epic Church states their vision is "TO SEE EVERY PERSON IN THE CITY MAKE JESUS THE FORGIVER AND LEADER OF THEIR LIFE"
• The Design: The pop culture references in the naming and artwork of the Services posted in the website archives points to their focus on youth and new believers, since they are using well-known and popular references to the secular culture that non-believers are a part of and the youth is saturated with every day in social media. In the same post I made the case that, "A lot of their website then shows, shortcuts and easy access to information for new believers and people interested in becoming part of the faith". This again shows their website is not only welcoming to non-believers but also actively accommodating them. Another identity that is a big part of the Epic Church are Philadelphians as a whole, Philadelphia is a central part of their mission and what they write about in the website explicitly, under the about section, they write "WE ARE #FORPHILLY" twice, once in their belief list, and another in their introduction. This repeating line shows the church's focus on Philadelphians. Based on an assessment of other parts of the website, I wrote about a certain thing that really caught my attention during the first post of this blog:

Similarly, I believe the Epic Church's religious identity is very related to the mission. I believe their religious identity is built around community, the city of Philadelphia, and being 'cool'. The examples I have for this are strongly correlated to the ones above:

• The #ForPhilly: This hashtag is recurring on their website text, and the sentiment of 'doing something for the city' is also a recurring theme on their services. 
• The Life Groups: The strong sense of community comes from under their "Get Involved" section. Under this there are groups for youth and kids, showing the Epic Church is very present in engaging with younger generations. There are also community volunteering groups. Even more interesting were their 'Life Groups'. These groups meet at a certain time a week, in a certain location, and have a certain number and type of members. These life groups are very interesting due to their nature, which is seen through their titles; there are life groups for everything from volunteering at a certain location to watching and discussing Football together. The life group search engine linked to on the Epic Church website is shown below. As is visible from these screenshots, there are different types of life groups, dedicated to different things and aspects of life that bring certain people together. These life groups along with the showcased diversity in the welcoming video show how important community is to the Epic Church's religious identity.

• The Pop Culture References: As shown in the first blog post, and will be shown below. The Epic Church does something peculiar with how they present their religious services. Out of the two links under the header of the home page, I decided to follow the "watch now" link. This link leads to the recordings of the services portion of their website. They link to these twice in the homepage, meaning this is a very important part of their website for them. Once under this page form, one finds the list of the recorded services with a small text description, and a big visual picture containing the title of the recording. A peculiar thing to note about these visuals is that they are designed to seem, in a sense, very colorful, creative, and 'cool'. Some of them even contain pop-culture references, like emojis. Even more on the subject of pop-culture, the titles of some of these recordings are direct references to popular online phenomena such as hashtags, phrases, and even memes. To prove this, some of them are shown below. Pop-culture references here include (in order): emojis, tinder, mixtapes, Supreme brand, hashtags, and popular phrases among many more... This shows the Epic Church's attempt to be in touch with popular culture as part of engaging themselves and others on their religious identity of being the 'cool' church.

Through the app and website, we see a church group that is in touch with digital media as a form of 'selling' ideas, but also as a way to form community bonds, and make life simpler and more 'handheld' (hence the simplicity of the app). This showcases a 'blending' relationship between the Epic Church and digital media. In their home page The Epic Church displays the words "Something Different" across the page. They do manage to maintain the individuality and unique religious identity they profess in their home page throughout the entire website, now it is time to see whether the same ideas can be extracted from being in one of their campuses in person.