Tying it All Together

The Epic Church is a Philadelphia-based multisite Christian church with campuses found at locations across the city: Center City, Roxborough, Fairmount and Parkside.

Their explicit 'vision' statement is to see every person in the city make Jesus the forgiver and leader of their life. Throughout my research I built, in a step-by-step fashion, the following statement about their religious identity and mission:

"The apparent mission of the Epic church is centered on drawing in youth, minorities, and Philadelphians into the faith. Their identity displays a desire to pave the way for a tight-knit yet diverse community centered on Jesus' teachings through the means of casual communication, and a relaxed and comfortable atmosphere."

There are examples for each claim made within the statement above, but the best and most complete examples I have found are:

1. 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 life groups are very interesting due to their nature there are life groups for everything from talking about motherhood to watching and discussing Football together:

2. SERVICE SERIES' POP CULTURE REFERENCES IN NAMES AND ARTWORKS:

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.  An important thing to note about these visuals is that they are designed to be a play on popular culture. Some of them even contain direct references, like emojis. Even more, 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. 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  casual communication and a relaxed atmosphere.

In the end, the Epic Church relationship with the media can better be understood when the simplicity and focus group of their app is analyzed. Epic Church sees and approaches media most widely through a 'blending' relationship (refer to class notes), although there are also bridging and blurring aspects to their media usage. This is because certain aspects, such as their services and the bible, are accessible online through their website or app. This creates a new 'space' for worship within the Epic Church. Yet, the church maintains a clear distinction between online and offline life for other things such as the Life Groups mentioned above: you can sign up for them, but you can't meet online (they meet in person). This clear distinction is even more visible from their app, geared specifically towards members and which maintains a careful simplicity to only show the necessary while still maintaining their sleek distinctive style. 

I believe the Epic Church sees media as a tool to seem more 'inviting' to Philadelphians, the youth, and non-believers. They also see it as a tool to share their services and have more people access their teachings, which in unintentional consequence creates a blended 'space' of worship online.

QUESTIONS:

Do you think Epic is creating more than just a blended space within their media usage? Or does this assessment seem correct?

Does the contrast between a very 'cool-looking', sleek web/app design and a church that isn't entirely blurring the lines between online and offline (with things such as interactive social media) seem unusual to you? Or do you think churches can and should integrate both seamlessly? 

What would you say about multisite churches as a whole, do you think the general trend is that the nature of having different campuses leads to churches with a closer relationship to digital media? 

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.

Apps as Mediators of Online and Offline Church Experiences

Last week's concluding statement shows the idea of the Epic Church that I have gathered thus far:

"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."

This week, I have downloaded and navigated through the Epic Church - Philadelphia app in order to further understand the Epic Church's relationship with digital media. The app design follows the visually aesthetic detail of the website, but is surprisingly a lot more simple. The app consists of the following functionalities:

Aside from the front page of the app presented above, if you swipe left to reach the second page of functionalities, there is also a settings option to clear caches, but that's the only other thing available in the app aside from the previously shown front page. The amount of functionalities and information about the Epic Church in the app is very small. There is virtually no information on the Epic Church or its mission on the app, nor a button to redirect us to their website. It is because of this that I believe the app is meant to be solely and uniquely for people who are already members of the community and who need a fast-access framework to access podcasts or videos on the religious services offered by the Epic Church. It could also be used to look at life groups and community outreach groups and sign up for them (but the app simply redirects you to the websites instead of it being an in-app functionality), to donate to the Epic Church, or to read an online version of the bible. There is no contact information in the app, which further confirms my suspicions that the app is only intended for people who are already members of Epic Church. This is a stark contrast to their website, which is heavily designed towards new believers, but the mission I've gathered from their website is strengthened by this app. This is because out of all the things they chose to add into such a minimalistic app they decided to include the Life Groups and volunteering outreach search engines which serve to browse and sign up for these community-strengthening activities. It is then clear that the sense of community I have been speaking of since week 1 (with the Life Groups) is a very important part of Epic Church's identity, so much so that Life Groups and volunteering outreach are included in their fundamentally simple app alongside the bible and the recordings of their religious services.


I believe that, based only on the app, the relationship between the Church and digital media is leaning towards a blending relationship (refer to bottom of this post for the relationships) with a few characteristics from a blurred or bridged relationship. This is because there is an overlap of what a religious service looks like traditionally along with how it can be accessed online and in the app. It would be safe to say that the main point of the app is to have the religious services of the Epic Church in a fast-access, handheld framework, alongside the search engine for community groups. This shows an overlap between religious services with digital technology and a transcendence of these religious services into a digital and asynchronous space showing characteristics of a blending, almost blurring relationship as a new 'space' is created. Yet, aside from the religious services, all other aspects of the app point towards a more blending/bridging relationship. For example, the Life groups and community outreach groups are easily searched in the app, but once you have found and signed up for a group, there is no digital counterpart to the meetings that happen within the groups. Therefore there is a distinct and measurable difference between the Epic Church's Life Groups in the context of being online vs. in the context of being offline, although there is a bridge between them (the app). If we take into context their website, I believe the relationship maintains mostly a blended relationship with digital media. There is, in the context of the religious services, a digital 'space' (and thus a blurred relationship), but in the context of all other content at the Epic Church's website, there is mostly a distinction between online/offline life. This would make sense under my stated profile of the Epic Church, since the support for a tight-knit community that I state comes from examples such as Life Groups and the welcome video which shows coffee talks, and community members personally interacting. These examples show a much more 'bridged' relationship between online and offline life than they do anything else. Yet, one of the most universal religious traditions is worship and time of worship, and in the Epic Church, the context of worship has been formed in a new online/offline 'space' which shows a deeply blurred relationship. Because of this, I would call the Epic Church's relationship with online/offline life a 'blended' relationship. In the end, I can update my experimental assessment of the Epic Church's identity by relating this new analysis to the core observation:

"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."

Presenting Mission Through Multi-Media Online

For this week, I have assessed two videos found in The Epic Church's website. The first video is found in 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, which comes back around to the description of the Epic Church I've written before on this blog: "The apparent mission of the Epic church is centered on drawing in new believers, youth, minorities, and Philadelphians into the faith, and they want to pave the way for a tight-knit yet diverse community centered on Jesus' teachings."

The second video I have watched is the most recent service posted on The Epic Church's website. It is called We're in a War and it is one of the many videos in the month-long series "This I Know". This video is a service hosted in the Roxborough campus. The service's main idea is that we are in a spiritual war and one of the worst things to be in a war is unprepared. The service's main concern is that in order to be prepared for this spiritual war we must give ourselves to God and renounce the temptations that Satan brings upon us. The service's main goal is to have a church full of people who are 'good soil', which in the words of the preacher are, people who are deeply rooted in God. 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. Other, more subtle, things can be said about the service that draws back to my original statement that I believe describes The Epic Church best. For this, I will be drawing a bit of knowledge from my previous Performance Studies course. In performance studies, our social interactions, settings, and positions are all seen through the context of what it means to perform a certain social interaction, setting, or position. From my knowledge, looking just at, for example, what the preacher is wearing (baseball cap, sweater, jeans) and how he is speaking (casual jargon, cracking jokes) there is already a big distinction between what it means to perform preacher at my home's Sunday School vs what it means to perform preacher at The Epic Church vs what is expected of a preacher in the Christian community of the United States. I will go as far as to claim that how the preacher was performing in that video shows a 'welcoming' attitude towards non believers and more casual and relaxed communication between religious authority and the community (perhaps, strengthening that bond of community) than what is expected. Adding on to that, the more casual attitude towards service helps reach the more secular and young community which I believe is their main target (youth, nonbelievers, and Philadelphians). The social setting of this service also gives another aspect to what I'm trying to convey here. There is one blue backdrop, a screen where text is often displayed through the service, and a music stand, a much more casual set-up (as is usual of multimedia churches) than the ones found in traditional churches. Again, these more day-to-day setups and communication ultimately draw attention to the Church within younger and more secular communities simply because it is similar to what those people are used to.

In the end, I truly believe that both the video found in the "About" section of their website, and the service I watched still hold true to my original statement of what the Epic Church is all about. If I were to add a bit more, I'd say now that the Epic Church is all about:

"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."

Summarizing: Assessing Church Identity

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. 

In my first blog post I spoke of the appearance of the website:

"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."

This 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:

"One last thing that really caught my attention was 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. 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."

This ties back tot he claim that the Epic Church's focus is to pave the way for a tight-knit yet diverse community. In the end, the actual mission and focus of The Epic Church as phrased by The Epic Church are the next lines:

"WE DO OUR BEST TO LOVE JESUS AND LOVE PEOPLE. WE'RE #FORPHILLY. WE BELIEVE THAT EVERY PERSON MATTERS. WE CREATE CHURCHES THAT LEAD PEOPLE TO AND THROUGH THEIR NEXT STEPS" 

In conclusion, the original evaluation of what the Epic Church's mission is seems pretty similar to what the Epic Church says about themselves. The only thing I would say is missing from my initial idea of the Epic Church's mission is the lack of the figure Jesus, which seems very important on Epic Church's stated mission and beliefs. I believe that this is missing in my initial assessment due to the lack of visuals that tie back to Jesus in their website, although he is mentioned extensively in text.

In the end, through the assesment of the website's own stated mission, I have only one thing to add to my initial claim:

"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." 

Communicating Belief and Practice Online

Last week, I mostly spoke about the design of the Epic Church website, for this post, I'm going to pay closer attention to the text and the mission that the Epic Church writes about in their website. One of the first things we can deduce from the mission and the text is who is the church's target audience (ie. People already Christians, New Believers, Non-Christians, Families, Youth, Inter-generational). In the case of the Epic Church, the design and text of the website shows that their target audience might be youth, new believers, and minorities. In terms of the youth, this can be seen because of the abundance of representation of younger people:

For new believers we have evidence such as the following:

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.

Lastly, in terms of minorities, we have the many images of youth I posted above that show minority groups active within the faith, and under this I will post more pictures:

Now that we have thought about the target audience of the website, we can begin to understand the main goal of the website. I believe that the website is trying to bring out 3 important aspects of their faith:

• Experiencing aspects of the church programs/life
• Building relationships with leaders
• Building relationships with members

The first I mention due to the visual aspect of the website, the video playing behind constantly in both the home and about pages. This video shows aspects of the community such as music, coffee talks, community, showing then a couple of aspects of the church life in the Epic Church:

These videos are, then, there to represent aspects of what life is with the Epic Church.

Then, there is also building relationships with leaders, as seen by how the biographies are written for each location pastor and the openness to have people contact them personally through email:

Lastly, I would say that the website showcases building relationships with other members. The best example of this would be the life groups and the 'shopping' list for life groups that include many community groups for different things and hobbies:

And also, the visual aspects of the videos showing a lot of community bonding and outreach.

The religious focus of the website seems centered around their religious philosophy and explaining that to the audience. It seems to be a lot about the services, dedicating a whole page to free recordings of these services, but also seems to be a little centered in outreach, such as the life groups, and the community outreach and eteams section:

In conclusion, based on the mission and belief statements found in the website:

I feel comfortable saying that there is a strong correlation between the mission of the Epic Church and what their website displays. Last week, I spoke of how they include more visuals than text and that could be a way to appeal to the youth and also just to call attention to the aspects of what their religious identity is instead of what they say their religious identity is. I think looking at the mission statement and beliefs and also looking at the 'about' section of the website, its simplicity, and short text, comes back to this very design choice I was speaking of last week. I think it is very clear both through the little text, and the visuals that the Epic Church is focused on community and shared experience.