"The Internet is like a modern church," according to renowned Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei.
He was speaking after being inundated with offers of Lego bricks to create his latest work of art in Australia – he'd used social media to reveal Lego's refusal to fill his bulk order. The piece is expected to depict prisoners of conscience and political activists and the company said that its policy was to refrain from "actively engaging in or endorsing the use of Lego bricks in projects or contexts of a political agenda". Ai branded this "censorship and discrimination".
So why is the Internet like a church? "You go and complain to a priest and everybody in the community can share your problems," the artist said.
I have no idea what Ai Weiwei's religious views are (though I did find one of his tweets saying, "One of the reasons religions are widely accepted is spiritual laziness and its resulting fear.") But I think he was speaking more truly than he knew.
Yes, the Internet – and social media in particular – is like a church. It can create a sense of community. We have Facebook 'friends'. We share things with people. Forums like Mumsnet let people look for solutions to problems together and assure them that they aren't the only ones facing tough times. The Internet is great for sharing information.
Perhaps most of all, it connects us: you might be at your desk or on the sofa with a laptop, but you're plugged in to the world. And the Internet really can change things. Social media can drive politicians to do things they'd never have bothered with before. For all the limitations of 'clicktivism' – and yes, it can be an effortless, self-indulgent way of virtue-signalling rather than a genuine and costly commitment to a cause – sometimes it makes a difference.
All these things are true of the Church. Aside from the vertical relationship between us and God, the horizontal relationship is made up of all these things. We connect, we share, we inform, we act. And that's great.
The problem is that the Internet has its dark side too. There's a dark web accessed through special browsers like Tor that lets users into sites specialising in crime and depravity.
Social media is used to pull people down as well as build them up. For every heart-wrenchingly good cause that elicits thousands of pounds worth of donations out of nowhere, there are hundreds of people being trolled and bullied into depression or suicide.
The Internet exposes wrongdoing and keeps people honest. It's also prurient, intrusive, vicious and hateful.
I like it that Ai Weiwei said something nice about Church. But I'm an insider. I know how great the Church can be, but we don't do ourselves any favours if we deny that the dark side exists, too.
Church can be a place of joy, healing, acceptance and grace. That's what it's like when people are prayerful, humble and keep their eyes fixed on Christ. It's usually like that; let's not give any traction to those who want to pull it down and say it's full of hypocrites. Most Christians are genuinely trying to be better than they are; if that means that they sometimes say one thing and do another, well: that's human nature.
But we shouldn't be afraid to acknowledge that Church can also damage people because wrongdoing isn't faced up to and dealt with, or because people in power use it to dominate and control people weaker than they are. Like the Internet, it has a dark side.
A few years ago I visited an Anglican retreat house which had a communion table in its chapel. Nothing odd there, but I was struck by a detail set into the wood. In an echo of Genesis 3, the carpenter had depicted, climbing up one of the legs, the figure of a snake.
Even at the Lord's table, the place that symbolises and enacts our union as a Church, evil is near. As God said to Cain, "If you do not do what is right, sin is crouching at your door; it desires to have you, but you must master it" (Genesis 4:7).
Yes: the Internet is like a church.
Follow @RevMarkWoods on Twitter.
