What will it mean to belong in the future church—and who gets to decide?
This session explores how emerging forms of ecclesial life are reshaping the meanings and practices of belonging. Drawing on empirical and ethnographic research, these papers examine how belonging is being reshaped across migration, digital mediation, and ecumenical practice, inviting us to rethink belonging as fluid, contested, and newly configured for the future church. This conversation will open new possibilities and raise urgent questions about identity, authority, and community.
What becomes of ecclesial belonging when the immigrant congregation that formed you can no longer hold you? Drawing on a hermeneutic phenomenological study of eight Indonesian American emerging adults raised in two Southern California evangelical congregations, this paper argues that departure from the immigrant church is not the failure of an ecclesial imaginary but its reconfiguration. The study surfaces several collective themes spanning the affirmative (resourcing, closeness, formation) and the critical (otherness, differences, schisms), revealing how participants carry the formational imprint of their ethnic faith communities into new contexts—from pan-Asian fellowships to “exvangelical” disaffiliation. Deploying a kinopolitical notion of imagined communities for non-linear faith identity development (Anderson [1983] 2016; Gin 2009; Nail 2015), the paper positions these departures as ecclesial flows rather than mere congregational losses—to reimagine belonging as circulation rather than enclosure—and hears in them echoes of Deus Migrator (Phan 2016), the God who travels with the (ecclesial) migrant.
“Ecumenical shared ministries” (ESMs) result from two or more congregations merging resources and worshipping together while retaining distinct denominational affiliations (Beardsall et al. 2018). In 2025, I conducted a qualitative study of two ESMs in neighbouring rural communities. Adapting Sarah Dunlop’s method of “narrated photography,” I collected photos of each ESM’s worship space (Dunlop 2024). I then conducted semi-structured interviews to explore how congregants engage in receptive ecumenism to discover “what each tradition might…fruitfully have to learn from the other” (Murray 2008).
My qualitative data suggests that the messy work of receptive ecumenism happens for ESMs through real-time encounters between differently ritualized bodies in a shared worship space. One ESM models receptive ecumenism by bringing differently ritualized bodies into the same space for a shared liturgy. The other ESM rarely engages in receptive ecumenism because differently ritualized bodies take turns using the same space instead of worshipping together in it.
This paper explores the emergence of AI-generated Christian influencer characters circulating on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube. In a viral TikTok video with over 30 million views, an AI-generated Moses recounts the Exodus narrative in the style of a POV influencer vlog. Accounts such as holyvlogsz, followed by 450,000 users, portray biblical figures—Daniel narrating the lion’s den or Mary announcing her pregnancy—as social media personalities addressing contemporary audiences. Through content analysis of these viral videos, the paper interprets the phenomenon through the lens of mediatization theory, which examines how media logics increasingly structure religious communication. The paper also analyzes the racialized aesthetics of AI-generated biblical figures, showing how visual conventions derived from Western Christian imagery and global platform culture shape representations of sacred characters and influence emerging forms of digitally mediated religious authority. The paper investigates the merging of histories and futures in the AI Christian influencer.