When theologians, who care about church, spirituality, and theology, conduct empirical, ecclesiological studies, our underlying normative values impact the entire research process and results in unhelpful or helpful ways. In this article I propose that attending to precisely reflexivity might change our initial, naïve normativity from an implicit to an explicit normativity. I suggest that if these normative values are brought to the table, and self-critically and honestly reflected on, the initially naïve normativity can prove to be an interpretive key in unlocking the data, thus helping us understand the phenomenon under investigation in a more nuanced way. When making this claim, I mainly draw on my own empirical study on clergy spirituality in the Church of Norway (CofN), but also bring in the work of other scholars, and in particular Mary McClintock Fulkerson’s ethnographic work and “theology in four voices” proposed by the arcs team.

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This paper adds to the growing body of literature on digitally mediated preaching by using actor–network theory (ANT) in conjunction with Amanda Lagerkvist’s work on digital media as theoretical lenses to describe and discuss what we term “the paradox of (im)perfection”. This paradox refers to the tension between an ideal of perfection and an ideal of imperfection (or vulnerability) as experienced by church practitioners who were “thrown” online abruptly and unexpectedly due to the pandemic. In our analysis we show how human and non-human actors interact (and act on each other) in ways that assemble their networks towards a mode of visibility and perfection, or towards a mode of authenticity, intimacy, and imperfection. In the former mode, preachers and church practitioners find themselves competing in “a mimetic visibility contest” that is characterized by an ontology of numbers (likes, follower counts, retweets, etc.) and a subsequent ethos of quantification. In the latter mode, an ethos of care affords the opportunity for spiritual intimacy, even among “anonymous” online individuals. Drawing on Deanna A. Thompson’s and Amanda Lagerkvist’s work, we argue that the latter mode enacts “a cruciform media ethics” in which the embodied worshiping community interacting online can be understood as “the virtual body of the suffering Christ”. Here, digital media is enacting as “caring media” rather than “metric media”. While the paper introduces message-oriented, media-oriented, and ontology-oriented approaches as helpful for the study of digitally mediated preaching, it ultimately argues for the superior virtues of ANT as a non-dichotomous approach—overcoming both the message/media and the virtual/real divides which are often inherent to other approaches.