Church digital applications and the communicative meso-micro interplay: Building religious authority and community through everyday organizing

This chapter addresses a research gap in the mediatization of religion by discussing the interactions between religious organizations and individual followers. It focuses on the communicative interplay between meso and micro religious agents to build authority and community through everyday religious organizing. The chapter describes empirically to the globalization of religion and media research by examining the case of the internationally renowned New Creation Church (NCC) in Singapore; a context of intense mediatization and a highly developed telecommunication infrastructure. It explores how strategic church communication works to premediate church gatherings and shape social networking to accomplish clergy authority and brand resonanc. The chapter highlights how mediatization as a communication-centered concept can be applied to the domain of religion beyond traditional institutional and individual levels of analysis. It discusses the NCC application which can be downloaded for free from the App Store or Google Play, and has real-time capabilities to sign up for events, get seats and carpark availability updates.