Tag Archive - Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

June 16, 2009 in Ministry-Theology, Technology-Social Media with 1 Comment

Great TED video interview with Clay Shirky at the TED@State event. Clay has been super influential in my thinking, especially after I read his book Here Comes Everybody last year. I highly, highly recommend this book. It is a must read for anyone in a leadership position. I wish more church leaders would read it. What he says is what is happening in leadership and organizations all over the world.

Check out the video.

I have been reflecting on his writings for a long time, and I have been especially interested in two specific topics he talks about in the book. Architecture of participation and communities of practice. I have more thoughts on a theology of these for the Church (but that’s for another post).

I wrote Clay an email last year to tell him about his influence on my thinking, and he promptly responded with a nice email in return.

When asked about what has had the biggest impact with what is going on right now in Iran–blog, Facebook, Twitter)–this was Clay’s response:

It’s Twitter. One thing that Evan (Williams) and Biz (Stone) did absolutely right is that they made Twitter so simple and so open that it’s easier to integrate and harder to control than any other tool. At the time, I’m sure it wasn’t conceived as anything other than a smart engineering choice. But it’s had global consequences. Twitter is shareable and open and participatory in a way that Facebook’s model prevents. So far, despite a massive effort, the authorities have found no way to shut it down, and now there are literally thousands of people around the world who’ve made it their business to help keep it open.

Changing & Developing Our Thinking in an Online Community

July 9, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 2 Comments

Scot McKnight has a great post, A Little Exercise for Young Theologians, which is a take on the classic book of the same name by Helmut Thielicke.

The premise of the post:

Bloggers pastors or students or theologians, especially young ones, need to listen to the wisdom of this little word by Thielicke. Why? Let me begin with this: what you say on your blog is international, permanent, and universally accessible. It’s not that I think you need to hide your ideas; it is that some of your ideas are not wise to be aired in public. Keep them to your closer friends and give them time to dig roots. Some of them you may toss into the bucket before too long.

Recognize that you will change: I’m asking our pastor readers today to weigh in on this one. Here it is: Did you change your mind on something that, when you were a young pastor, you thought was absolutely important? What was that? Had I been blogging 25 years ago, I would have been harsh on the grace emphasis of a writer like Yancey.

Have you changed your mind on anything absolutely important? What was it?

For me personally, there is not one specific thing, but my theology has constantly been in a state of development over time. Some believe that we should have it at a fixed place, but I think as we grow, mature, gain wisdom our theology changes as we come to understand and know God in new ways.

When it comes to blogging, where have you made mistakes? What would you do differently?

I think I would be less critical. I have too often written posts critically about thinkers, pastors, I don’t know. And though there is a place for criticism, I really try hard to be more constructive than critical, but often fail at that. Even this last week I wrote a post about another pastor (Driscoll) that really didn’t need to be posted.

So I’m working on being more constructive.

What thoughts do you have on thinking differently, or blogging differently?

I’m convinced, that just like working out our theologies, mistakes and differences has taken place in communities and groups for thousands of years, we will see this same process happen online as well. More people will be privy to it, but it’s part of the “publish, then filter” that Clay Shirky talks about in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Please share with us some of your thoughts.

Practice, Participation and the Art of “Remixing” Church and Community

July 3, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 7 Comments

In class my adviser, Ryan Bolger, often tells a story about a pastor of a mega-church in Arizona. One day the pastor, while walking with his son across the campus of the church he built, said, “Son, this is all going to yours someday,” and his son took a step back and responded, “I don’t want anything to do with this kind of Christianity.” It was then that this pastor realized his church was rooted in a boomer culture phenomenon (and has since gone on to rethink their mission as a church). This “mission-station” approach is rooted in a different time and sensibility than that of our younger generations. Theirs is a do-it-yourself culture: sites like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and open-source community-based software need community cooperation in order to work. These sites represent a rejection of powerful top-down hierarchies where the flow from producer to consumer maintains control, predictability and efficiently. Those influenced by the participatory culture, actively participate in creating where they see need and they do it with or without permission from those in power, they share information and welcome low levels of control, they are highly energetic and creative and they want to be active in shaping their future through a variety of grassroots means. (From the article, Remixing Faith in the 21st Century by Wess Daniels)

Recently I have been thinking a lot on two terms that author/consultant/professor Clay Shirky used in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. He discusses, among many other things:

  1. An “architecture of participation” (coined by Tim O’ Reilly)


  2. Communities of Practice

Both embody what I think are two important necessities for the Church. That we create an environment that allows for and encourages participation among everyone. Not just pastors, directors, paid staff, or those that we often single out as having special gifts. Rather it is a community that everyone brings something to the table. And that we foster a community environment that encourages practice, which allows for mistakes, failures, successes…everything that comes along with practicing.

Churches are often bad at these two things. We don’t allow for failure, and therefore we inhibit a participatory community.

That’s why you rarely see anyone up front during worship on Sundays unless it is the paid staff. That is the way that we minimize mistakes, which therefore limits total participation. It’s a vicious cycle which eventually leads us to being consumers of Church, the community and all that is offered.

I have great hope for the Church as I see many new communities and Churches embracing some of these values of participation and practice, while also moving away from being consumers of the Church and worship. Many are also moving away from top-down hierarchies that maintain command and control. I think these moves are a step in the right direction.

Wess Daniels has got an amazing post over at Barclay Press, Remixing Faith in the 21st Century. I leave you with another great quote from the article. Then go read it for yourself because it is well worth the time.

This past April Radiohead did another thing that sparked imaginations and challenged the preexisting structures of the music industry, yet again. They setup a website and invited people to remix one of their singles, “Nude.” Along with the invitation, they released the audio tracks containing the guitars, strings, drums, bass, and vocals through the iTunes music store. They invited people to participate in a contest to see who would make the best remix of their song, all the votes would be made by Radiohead fans (the winning remix received 38568 votes). By looking at remix culture, I think the church can learn something about how creativity and imagination interacts with existing ideas and structures and builds off those resources while also moving beyond them in new ways.

The Dilemma of the Church: Pursuing it’s Mission or Self Preservation

May 23, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 2 Comments

Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (pp. 29-30)

Running an organization is difficult in and of itself, no matter what its goals. Every transaction it undertakes—every contract, every agreement, every meeting—requires it to expend some limited resource: time, attention, or money. Because of these transaction costs, some sources of value are too costly to take advantage of. As a result, no institution can put all its energies into pursuing its mission; it must expend considerable effort on maintaining discipline and structure simply to keep itself viable. Self-preservation of the institution becomes job number one, while its stated goal is relegated to number two or lower, no matter what the mission statement says. The problems inherent in managing these transaction costs are on of the basic constraints shaping institutions of all kinds.

Thoughts:

  • Churches cast a vision/mission statement. This can often be handled in two ways: 1) They spell it out very specifically for the congregants through steps, action plan, etc. 2) They leave it open, allowing for the creativity of the congregants to carry out the vision/mission as they see fit.


  • Dillema: If the church doesn’t spell it out, and wants the congregants to be creative, the church needs to cut off the “choke point” that is usually created by layers of bureaucracy and hierarchy, giving freedom to the people. Or they need to spell it out, give marching orders, but in the process they cut off people’s creativity and the participation of the congregation.


  • In the end, the church has the choice to be self-preserving by maintaining control, or really pursue its mission/vision by opening up.

Responses to a Commenter

May 23, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 2 Comments

Ryan at Tilling the Soil asked me a couple of good questions related to my post below, so I want to give them proper attention in a post, and not just leave a comment for him.

I had the chance to talk with Ryan by phone last week and I enjoyed our conversation, and I’m looking forward to connecting with him when we move to Dallas this summer.


1. Ryan Says:
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:01 am e

Rhett,
Hey man, I’m really enjoying this series.
I have two concerns:
1) With all of the networking that is going on, is it realistic to ask people to go to another site (your church’s site), even if you are farming out all of the content to facebook, flickr, etc.? In my world if I can’t RSS it, then I probably won’t see it.
2) How do you deal with students who want this before the church authorizes it, and so they create their own facebook groups, mychurch.org pages, etc? (i.e. how do you maintain control in such an environment?)

-ryan

Response to Question 1

Ryan, I don’t think it really is realistic. In fact, I know for certain based on traffic, that our college webpage’s traffic decreased dramatically after our Facebook group was launched, and it has pretty much decreased to no traffic. I think most church’s will have this problem and may not realize it. They design sites that have forums, videos, photos, links, etc., but people aren’t going to leave their networks to do those activities on a church’s website. One, people already have enough committment to a site like Facebook, and to ask them to commit to your church’s website in the same way is unrealistic. Second, church website’s just can’t compete with the social tools out there.

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The Collapse of Traditional Hierarchical Structures (“The Death of the Alpha Leader”)

May 12, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 2 Comments

I have blogged a lot on this site about the collapse of hiearchical structures, especially within the Church, and the rising level of leadership from the bottom. I see this change in structure as a good thing and I saw a couple of good posts over the weekend.

First, Hugh Hewitt has a great piece on his blog that was written by Randy Elrod. Here is just a sample from his post, The Death of the Alpha Leader, but make sure you read the whole thing.

Servant leaders have the ability to provide a new type of leadership. A collaborative mentoring and releasing of people with varied and mystical gifts in order to create culture. Alpha leaders value control, servant leaders value collaboration. Alpha leaders value individualism, servant leaders value community. Alpha leaders value affluence, servant leaders value influence.

After reading his post, what are you initial thoughts? Is this a new concept to you, or are you “on board” for lack of a better term?

Second, Hugh Hewitt links a very fascinating interview in the Wall Street Journal with Clay Shirkey who just authored Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (which I just started reading–it is a great book). The title of the interview is Wisdom on Crowds: What CEO’s Need to Know About the Social Web. Here is the snippet that Hugh links:

Continue Reading…