Tag Archive - Here Comes Everybody

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.

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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Romans 8 Movement: Harnessing the Self-Organizing Creative Power of Church Community

May 21, 2008 in Uncategorized with 7 Comments

Back on Wednesday, April 23 I wrote a post called This Isn’t Your Parent’s Prayer Chain. The post was about a young woman in our church, Katherine Wolf, who was one of the volunteer leaders in the Young Marrieds ministry, and who went through an unbelievable 13 hour emergency brain surgery at UCLA.

There are a lot of amazing things that are coming out of this story, such as the unwavering faith of family and friends. The huge network of people praying for her and her family. God’s continued grace, presence, support and protection during this very difficult time, etc.

But what has really, really impressed me as well is the way that Katherine Wolf’s circle of friends have self-organized in a powerful way, and created amazing avenues and opportunities for people to be involved.

It’s probably cause I read The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations a few months ago.

And maybe it’s also cause I just finished Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

And last night I was reading through Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

What do they all have in common? Basically, people are organizing themselves in powerful ways that thwart the traditional means of organization through leaders in authoritative, hierarchical positions. No longer do people need to go through an institution to achieve their end goal. Many churches already know this, and still, so many other don’t. Those who recognize the shift will be in positions to harness the unbelievable creative power of a church community. Those who don’t will find themselves struggling to carry out the vision for their church community.

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