Tag Archive - open source

Becoming a Heretic on Church Ministry: Church Leadership

November 6, 2008 in Ministry-Theology with 3 Comments

The Context
This is Part 2 in the continued series, Becoming a Heretic on Church Ministry.

Last week we looked at Becoming a Heretic on Church Ministry: The Sermon.

When we think about what a heretic on/in Church ministry is, I am taking a cue from Seth Godin’s book Tribes: We Need You To Lead Us. See my review for Leadership Network here.

Godin says:

Challenging the status quo requires a committment, both public and private. It involves reaching out to others and putting yourideas on the line. (Or pinning your Ninety-five Theses to the church door). (pp. 49)

and later in the book, Godin says:

Religion and faith are often confused. Someone who opposes faith is called an atheist and widely reviled. But we don’t have a common word for someone who opposes a particular religion.

Heretic will have to do.

If faith is the foundation of a belief system, then religion is the facade and the landscaping. It’s easy to get caught up in the foibles of a corporate culture and the systems that have been built over time, but they have nothing at all to do with the faith that built the system in the first place.

Change is made by people, by leaders who are proud to be called heretics because their faith is never in question. (pp. 84)

Church Leadership
One of the areas that I want to look at is “church leadership” which is such a broad topic and can literally mean anything. As we look at this topic, I want us to remember…I want to remember…that this is really an exploration on looking differently at some areas in Church that we have often taken for granted, or have always performed the function the same way. And I’m wondering, and believing, that we need to re-think, re-imagine some new ways to do things. As we look at this list you will see some of the strong influence I have received from the world of technology and social media, and how the tools they provide are setting the agenda for a new way of leadership…actually, I think it takes us back to a more Biblical form of leadership (minus the internet). So here are just 5 areas that I have been thinking about…that I think need tinkering, re-imagining, etc. What do you think? I would like to hear your thoughts on these ideas that seem heretical in some circles…but may be common sense to you.

How?

  • Participatory: Church leadership canvtake cues from the world of technology and social media and understand the need and desire for participation.  The reason that Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Yahoo Answers, blogs, etc. are so popular is that it offers individuals the ability to participate.  Not only can they participate in regards to their own content, but they have an opportunity to participate in the larger content…larger narrative of what is happening around them.  They participate in the content they manufacture online, and they participate in causes, both global and local that have their source in origin in the content of others. I think most churches would love for everyone to participate. In fact, they hope they do.  It’s just that church leadership doesn’t structure itself in such a way that communicates or makes it possible for everyone to participate.  Participation is not about a few people telling others how to participate…participation is about opening up the avenues that allow others to participate more fully with the gifts, desires and skills that God has blessed them with.Does your chuch leadership structure itself in such a way that it communicates to the whole church that participation by everyone is important?  How?

    • Continue Reading…

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.

Kindle and the Continued Emergence of Online Collaboration

January 9, 2008 in Uncategorized with 1 Comment

In the previous post, What Buying, Collecting and Amassing Large Libraries of Books May Say About Us, I reflected a little on Amazon’s new wireless reading device, Kindle. A couple of the questions that I raised were:

  • Will a movement towards electronic reading promote more collaborative writing efforts? How will this effect new theological thinking and publication? And what will this do in terms of authorship and ownership?
  • What will be the future of publishing as we know it now?

Concerning these questions, I was most intrigued by this following passage in the article:

In a connected book, the rabbit hole is no longer a one-way transmission from author to reader. For better or for worse, there’s company coming.

Talk to people who have thought about the future of books and there’s a phrase you hear again and again. Readers will read in public. Writers will write in public. Readers, of course, are already enjoying a more prominent role in the literary community, taking star turns in blogs, online forums and Amazon reviews. This will only increase in the era of connected reading devices. “Book clubs could meet inside of a book,” says Bob Stein, a pioneer of digital media who now heads the Institute for the Future of the Book, a foundation-funded organization based in his Brooklyn, N.Y., town house. Eventually, the idea goes, the community becomes part of the process itself.

Stein sees larger implications for authors—some of them sobering for traditionalists. “Here’s what I don’t know,” he says. “What happens to the idea of a writer going off to a quiet place, ingesting information and synthesizing that into 300 pages of content that’s uniquely his?” His implication is that that intricate process may go the way of the leather bookmark, as the notion of author as authoritarian figure gives way to a Web 2.0 wisdom-of-the-crowds process. “The idea of authorship will change and become more of a process than a product,” says Ben Vershbow, associate director of the institute.

This is already happening on the Web. Instead of retreating to a cork-lined room to do their work, authors like Chris Anderson, John Battelle (“The Search”) and NYU professor Mitchell Stephens (a book about religious belief, in progress) have written their books with the benefit of feedback and contributions from a community centered on their blogs.

“The possibility of interaction will redefine authorship,” says Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, an association of libraries and institutions. Unlike some writing-in-public advocates, he doesn’t spare the novelists. “Michael Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium,” he says. Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead of being the sole authority, is a “superuser,” the lead wolf of a creative pack. (Though it’s hard to believe that lone storytellers won’t always be toiling away in some Starbucks with the Wi-Fi turned off, emerging afterward with a narrative masterpiece.)

Fascinating stuff…..

I have been blogging for about four and half years and during that time I have had the opportunity to collaborate more online with others than was previously possible. Now I’m only a click away from collaborating on articles and some book ideas with those around me, and with Facebook, blogs, wikis and more the possibilities are endless.

I still enjoy going away alone to a quiet place or sitting in a coffee shop as I write, but the possibilities of collaborating with others (reading, writing, commenting, bookmarking) through some wireless reading device such as Kindle is so exciting.

This is an area that I have just recently begun to seriously think about, so I’m going to point you in the direction of some others who have been doing this already, and who have some more astute thoughts on some of these issues than I.

Check out Open Source Theology which is a site that encourages a collaborative effort in the development of an emerging theology for the emerging church. Not to be confused with emergent village.

Read Neal Locke’s Challenge to Emergent Authors

As for me. I’m currently exploring a collaborative writing project with four others through the use of a wiki. If anyone has any wikis they love using, let me know.