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A while back, Andrew Jones noted the significance of the DailyKos. For the last week or so, I have compared the political/social/religious change strategy of Jesus, in his context, with dailykos founder Marcos Zuniga’s strategy in Taking on the System. My hope is to create a hybrid of the two — to see what Jesus-like social engagement might look like in 2008. In this 3rd installment of Jesus and Kos (part 1, part 2), I look at mobilization strategy.

Zuniga discusses the need to take charge and create a group of followers who exist outside the media and political establishment. He exhorts activists to raise up an army of volunteers who, although newbies at first, become experts as they participate in change. He encourages activists to go ahead without authorization — to not wait for the experts (the gatekeepers). These political change movements create alternative sources of information that come from the margins — the unauthorized. These bloggers do not possess the sanctioned qualifications to write or speak — they lack degrees or the right kind of experience. The expert gatekeepers get very upset about these boundaries breaking down, because the experts’ great influence depends on limiting those who are considered to be credible. Zuniga encourages activists to ignore them. Respect comes to those who create great content, not to those who have all the extra letters after their name. Finally, in this Chapter 2 — he writes that collaboration is key – networking with those who share similar passions.

Jesus created a movement outside the halls of power in Jerusalem. He was not a rabbi or official leader or any kind — he probably was a carpenter. He asked people to follow him, to join him in the movement. He did not wait to get approval; he created an alternative movement, unsanctioned by political/religious authorities. The gatekeepers became very frustrated by Jesus bypassing them — if people could be forgiven on the periphery, who needed the temple? To his hearers, Jesus taught as one with authority and not like the other religious leaders. It didn’t matter that he didn’t have the proper schooling — his message of the kingdom of God captivated his hearers. Like John the Baptists’ movement (a related network?), Jesus’ activities in Palestine engaged the populace and ignited a movement of political, religious, and social change.

How do we mashup these two mobilization strategies? Here goes: 21st century Jesus-followers must consider participating in a network of bloggers who exist outside the typical church, media, and political structures. These unauthorized writers, who have no seminary, media, or political credentials, create great content about God’s dream for people (the kingdom), both inside and outside the church. The message and the movement of these bloggers may frighten the gatekeepers, because gatekeepers form their identity around the idea that they,  and not these upstart bloggers, speak for God.

Although these new forms of community may not resemble anything like a congregation, is it possible we may be seeing a new form of religious structure emerging?

From Harvard Business this month, Vineet Nayar wrote that it is time to invert the management pyramid. In this article he cites how management was developed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, establishing command and control structures within organizations. Over the last century, cultural change drove new ways to innovate in organizations, most frequently through collaboration and teamwork. However, organizations still kept the classic management structures, which worked against innovative processes.

In our churches, similar changes have occurred. We’ve inherited management structures that were introduced to our tradition fifty or more years ago. In our day-to-day lives together as a church community, we assume a command/control structure is the way to get things done. However, the culture has moved on — one person cannot, within their person, have all the tools to direct an organization in an informed and intelligent manner. Likewise, our churches falter when it is the pastor who is assumed to do most of the ministry and leading. It does not need to be this way. Within most church traditions, appeals can be made to move towards a collective priesthood, one where a variety of gifts might lead and inspire the community at different levels. The pastor must shift his/her role towards one that creates space for the people to take center stage.

Nayar asks the hard questions, ones we must pose to the churches: “Do we have the humility to step out of our egos and hand over the mike to our subordinates? Do we possess the courage to unstructure an existing, rigid regime that we have known to work in the past?” Do churches possess the humility and courage Nayar talks about? I think many of our churches do, and now is the time to change.

For more thoughts on this topic, check out this post over at Subversive Influence…

In this part 2 of a mashup involving a read of Taking on the System by Markos Zuniga and the life of Jesus, we look at how to interact with gatekeepers. For Zuniga, social change process focuses on changing the conventional wisdom of a particular culture. If you shift conventional wisdom, then change will occur. From part 1, we saw that gatekeepers are those in the media and politics to whom we need to get approval in order to have a voice, to influence the conventional wisdom. Without approval of the gatekeeper, it is normally thought, social change cannot occur.

Who were the gatekeepers in Jesus time? It was those in religious/political leadership in Jerusalem. They guarded access to the temple, and they were able to declare who were legitimate members of the people of God and who were not. Jesus spent time with those who were considered outcasts, rebels, and sinners. These were those who were excluded from the promises of God.

So, what are our options regarding the gatekeepers today? Kos says we can bypass them, crush them, or influence them. Bypassers are those who self-publish their work, either in print media, music, or film. These artists let the media giants know they can do it without them. This scares the media gatekeepers and in many instances they quickly change their tune. Crushers are those that create an alternative to the media source and thus destroy the gatekeeper’s popularity or significance. Influencers are those who threaten the media outlet with irrelevancy. The media outlet must change or lose its market share. These three approaches in engaging the gatekeeper are similar and overlap a bit — they vary in the directness of their approach. What they share is pushing at the media gatekeeper’s fear of becoming redundant.

In a similar way, Jesus utilized these approaches in Palestine. He bypassed the gatekeepers — there were those who were sanctioned to offer forgiveness, to say who was “in” and who was “out”. By granting forgiveness to the outcasts on the periphery of society, who lived outside the religious establishment, Jesus rendered the temple irrelevant. By redrawing these social boundaries, political control passed from the religious establishment to Jesus. Jesus also crushed the gatekeepers — he turned over the tables in the temple as a direct action against the gatekeepers. He exposed, to all who were there, what the temple had become. He offered, in his person, another way. He also influenced the gatekeepers, like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea. For the most part, however, when we look at the social/political/religious movement of Jesus, the gatekeepers were bypassed. Jesus created a community that no longer required the blessing of those who held religious and political power.

To perform the mashup we must add another element to the puzzle. In Jesus’ day, religion and politics were one. The political leaders were the religious leaders and vice-versa. Today, they are separate. In order to envision what missional engagement for communities connected through social media might look like, we must engage the religious gatekeepers as well. With that in mind, here is a try at a mashup:

Jesus-following bloggers must change the conventional wisdom of the church and the media through creating an alternative message to the status quo of church and culture. As they connect online, they facilitate conversations that threaten to bypass the gatekeepers of traditional church structures. They also create their own media, i.e. writings, music, video, thereby threatening to bypass the media conglomerates as well. In addition, they push the culture to reconsider the practices that do not mesh with the dreams of God for humanity (what Jesus called the kingdom of God) – e.g the activities in society that disenfranchise people. In the end, these bloggers do not have the power on their own to be the “church”, to be the source of all their own media, or to create acts of justice. However, they can push both the church and the culture to listen to what they have to say and move the conversation and practices into more inclusive, just, participatory, and egalitarian directions. In turn, this will transform the conventional wisdom on what it means to follow Jesus.

More to come…

I just received my copy of Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin. Godin is a best-selling author of The Dip and his blog is hugely popular. In this review of Tribes, I want to listen and pose questions to Godin — as if the entire book is an answer to the question — how might we become a better church?

At 150 pages and a 4″x6″ footprint, the book is brief. The internal construction of the book matches the externals: Tribes is not organized by chapters. Instead, Godin’s thought flows from topic to topic through subtitles. Within the subtitles are nuggets of wisdom embedded in stories of tribes.

The format of my review will be as follows: I will put forth a quote or idea by Godin, and then I will reflect on the church in light of his insights.

For Godin, “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.” As I think about the church, my take-away is this: Christ-following tribes are connected to each other through the work of the Holy Spirit with the shared understanding that we are to continue Jesus’ work in the world.

“A group only needs two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.” As Christians, we go back to the elemental understanding that where two or three are gathered, Christ is in there with them. Our shared passion is Christ, and we speak of this love to one another. Size is not the issue here.

“Tribes need leadership, sometimes one person leads, sometime more.” Some churches prevent gifted leaders from leading because of their gender, age, lack of experience, or proper credentials. “You can’t have a tribe without a leader, and you can’t be a leader without a tribe”.  Christian communities are most alive when those who are gifted at leading do the actual leading — and it is often different leaders for different tasks.

Just as in the Grateful Dead community, people love to belong in tribes. It gives them a deep sense of connection. Christian communities that create deep encounters establish deep connections that last a lifetime. Ever since our church youth group spent a week with the homeless in LA they have functioned as a tight-knit family.

Godin notes that before the Internet, tribes were local. Now, tribes transcend those boundaries. The same is true for churches. Over the next generation, churches will need to make the transition to church beyond the local. Our churches will share commitments on ways to embody Christ in the world, but not necessarily the same geography. So, a church community might be a tribe that spans the globe, but physically gets together rarely. Instead of the pew as the meeting place, or even the cafe, it might be facebook or ning. The software platform might be the primary space where encounter occurs. To move beyond the local will be one of the major challenges for the church to engage in the next fifteen years.

In the same way that the church might be twelve people spanning the globe, it may also be a fairly large-scale phenomenon as well. Big or small, each type of community will have its own unique challenges.

Godin describes tribes that are stuck — they discourage innovation and foster conformity. Many churches fall into this category. Tribes foster group participation at a high level. Everyone wants to share and give something to the group effort. To be alive, church leadership needs to shift so that this kind of participation might occur.

Tribes are no longer squishy — there are many tools that connect communities in a tight way — Twitter is one example. However, Godin is clear to point out that these changes are not about the Internet. Blogs, wikis, and youtube are just tools that have reduced the barriers to connect and organize groups. Rather than being about tools, tribes are about people and their connections.

Godin talks about leading, not pushing. A community might start simply by sharing one’s passion online (e.g. for wine). A community might begin to follow. The same may be true for new churches. A church might begin on a blog, or an existing church might be renewed there.

Tribe leaders may also work within institutional boundaries. You might have an internal tribe within a church — a group highly influenced by a person or persons with particular insights about how things ought to run. It may be few track with this person, or if the church community is large, it could be in the thousands.

Godin’s plea? Everyone needs to lead. We need you to lead, he writes. I resonate with his idea — the barriers must come down for everyone to share their gifts with everyone else. Churches create barriers for participation — these people can do this, and those people can do that. It is no wonder that our members must go elsewhere for deep participation and passionate involvement in community. We need to take down the barriers and let everyone give what they have received from God to the others in the community. If not, people will go elsewhere — if they do not officially leave the church, they will remain as an empty shell, relocating their gifts where they will be received.

Wow — that was only the first eight pages of the book — I’ll keep going in another post to follow.

Perhaps the question I receive most from church leaders is how to connect the insights of emerging churches to the challenges facing denominational churches. Most of the US stories in our book Emerging Churches deal with new church plants and so existing denominational leaders desire examples closer to their own tradition. When we had the opportunity to host an issue of Fuller Seminary’s theological journal, Theology News and Notes, we decided to address that very question. We titled the issue “Emerging Churches within Denominational Structures,” and we focused primarily on US churches. Spanning nine articles and twenty-seven pages, the current issue features nine leaders who create alternative expressions of faith within traditional church structures. These change agents embody transformation while working within their particular faith tradition. Here are the titles of the articles:

Eddie Gibbs and I wrote The Morphing of the Church;
Walt Kallestad, Lutheran pastor, Community Church of Joy, wrote Redefining Success, Moving from Entertainment to Worship;
Ryan Bell, pastor, Hollywood Seventh Day Adventist, wrote From the Margins: Engaging Missional LIfe in the Seventh-Day-Adventist Church;
Nadia Bolz-Weber, mission developer of a Lutheran church plant in Denver, “House for all Sinners and Saints”, wrote Confessions of a Sarcastic Lutheran;
Troy Bronsink, PCUSA pastor and community organizer in inner-city Atlanta, wrote Of Dying Breeds and Swelling Hopes: A Mainline Emergent in the Reformed Tradition;
Eugene Cho, pastor of Quest, Seattle, wrote Quest and Its Relationship with the Evangelical Covenant Church;
Phil Jackson, pastor of The House in Chicago, wrote A Reciprocal Connection: The Surprising Convergence of Hip-Hop and the ECC;
David Fitch, pastor of “Life on the Vine”, in outlying Chicago, wrote On Being an Emerging Christian in the Christian and Missionary Alliance;
Liz Rios, founder for Center for Emerging Female Leaership, and Luis Alvarez, pastor in the AG, wrote Will a New Church Emerge? Las Raices in the Assemblies of God.

You can read all the articles online. Or you could email Fuller and they would happy to send you a snail mail version free. We believe these articles demonstrate that great creativity and vitality are possible (but not inevitable) within enduring traditions.

Bill Kinnon, at Achieveable Ends, wrote a post that captivated the blogosphere. In it, he plays off of Jay Rosen’s The People Formerly Known as the Audience. Titled The People Formerly Known as the Congregation, Bill rants against leadership that leads by 3-point sermons, raises money for building programs, and solicits volunteers to run the various ministries. But more than that, Bill rants against what it means to be a member in a congregation today — he feels ‘used’ and writes that he is no longer going to be a passive recipient of all things church. The tone is ‘don’t do it to me, but partner with me, treat me like an adult — a co-producer of church.’

Bill sparked a number of follow up posts that piggy-backed on his idea, written from the perspective of pastors and others who agree that the system is not really working. Of course, a passive congregation is not particularly the pastor’s fault, the congregants’ fault, or even the seminaries’ fault. Our entire church system is built around a Christendom model of church where we pay a special class of people to do ministry to and for everyone else.

Over the past ten years or so, the missional church conversation centered around the idea of equipping entire congregations to serve as missionaries to their surrounding cultures. They work with churches who embody this Christendom passivity. They look to help them re-imagine what it means to be the people of God.

I believe Bill taps into another dynamic not addressed by the missional church conversation. Bill speaks for those who already left. They couldn’t tolerate being treated as children and opted out. Now located outside “church”, these active (as opposed to passive) Christians create alternative ways to worship God, encourage one another, and witness to their faith.

Bill’s inspired rant describes the depths to which we need to re-think congregational life in a post-Christendom, postmodern context.

Technorati Tags: church, Jay Rosen, Leadership, missional church, Bill Kinnon, seminary

Last November I was asked the question, what would it take to move an evangelical seminary in the direction of missional church thinking and practice? Writing with my friend Mark Lau Branson, we offered some first thoughts towards an answer. This paper was one of five distributed at the Allelon Missional Schools Project in Dallas, serving the discussions as a conversation starter.

Technorati Tags: Allelon, Mark Lau Branson, missional church, seminary

In February, I participated in the launch of the Allelon Missional Seminary Project, a three-day conversation on transitioning seminaries to a missional paradigm. Twenty-four seminaries participated by sending a team of five people respectively. During the three days, Alan Roxburgh, Pat Keifert, and Craig Van Gelder (among others) invited us to re-imagine our seminaries for life after Christendom. Time was spent in large group lectures, small focus groups, and in-house seminary discussions.

It was quite an ambitious agenda, given the differing starting points of the seminaries. Some seminaries were over two hundred years old, a few were less than five years old. Some were very well versed in the missional conversation over the last ten years, and some didn’t understand the missional conversation at all. There were a fairly diverse set of schools included in the conversation including liberal, evangelical, conservative, Catholic, and Anabaptist traditions.

Five writers were tapped to present discussion papers to get the conversation going. Each of the writers were to write from their particular tradition: one Nazarene, one Evangelical, one Mainline, and one Mennonite. I co-wrote the evangelical paper, and I will share that on the blog tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: Allelon, Leadership, missional church

From Edu-Blogged news and specifically Will Richardson, I read how teaching is changing because of the web. Rather than the teacher serving as the authoritative voice and primary source of class content, students look to the web for resources. In response, teachers may either ignore this reality, fight against it, or serve as a “guide on the side”. Even further, teachers may encourage and facilitate the web’s use. In this case, teachers serve as connectors rather than content providers. They bring their students to the information that the teacher finds most helpful and they provide contexts for working through the material. As I am fairly new to the teaching scene, these thoughts are quite sobering. I get strokes when I get to be the ’sage on the stage’. Moving to the side changes the way I think about teaching completely.

As I think about churches, I realize the web will or ought to change the way we do church and leadership. Rather than the pastor or leaders serving as the one source or even the primary source of information for the community, church members will be looking to the Internet for resources regarding their faith. Leadership as the single funnel or portal of information will cease to be workable. Leaders will have two options — to control the information, which will become increasingly difficult, or again, like the new type of teacher, to serve as a connector rather than a content provider. Leaders will come alongside to help gather, interpret, start conversations, and build the community around helpful content.

I believe if we work with this cultural change rather than fight against it, we will see wonderful life come to our faith communities. I’ve heard some leaders respond, when I ask them who the leader of their community is, ‘hopefully the Holy Spirit”. I believe this shift creates an opportunity for a move in this direction, i.e. to an egalitarian spirit-led community. Although it may feel like a chastened role for the leader, I do believe “leader as connector” creates a space for the Holy Spirit to serve as the primary leader of our communities.

Technorati Tags: Leadership, teaching, technology

Steve Collins, ever the creative thinker for new forms of church, muses about the web and its impact on documents. He speaks of the control that authors once had on their text, a control that the web obliterated as readers break up, interpret, and parse the document in any way that is suitable to their uses. Steve then turns his sights to the church and ponders what might happen if the web impacts the church as much as it has cultures.

What might the church learn from the web? Any modern church leader is trained to maintain control over the whole process of what we know as church, manifesting most specifically in the maintenance of order. Our church authors/producers/leaders are not prepared to release the text/church service/way of life to the readers/consumers/members. None of their training has prepared them for this uncontrolled way of living in community. So much of church training assumes the leader will face a passive audience that will receive their ‘text’ in its entirety. We are not trained to participate in church as an ongoing dynamic conversation of equals. I know this, because I train these same leaders.

What would it mean for leaders to let go of control, to realize that it is pointless to try and contain the life of faith, just as pointless as it would be to attempt to control the web? What would happen if our authority to act as leaders came from the many unsolicited links one receives rather than the title one bears? What would happen if our members can post 24-7 and are not required to sign in through a single portal, i.e. not seek permission for ministry but are trusted as friends and colleagues to create meaningful God inspired activities?

I’m just posing a few questions, to which I do not have good answers. Stepping back a bit, it has been an elusive task of the church to see the priesthood of believers realized. If we want to imagine what that an egalitarian, spirit-led community might look like, we need look no further than the liberating freedom that many experience within the web community.

Technorati Tags: Emerging_Church, Steve_Collins, technology