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In his book The Great Good Place, written almost twenty years ago, Ray Oldenburg wrote about the great “third place” in our lives — not home, not work, but a third place where we relax and socialize with others– barbershops, coffee houses, parks, etc. A place to have civil discourse with others in our locale — talking and shooting the breeze both with those who think like us but also with those who do not share our perspective on all things. Oldenburg laments that these third places are diminishing in popularity.

At the same time, some have suggested that maybe we should not call for coffee shops to return but perhaps it is churches who ought to re-create this third space – that besides work and home the person ought to be deeply connected to a faith community. The characteristics of the third place:  a source of renewal, banter, serious discussion, all happening within walking distance from the home, ought to characterize the church — not just the secular third place.

No doubt, we must agree with Oldenburg — our participation has diminished in third places. Where are we spending our time? We are not just bowling alone, as some would say. Many are finding a sense of community online. They are spending their free time catching up with their friends and acquaintances on social networking sites, and increasingly that is Facebook. Has Facebook become this third place? Quite possibly, with some major tweaks. Although it is a place of deep connection and identity formation, it is definitely a different kind of space than the barbership or the physical church building.

As danah boyd (intentionally lowercase) has said, “networked publics” differ from physical communities in at least four ways:  persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences. Persistence – people have access to you 24/7. Searchability — people can find you and what you are up to. Replicability – what you write/say/photograph/video can be copied again and again. Invisible Audiences — you have no sense of who is staring at you – who is reading your wall – is it your friend, boss, or grandma?

Clearly, these four aspects of online social networking offer a different understanding of community than Oldenburg — they limit some aspects and augment others. Could it be that we are seeing not a poorer sense of community, just a different kind of community emerging?

Just as some envisioned the church as Oldenburg’s type of community offline, what about envisioning what the church can be through boyd’s categories? Clearly, to dream of Oldenburg’s community in an online environment is nostalgic and misses the mark. How about dreaming about what God might be doing in these four new aspects of ‘networked publics’: cultures of persistence, searchability, replicability, and invisible audiences?

To compare online community to offline community has limited benefit. Online community will always be significantly different than its offline counterparts. But might we see God’s goodness there, might we see practices of forgiveness, service, love of of the other? Of course, redemption is possible in any culture. Better than holding up online community to an arbitrary standard, perhaps we need to spend some time re-imagining what the reign of God might look like in these new virtual cultures.

I created a slide (still rough) that merged the work of David Bosch, Andrew Walls, and Wilbert Shenk into a map of the local theologies in history. We often think of theology as revealing universals that will be true for all people in all cultures for all time, but in reality theology is more about answering local questions that reside in particular contexts at particular times. The church gets into problems when it asserts that one theology is to be imposed on all other churches or cultures, outside of the one local culture where and when that particular theology was created. Reflection about God and creation, through the Bible, and with the church, while immersed in the culture, needs to be done for every context and time…

I had the opportunity to meet with a delightful group of Fuller grads from the early 1990s. About fifteen in number, these men and women serve as PCUSA pastors and once each year they get back together. I was invited to come and chat with them about my research interests. We had a great back and forth and the two hours went by really quickly — lots of laughter throughout. I spoke on the nine patterns of emerging churches. We talked about how the emerging practices are flowing into the denominational systems as a renewal movement. We talked a bit about the move of the church into new forms of social media. A rich time…

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’ve recently been reading Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era,  and I’ve been impressed by Zuniga’s astute observations regarding political change and how it occurs. Zuniga (or Kos, an abbreviated form of his first name,  Markos) is the founder of the very influential political blog, DailyKos. Writing from the liberal perspective, his book would help anyone who seeks political change, regardless if they identify with his politics.

As I’ve written previously here and here, the primary task of my classes at Fuller Seminary is to help students imagine what Jesus-like social change might look like in contemporary culture.

So, I thought I would create a mashup of these two conversation partners, looking to Jesus for the primary agenda of social change (the kingdom of God) while looking to Kos for the means of change, knowing full well that I need to hold both of these ends in loosely to create opportunities for synergy.

I imagine creating a number of posts, one or more posts per chapter of Taking on the System.

Chapter One (part one)

Kos writes that today we need the media for significant social change. We can protest in the streets, but unless it is covered by the media, it is not really an event. Change happens through changing the flow of information, and if you can’t change the flow, you can’t change hearts and minds. In the 1930s, Gandhi used news reels to broadcast his protests at the salt mines. In the 1960s, protestors used network TV to broadcast their message. Today, it will be social media that transforms the landscape. It will be the bloggers.

What were the political dynamics surrounding Jesus? In first century northern Palestine, word of the Jesus movement spread through Jesus’ teaching, preaching and healing. He taught with a different kind of authority than the religious leaders, and so he garnered support. To the people, he appeared like a revolutionary zealot, as a prophet on the fringes of society. People followed him in the countryside. It was a bit of a backwater in northern Palestine, yet thousands came to hear him speak. He offered them a different understanding of reality than was given by the religious leaders — a new way to be the people of God. This put pressure on the leaders, both Jewish and Roman, to respond in some way. Unknown to the powerful — it was the powerless of society that knew who he was. It wasn’t until Jesus came to Jerusalem during passion week where his public role grew dramatically.

Kos writes that the ultimate goal of activism is dislodging conventional wisdom. HIs advice is particularly relevant for social change in democracies, but one could argue that changing public perceptions is valid in more oppressive systems as well — but you may not see the results as quickly, if at all. Jesus changed the conventional wisdom of the masses through storytelling. I’ll talk about that more in a later post.

For Kos, changing conventional wisdom takes place through changing the perception of what is true as understood by the public, the gatekeepers, and those in politics. Whoever frames what is considered to be true controls the nature of the debate. Kos cites the Daou Triangle, an article written by Peter Daou on Salon in September 2005. Daou put blogs (or netroots) on one corner of the triangle, the media on a second corner, and the political establishment on the third. At this point in history, blogs cannot effect change in conventional wisdom on their own, but they can put pressure on the media and politicians to change the conversation. Bloggers can put pressure on the media or the politicians, or both.

What does a Jesus and Kos mashup look like here? What is the takeaway for churches today? In sum, Jesus-like communities will become an online social movement challenging both the media and political power. Strongly connected to each other, they will live out, as a social community, what they preach to others. From the outside, they will seek to challenge and influence the common understandings of reality as put forth by the media and the politicians. And they will be bloggers.

More to come…Part II — Moving Past the Gatekeepers

Bob Roberts Jr. at Glocalnet has a great post about church planting vs. fostering kingdom community. I met Bob when we both presented at a conference a year and a half ago.  Bob is a renowned international church planter, and his insights apply in the US as well — especially in blue states where there is great apprehension about evangelism. People outside the faith see church planting as religious colonialism; this in turn creates unnecessary opposition to the faith. Instead of starting new churches, those beginning new comunities need to foster kingdom (serving, generosity, inclusion) sorts of practices and watch faith emerge from the people. Roberts advocates churches emerging from those who have come to faith — something much more organic and indigenous. Well said.

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.

Yesterday I posted the first part of a review on Ed Stetzer and David Putman’s Breaking the Missional Code. I will briefly wrap up that review today. In yesterday’s post, I celebrated the large amount of missiology that found its way into a book on church renewal and church planting. I had a couple of critiques yesterday as well — the conflation of church marketing with cultural exegesis, and two, the whole church/unchurched typology.

Technorati Tags: book review, Ed Stetzer, missional church, David Putman

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Ed Stetzer and David Putman’s Breaking the Missional Code gives church leaders the tools needed to become a missional presence in their community. In down-to-earth style, the authors take complex missiological concepts and translate them into achievable church practices. The book covers a lot of ground, addressing how to overcome the barriers to mission within existing models of church. I consider Stetzer and Putman’s work to be a valuable conversation partner in all things missional. I couldn’t be more pleased that so much contextualization material made it into a North American church- planting book.

Technorati Tags: book review, church growth, David Putman, Ed Stetzer, missional church

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Allelon just posted a video where Alan Roxburgh interviews me. In this clip, Alan asks me about the missional church, the emerging church, and about the differences between the two. I describe how I teach missional church material, and I also tell a bit of my story as well — how I became involved in the missional conversation.

Technorati Tags: Allelon, alternative worship, Emerging_Church, missional church, video