In case you're wondering what the Church of the future looks like, I think its safe to say that the New Media will have far-reaching effects that we have yet to predict. Thus, the innovative U.S. churches of today, lead currently but they may or may not be on target when it comes to serving tomorrow's global world, particularly in light of unpredictable trajectories. (HT – Kevin Hendricks for the squidoo lens.)
Ultimately, every currently existing social institution will undergo dramatic change over the next 20 years.
C.S. Lewis said: "A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from press and the microphone of his own age."
What will happen, I wonder, when not many but all places are united into an actual (not just theoretical) global village? And when the scholarship of our day will have the technical facility to access and encompass all previously existing scholarship from every recorded time. Business is changing; education is changing. How will our faith circles embrace and be impacted by the New Media?
The 2007 book by Don Tapscott & Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, explores collaboration and the theory that mass collaboration from participants in the online community creates open systems that produce faster and more powerful results than the traditional closed proprietary systems that have been the norm for private industry and educational institutions. Historically, this would also include the Church.
If peering, sharing, and open-source thinking become the norm and collaboration emerges as the dominant paradigm of our era, how will our faith communities reflect and respond to this new world? While our theology doesn't change, because Jesus is the same yesterday and today and forever, how will the Church change?
By the way, in case you're interested in what else the immune scholar C.S. Lewis has said, thanks to the collaboration of the semantic web, it's just a click away at Wikiquote.
Or access any of these other collaborative projects from the open-source Wikimedia Foundation:
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Wikipedia Free encyclopedia |
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Wiktionary Dictionary and thesaurus |
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Wikinews Free content news source |
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Wikibooks Free textbooks and manuals |
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Wikiquote Collection of quotations |
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Wikisource Free source documents |
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Wikiversity Free learning tools |
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Wikispecies Directory of species |
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Commons Shared media repository |
Thanks for the heads up on the book, I’ll get a copy, and thanks for the links to wiki resources. I love your new design (I’ve been reading it in RSS and hadn’t noticed the design change). Jason.
Jason, great time to say thanks for “collaborating” with me. It’s not that the world has become so small…It’s that we have grown.
I love the idea of breaking – no, smashing the closed proprietary systems involved in theology and denominational Christianity.
I think blogs are powerful to this end and if they were not so we wouldn’t hear those people whose livelihood and power depends on the closed system being so quick to dismiss blogs and the content posted on them.
Fernando, always happy to see Hong Kong on the site meter
(And, I take back everything I said last year about not changing your theme…the new one is great!)
Since my husband and I pastor a traditional, denominational church we find ourselves in a unique position to view new forms of faith-building connections. As pastors for the last 20 years, we are some of the people whose livelihood and “power?” (I’ll withhold myself) rely upon denominational connectedness. Our service to both our denomination (Foursquare) and more particularly, the individuals in our congregation, however rarely feels like it operates in a closed, proprietary system. In fact, I perceive it as a kind of undergirding support and more so as the years progress.
There are, no doubt, closed religious systems but rather than break or smash them, I submit we advocate new kinds of transformation for them so they can reflect fresh attributes: collaboration, participation, collectivity, inclusiveness (not of sin but of individuals), etc. My Bible reading yesterday reminded me that sectarianism is carnal. Wow.
Each Christian denomination (all faiths for that matter) has the opportunity to undergo significant reformations during this time of cultural transformation. The Church, although often viewed only as a static institution, which it’s not, will only benefit from embracing new forms of connection and collaboration. Emergent, non-emergent, traditional, non-traditional, seeker-sensitive, traditionally orthodox, whichever divisions one makes, God is with those who request Him and both we and the denominations we may choose to affiliate ourselves with can be islands of hope in a sea of despair.
that’s a great Q – i think more information breaks down barriers – what is known about is less feared than the unknown. I wonder if collaboration will spread off line and be the norm – churches collaborating as the local expression/flavours of the kingdom of God with a common mission and co-operation? I wonder if this will enable us to learn from the past and dream for the future? I feel that this will help the ideas of deep church become more viable.
What do you think, cynthia, about your own Q?
thank you…
Hi Paul, as I’ve said here often, it is almost impossible to predict the trajectories of the future impacts of the new media on institutions like the Church. If we could more accurately predict, I think we would have all bought stock in Google a few years back.
In the same way the industrial revolution brought about unpredictable applications of new inventions, the technological revolution (with its applications and consequences) is unparalled in its explosion of innovations and thus filled with speculation.
But, that being said, I think it is a worthwhile endeavor to promote capitalizing on Web 2.0 opportunities for Christians so the Church at large doesn’t end up in a laggardly position but instead with an amplified voice. Why should our lights be under a basket?
Resisting technology seems particularly unwise. I see “lead, follow or get out of the way” as an invitation to the Church. I know I’m preaching to the choir with you here, but virtual relationships will continue to occupy more and more slots of significance in our lives in the future. They will never replace the real world, but the ramifications for the next generation will be good-sized.
I really like the way you articulated “churches collaborating as the local expression/flavours of the kingdom of God” because that really sums up my conviction that local expression is particularly valuable. Like each family exists with its own flavour, no two churches are exactly identical (nor should they be) and I really can’t predict what would happen if we raised our goals from co-existing to collaborating.
btw – I have absolutely no doubt that collaboration will spread off-line. I am already experiencing it.
I have a copy of Wikinomics sitting on my reading shelf, but just haven’t had the time to pull it down and read it. I think business and the church should employ more opportunities for collaboration whether in person, blogging, social networking or some mix therein. The art of collaboration, truely understanding how to collaborate, is still in its toddler stage in my opinion, especially as I survey the Corporate landscape simply because we get stuck in our own little worlds and don’t want to change. I think the church can also fall into that pattern, and the church needs to realize that “collaborating” can strengthen the body of believers and not hinder it.
Dave, (hello, hello) I think we all agree about the toddler stage. The Human Genome Project is one of the few well-known examples of collaborative successes but there will likely be many more before the end of the decade. Also the “mix therein” is, I think, an important element of all that we’re talking about, the mash-ups we haven’t forecasted yet. Enjoyed going to your blog and thanks for the comments.
Cynthia, I may not have expressed myself all that well. I don’t think everyone whose livelihood depends on the structures of insitutional church is working against a colloborative ecclesiology (wiklesiology?). Rather the afct that *some* who are in such a situation are so ready to reflexively speak out suggests to me that maybe *they* feel threatened by it – which is not a bad thing.
Maybe my smashing language was harsh, but trying to be collaborative runs counter to most of my church experience. I’m now in my 9th church in 21 odd years (places I’ve been for 12 months or more) in four countries and the only one that felt collaborative in any real sense was a church where I was an associate pastor. However, even then it felt like we were breaking something ( we used to talk about breaking walls to put in windows and doors, as a metaphor) and the pastor who took over the seniorship after I left treated the church as broken and the emerging collaborative culture as a sign of “anarchy.”
I agree with your emphasis on hope, transformation and the power of God to bring about change. It’s just my experience of this has seldom been one where churches embrace this smoothly.
Fernando,
Our church just recently has made great strides in becoming more collaborative in our worship planning. This year we are doing a sermon series on “A Year in Life of Jesus” and I had been pushing our worship leader to put a creative team together to help pastors articulate their vision for their sermons each and every week. Since we began this process we have developed a wiki to help manage our day to day items and our sevices are running on all cylinders because of the collaborative process we have created. I think it becomes a culture that is created and desired for – for it to be successful.
Fernando, thanks for the clarifications and no doubt change can be very hard to embrace within institutions and often threatens the status quo. We agree on hope, transformation and the power of God to bring about change.
Dave, thank you for this helpful example of collaboration. These particular successes are what I am most interested in. I noticed Agoura Bible Fellowship on your sidebar and that’s where my husband’s parents have been longtime members. Is this your church? (If this is personal information feel free to email me.) And thanks again for an excellent working example of “church as a team”.
Cynthia,
I found this through the Wikinomics website, and I absolutely loved your article. For some reason open-source seems to keep popping up in a lot of conversations lately. A friend of mine is doing his DMin work at Talbot on open-source and its application in the church, from what he tells me it is going to draw heavily off of a lot of the concepts in Wikinomics. I am trying to incorporate this in a business start-up I am working on, and I think the format has limitless applicability.
Honestly, I think that open-source collaboration has the ability to network the Body of Christ globally for a myriad of different causes. The possibility for world missions is staggering, where Christians train and equip converts via web-technology and get new believers the info, prayer, and resources they need in real time with the connectivity afforded through the web. Often this can give us access to areas in the globe that are closed off and nearly impossible to deploy traditional missionaries to.
I get chills over the tidal wave of change that online collaboration is bringing both for good and for evil. What is certain is that the changes we will go through in the coming years will be exciting – it’s a great time to be a believer.
Jedidiah, it seems most people find Wikinomics through me rather than me through Wikinomics so that’s a pleasant surprise.
Glad you liked the article and we must have similar interests that being the case. Please feel free to dig into my archives for other similar posts.
Also, really appreciate you adding my site to your blog and look forward to more of your comments.