July 2007

I got to visit Drew Goodmanson's church, Kaleo, at Mission Valley in the heart of San Diego recently when traveling.  I have vivid memories of the area having spent my freshman year at UCSD.  It was a blast to be at a friend's church.  When you've been in ministry for a couple of decades, it's easy to forget what a privilege it is when you are able to visit another congregation.

I was lucky enough to have Drew introduce me to his mom which was a good thing because I was hoping not to stick out as a boomer in the middle of the Generation Y crowd.  Although I had to leave a bit early, the whole thing was a great experience.  Kaleo Church is growing and multiplying, no small feat for a pioneer work.  Want to know how they do it?

I and another pastor on our staff had dinner with Drew a few months back and he explained to us what an innovative approach Kaleo Church is using to plant and grow congregations.  They use the Internet as a primary planting tool.  Using their hardcore web-savvyness, Drew's team focuses on reaching the next generation by implementing smart SEO techniques.  In fact, you could say that have a very concise, targeted  church planting strategy using web-focused missiology to reach the generation who, as Don Tapscott puts it, is bathed in bits.

The church has grown to hundreds in a couple of years.  No doubt it will become a model for other web-driven ministry experiments.  Just another brilliant idea for using technology to serve the Kingdom of God. 

If you want to know more, you can visit any of these related sites: Drew Goodmanson, Ekklesia 360, Monk CMS, Church Planting Resources, Sermon Cloud and ChurchBIT.

Additionally, like myself, Drew is one of the authors with a chapter in the Wikiklesia Project which launched yesterday.

I'm not sure why the Acts 29 links aren't hot but when I get back from this week's travels, I'll reload.

There is an unstoppable trend amongst global youth to use online means in more pervasive and ubiquitous ways than ever before.  Convincing Christians to pay attention to the forum of tomorrow's generation is a constant battle as traditionalists often belittle technologically-mediated communication and perceive it as insignificant by comparing it to real world communication.

While skeptics focus on doom and gloom regarding Internet usage and point to our sin nature online (i.e. porn addiction, identity theft, electronic slander, voyeurism, etc.), world-wide youth are marching into technologically-facilitated communication opportunities in record numbers and at unusual speed.

For example, during the the recent Viginia Tech college massacre, many students learned of classmates death's through their AOL messenger service.  In fact, the Internet was the first place they turned, and not just to receive news information.

In a CNN report dated April 17, "many Virginia Tech students, grief-stricken and bewildered, turned to the Internet to share information and stories, ask questions and comfort each other."

Additionally, on Facebook.com, a members-only social website, dozens of groups were created, starting moments after the shootings. Students updated information within existing groups, and created additional groups for weeks and months after the tragedy.  Facebook is only one example of how instinctive it has become for young people to use the Internet as a primary source for human communication. 

Unlike the generation before them who used the Internet for seeking information, today's youth, the iGeneration, depend on online communication for meeting their needs - comfort, companionship, spiritual support, connection, conversation, relationship building, job/home searching and social networking. 

Embracing online means as a cultural mandate, as a stewardship duty, as an unparalleled communication platform for spreading the good news is necessary for the transmission of the Kingdom of God to the next generation. 

The Pew Internet & American Life Project has released two excellent diffusion reports over the month of July.  Their Home Broadband Adoption 2007 report by John Horrigan as well as their most current report, China's Online Population Explosion by Deborah Fallows, provide the most recent (and accurate) data to date on Internet diffusion characteristics.  According to a couple of emails I've gotten from Pew manager Cornelia Carter-Sykes, both reports produce predictable, yet still important, results.

The Home Broadband Report finds that nearly half (47%) of all adult Americans now have a high-speed internet connection at home. The percentage of Americans with broadband at home has grown from 42% in early 2006 and 30% in early 2005. For the full report, click here. 

China's Online Population Explosion notes there are now an estimated 137 million internet users in China, second in number only to the United States, where estimates of the current internet population range from 165 million to 210 million.  Furthermore, the growth rate of China's internet user population has been out pacing that of the U.S., and China is projected to overtake the U.S. in the total number of users within a few years.

If you'd like to participate interactively with Pew, you can take the Internet Typology Test here. Or, if you insist on being a technological omnivore, you can always go back to my Pew Typology of Tech users.

The Wikiklesia Project: Book One will be released on July 23rd in e-book format on Lulu.  Subtitled “Voices of the Virtual World: Participative Technology and the Ecclesial Revolution,” the print edition of the book will become available following the virtual release.

The publication features more than forty diverse authors who explore the growing influence of technology on the global Christian church. From the creative uberblogging perspectives of global pilgrims like Andrew Jones, aka tallskinnykiwi, to theological scholars like Dr. Scot McKnight (Jesus Creed), readers are promised one thing for sure - a diversity of perspectives. Criticism, evaluation and praise will likely all be present in this sweeping overview of technology's influence/impact  on the Church. (A huge thank you to Len Hjalmarson and John La Grou for inspiration, coordination, publication, revelation.)

You can see a full list of contributors and their chapter titles here, including mine.  A handful of friends couldn't participate or couldn't make the deadline and I'm hoping they get included next time.

This is a not-for-profit, non commercial deal with all proceeds from the sale of the book being contributed to the Not For Sale campaign, designed to support abolishing the global slave trade.

Here's a recent press release that further explains what Wikiklesia is about.

"Conceived and established in May 2007, the Wikiklesia Project is an experiment in online collaborative publishing. The format is virtual, self organizing, participatory – from purpose to publication in just a few weeks.

Wikiklesia values sustainability with minimal structure. We long to see a church saturated with decentralized cooperation. The improbable notion of books that effectively publish themselves is one of many ways that can help move us closer to this global-ecclesial connectedness. Can a publishing organization thrive without centralized leadership? Is perpetual, self-organizing book publishing possible? Can literary quality be maintained in a distributed publishing paradigm? We’ve created Wikiklesia to answer these kinds of questions.

Wikiklesia may be the world’s first self-perpetuating nomadic business model – raising money for charities - giving voice to emerging writers and artists - generating a continuous stream of new books covering all manner of relevant topics. Nobody remains in control. There is no board of directors. The franchise changes hands as quickly as new projects are created."

Following my post about unordered lists, flocking information and David Weinberger's new book Everything is Miscellaneous, I got inspired to make his Authors@Google clip available (found at the end of this post).

It's an unbelievable hour long (beware - it makes references to both Paris Hilton's anatomy and 'provincial' Christianity) and underscores how things really aren't "boxable".  According to Weinberger, in terms of categorizing and classifying, singular ordering doesn't work because things are interrelated.  And they overlap.  And they change.  And in terms of their attributes, different attributes are important for different purposes and they are important to different people and at different times.  Good point.

For example, and this is entirely hypothetical, what if I say, "I'm a Christian." You store me in a certain place in your mind.  Then I say, "I'm a protestant Christian." You store me again.  Then I say, "I'm an American, protestant Christian."  Then I say, "I'm an American, protestant Christian - woman!"  Got my category made?  Am I driving a mini-van with a fish sticker yet in your mind?

Then I add that I'm friendly with a bunch of folks who are presenting some radical challenges for mainstream Western Christianity - you know the kind who want to live out their faith 7 days a week.  Now where do you put me?  Just hypothetical, mind you.  Ok, real.

The interesting part for me is the new digital disorder described by Weinberger might affect how we present the gospel in current culture.  We cannot deny that our "boxes" aren't working the way we once thought they might.  Putting certain people in categories and then labeling them gets tricky.  And of course, Jesus defied the traditional compartmentalizing of individuals based on what sickness or bondages they had, what their past or current sins entailed, what professions they had chosen, what strata of society they found themselves in, etc.

How we classify things does not change the Bible or its accuracy.  Since the Bible is the blueprint of the order of the universe, and everything can be perfectly ordered when you place it next to the plumbline of the Scriptures, it seems like the Church might advantage any who are confused in the new digital disorder with a continual re-presenting of the Word of God.

It's a well known fact amongst my friends that I make up words and phrases to suit myself.  Even I, however, could not come up with some of the linkages, typos, mash ups and mutilations that appear in the search terms of my sitemeter on a regular basis. (See last month's Search Term Awards.)  

So, now I've decided to make it official.  I've added a humor category.  Once a month, I will present to you the depth of spiritual substance that permeates the backend of this seemingly shallow blog.  Here, dear readers, are your search terms:

• typepad to make virtual people say stuff (wholly different than wordpress to make virtual people say stuff)
• curse of the digital spirituality
• listen to the bible written by jack hayford  
• holy bib  (not to be confused with holy diaper)
• dieting with christian blogs
• dangers of church mentoring onliners (not to be mistaken for mentoring with one liners)
• what is an epod of the bible  (Google fetches me because it sometimes cannot interpret between epod, ephod and iPod, not that it matters, because you could cover yourself with either.  Better yet, get an iPhone which can be all things to all men, camera, phone, mp3, tv, web, underwear, whatever) 

And last but not least:

• Cynthia's computer college (if only I could charge tuition)

Again, readers from all over the world, well for that matter cyberspace, include the the U. S. Government & the U.S. Department of State, Asbury Theological Seminary, Pepperdine University (ok, so these are the ladies at my church) North Carolina A&T State University and MIT.  From Apple to Intel, from wifi hotspot NetherlandsSchiphol, Noord-Holland to Serbia and Montenegro to Kota Kinabalu, Sabah Malaysia, they've all stopped by. 

I guess just about everyone is still interested in the Church and technology.

I won't tell you whose search terms are whose.  What's your traffic like?

Since "Everything is Miscellaneous" in the digital world, we've lost our ability to neatly and succinctly place specific things into specific categories.  In light of the web, things often fit into multiple categories, just when we put them in a specific spot they float away and flock with other things they find similar.  

Final edited version of the video clip of my daughter's interview with Alexia Prichard of Netscape's NewsQuake! during the iPhone launch.  Yes, of course you can vote this clip up by just clicking on it. 

Proceed with caution navigating the rest of the site.