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A few of the theological "influences" on me
and how these have "jelled" into the kind of philosophy I have
about Computer mediated Communications.
My experiences and learnings in the church with the likes of "The
Church Of the Saviour" in Washington DC
I am close to the time when an online friend and I will be setting out
on a journey and an experiment in Computer mediated community building.
In my Personal Perspective I described my experience of community with
the small group which centered around the model of the Church of the Saviour's
mission groups. I described how we never found a "mission",
and how this may have caused us to be overly self-centered and so we may
have "worn each other out" in self-reflection.
Without a common experience of working at some task that could make a
difference in the world where we lived, we had narrowed the scope of our
"learning about each other". Sure, there were stories to share,
and opinions and feelings to express, but there could have been so much
more potentiality in each other to explore as we observed our reactions
and struggles with trying to journey outward and give of ourselves.
My friend Bob is based in Washington DC, and has been the pastor of
the Sojourners Community Church. I call him an "online friend"
because we met online on Ecunet. Bob wrote me originally to ask me about
resources and ideas for an article he had in mind for Sojourners: "Community
and Computer Communications", or something like that. He began a
meeting on Ecunet called "Computers and Church Renewal". Soon
he and I were exchanging notes frequently as he saw me in the Sojourner's
magazine meeting expressing my hopes that Sojourners would begin to look
at their online prescence on Ecunet as a way to extend the magazine's
desires to be "more than just a magazine".
Bob also read in "A Compuserve For the Church", and some of
my thoughts as they developed on Internet usage by theological students
(which includes all of us if we are lifetime learners and seekers after
truth and relevance.)
The Mission group concept centers on the idea of Journey Inward , Journey
Outward, which is the title of a book by Elisabeth O'Connor, who wrote
a series of books considered to be the definitive history of the Church
of the Saviour's early journeys (if one could do such a thing as a"definitive
history" of such a community). Her "trilogy" of books,
Call to Commitment (1963), the aforementined Journey Inward Journey Outward
(1968), and The New Community (1976), were tremendously moving for me.
So too were another "trilogy"of books that were "exercises"
rather than stories, designed to be worked through rather than read as
history. Our Many Selves was to have a rather large impact on my developing
a keen interest in psychology.
The mission groups of COS are the basic unit of the church. All members
become so by responding to a call to join a group. Any group is begun
by two or three others (or even by one in some cases) who sense a call
to respond to a particular need, and they sound a call to the church.
If the call "sounds like good news" to some others, they come
together and agree upon how they will explore and carry out this mission,
and how they will covenant together to know, support, and encourage one
another.
The "Computer Mediated Mission Group" will have a common mission
of implememting several experiments in Computer mediated communications
with the aim of encouraging the church, by example, to venture out all
over into wider utilization of the "highway" in communicating
and sharing resources. Just as many churches were among the earliest "literacy
campaign" organizers (teaching people to read), churches can again
be a resource to enable more computer literacy for the purposes of allowing
people access to learning tools just as books provided the same opportunity.
Computer Mediated Communications (CMC) encompasses the book and potentially
extends its reach and distribution. It also allows for interaction of
the immediacy not possible with books. And it affords so many enhancements
which allow us to bypass common blockages to personal expression ( without
reiterating such observations I have touched on frequently in the Synergy
and in the Context descriptions). It's hard to believe it's been 18 years
since that little "taste" of community I described with my friends
as we explored the same dimensions (and methods of getting at it) of community
explored by COS. The sense of connectedness I felt then is as fresh as
if it were yesterday. I tend to compare later attempts and similar "communings"
with others to those earlier ones in 1976.
I find that I need the fresh call of community of the beloved to break
me out of the feelings that I am not getting anywhere in what I am doing.
The exploration of what it means to be church, and what we learn in dialogue
with each other, this calls forth the rootedness in me that I sense when
we "meet one another" in the "I-Thou" sense. I just
read a most interesting article in Creation Spirituality magazine about
Teilhard De Chardin's concept of "noosphere" (read as "no-osphere").
It is, to define briefly, a kind of collective mind. De Chardin's descriptions,
as the article explores, bear a strange resemblance to what is forming
"in Cyberspace"; this "global consciousness" that
we are beginning to see more clearly only now as "real beings"
communicate with us rather than some vague notion of ecumenism or global
unity.
I see in the concept of "noosphere" something which has always
been true, I believe, of the power of community. That is, that the divine
prescence in us is only as a "link" which spans all of consciousness,
and that we find pieces to the puzzle in the other; in community, and
in extending it to others as well as accepting it. I have felt my concept
of ecumenism grow. Grow from what seems by comparison, "practically
nothing" and totally vague, to wider appreciation and understanding
through people such as Clarence Jordan and the Koinonia Farm Community,
Martin Luther King, Mahatma Ghandi, and others.
In the last few years writers such as Matthew Fox have delved deeper into
what ecumenism is. But it has only been after my first couple of years
in online "connections" that "real beings" have colored
my concept of ecumenism. Now this has moved from abstract concept to personal
exchange and a sense of knowing that what I am saying or communicating
could touch someone anywhere, or prompt a message of comradeship from
anywhere.
And why should this "noosphere" be limited in any way? De
Chardin's notion of humanity's being "at the heart of a continually
accelerating vortex of self-totalization" references this sense of
endless discovery to be found as one enters into ecumeical community..
I had heard some summary of DeChardin's "theology of evolution"
at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary back in 1980, and remebered being
somewhat struck by it. The article (Summer 1994 issue) in Creation Spirituality
resonates with my experience about the "discoveries" of humankind
happening in Cyberspace, and the incarnational experience it represents
for the idea of Ecumenism. It represents also another of the "synergies"
I have been discovering in my life and the world into which I have been
placed.
The ways we will be using these tools of cyberspace in the future of
the church are wide open, as are the options before us to help create,
identify, and/or experience community in our world. The Computer Mediated
Mission group will represent one outpost of a movement to grab hold of
some new paradigms for relating, and for creating some where none could
exist before. I am called to be alert and conscious of new ways and means
of helping the link along.
- Sojourners magazine
- Koinonia Farm and Clarence Jordan
- The "lay renewal movement
as represented by such people as Keith Miller, Robert Raines, and John
Killinger, the "Creation Spirituality of Matthew Fox, and the work
of Tony Campolo. All of these have a place in the things I see in the
future of Church-mediated, computer-mediated communications.
- Creation Spirituality
- Campolo and Sociology
- "Virtual Community"
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