Knowledge Management for the Church

Known in the tech world as KM, Knowledge Management is a way that some in the Business world have begun to emphasize which seeks to capture the "intellectual capital" in an organization, in order to make such knowledge accessible to a wider internal audience.  The research of some who can cull together key insights ,  and draw strategic conclusions from a variety of realities in the business sector within which the company works,  can be "dispersed" to the others in the organization.  One of the early books I saw from the Business world on this topic was Donald Tapscott's "Digital Capital" which pointed out how Knowledge Management and Internet technologies made for a good team for harnessing the power of this "Digital Capital",  the source of which was the people.

This seems to me to be crucial for the concept of Church as a called people.  If we believe that it is the mission of the Church to be a crucible for the incubation and nurturing of "Call" , and to provide the context for people to disocver their call,  then the "mission" of the Church as a corporate structure is sort of a "Meta Mission"---- it enables and nurtures and encourages people in discovering their call,  which results in their "going forth" in the company of others who respond to that call with them,  and implementing missions in the "outside world".  The Church role is to be "on mission" to enable "Mission";  in other words,  the people carry out the mission,  and the role of Church leadership is to enable the discovery of the call that leads to mission.   Professionals can participate in the missions,  and perhaps have "individual calls" that involve them in the life of the people of a particular mission even as they do their work in nurturing call......(I think that this is not neccessarily two distinct things,  as one's "call" could very well be devoted entirely to the work of nurturing of call,  and therefore be at once their corporate call -- their professional service--- and their laity involvement ---- being nurtured in the "call" to "nurture call" ---- but somehow "get themselves dirty" with involvement with the have-nots in the process---- and not shy away from this.

KM (Knowledge Management) becomes crucial when seen in the context of how Weblogs encourage "putting forth of our selves" in some maner.  I think the significance of this and the "power" of this phenomenon as we see it emerge into the light of public curiosity is because of how it cuts close the idea of "call" as a lifelong pursuit,  and that laying down a public statment of who we are,  in as complete or partial way as we are able or wish to reveal,  is liberating.  The flood of Weblogging tools emerging is pointing toward a variation on the peer-to-peer environment:  Instead of direct PC to PC access through such technologies as the Napster/Gnutella/Kazaa genre,  there is a "distributed" Web that enables relationships between them and notification of changes in one place to all "subscribed" peers, who keep watch of new entries over the Weblogs kept by those who they are drawn to watch.  

© Copyright 2003 Dale Lature. Last update: 9/23/2003; 3:35:58 PM.