Goals and Calling

Back to My Resume | Back to My Resume Index | Technical Goals

Integrating Community and Information

My calling in ministry revolves around helping the Church and its related organizations to build online tools to enable further and more frequent dialogue, increase the flow of information, and enable the church to more effectively tell its story. Internal stories enable members to offer their own stories to one another in order to help incubate the development of new callings and so expand the reach of the church. The work of "telling the story" to the public is a crucial piece of the work of evangelism, for it is here that the call of God to those not yet engaged with a church community begins to take shape in the individual. Often a work (a ministry) already taking place provides a context for an individual to connect with the church because this ministry connects with something in them, making use of gifts which tap something deep within them.

I believe that the online world is one rich with tools and possibilities for telling effective stories through dialogue, information about ministries, personal reflection and experiences in these ministries, and a variety of ways of "keeping in touch" for the members of a church community.

The rise to prominence of the portal in the online world (ie. Yahoo, Excite) and the growth of all of these sites from their beginnings as "Search engines" to full blown "Information Centers" with personalization features* suggests to me that the work of the church and its role in the life of its members lives is as important as providing sports scores, stock tips, and weather information.   The existing portal sites offer these features as a way to attract users to the convenience and efficiency features,  in order to have more eyeballs to which they can sell things through their participating and strategic business partners.  A MyChurch/MyCommunity portal  makes what seems to me to be a crucial theological statement: That the life of the community that is the Church is related to the everyday affairs of the world,  and that the importance of communications in the work that we do is a clear call to the churches and their communications investments to leverage to the fullest extent possible the tools of Web technologies.

There is a support industry and infrastructure growing up around the growing recognition that community functions are the strongest "feature" for accomplishing "stickiness" for Websites (keeping their users coming back).  Thus I believe that it is important for us to promote and encourage personal engagement in Web communications,  for the sake of the furthering of Community for the Church.   Since the Church ,  at its very basic is defined as the collaboration of God's people in the efforts to live the Jesus story and promote the values of the Kingdom of God,  then the visible indicators of the Church in the online world neccessarily exhibit the flavor of that community,  or any particular expression of it.   The callings of this people so engaged will be a central focus.  

The Church needs to utilize all communication means available to tell its story.   If the story is vital to its members,  then it follows that an effort to represent the dialogues around the sense of call -- how it plays out in the world (application in specific ministries) ,  how we have come to this sense of call (testimony and journey),  and what our local church body expressions are doing to help us embody this calling--- these things represent content of paramount importance that can be resourced by the construction of a place online to host these conversations,  and link to existing Web content that directly addresses similar concerns and callings elsewhere.  

Promoting Ecumenical Collaboration

The use of online community technologies (discussion/forum software stored in databases that can be linked to subject/topic categories) allow for the linking of conversations to related resources, related activities and ministries of the Church

Connecting to each other's callings

Online community technologies also allow for the linking of conversations of persons exploring their role in ministries ; one's calling is often worked out in exploring the various existing ministries of the church; publishing the stories of persons and ministries online enables exploration of a wide variety of responses to various needs to which the Church can respond, and connect to the stories of the people involved in them.

*(ie. MyYahoo,  which aggregates information specific to the user's interest from a diverse set of information services such as weather, sports, stocks, shopping)

Back to My Resume | Back to My Resume Index | Technical Goals

© Copyright 2003 Dale Lature. Last update: 9/23/2003; 3:37:04 PM.