Unbelievable. Send that writer to Iraq and then "Let Him Decide". Good grief. Practically scandalous to drudge up something like that for the sake of "balanced conversartion". Exploring "all sides of the issues". Well, Fox has entered into a new dimension entirely.
hat tip to:
willzhead: Name That Caption: 02/28/06
February 28, 2006 in Name That Caption | Permalink
"Where people are encouraged to speak their mind, and those in power trust the people they oversee, blogging flourishes".
---Naked Conversations, p.131
Hear that churches and denominations? Are our doors always open? 'Nuff said.
Continuing on in Naked Conversations: The organizations with the power of numbers and dollars had best soon learn that the more they are ENABLERS of ways to get people enthused and engaged, the more they win a bit more of the ear of those people. It's very much that way with the church as well. The more churches, as individual communities, and denominations (as groups of these orgs) with their ability to marshal the aggregation of the resources such as education and curriculum and communications can realize that it is iin their own best interest to "host" and "enable" a variety of conversations on a wide range of topics, blogging will move closer to recognition as the "must have" tool.
I was just thinking of how we should be asking, as church, why NOT? Why not just open up the "spaces" where this can happen. Where is the leadership of denominational and ecumennical church groups on this issue? When I was just starting out in the faith, the big thing was small group and lay renewal, and finding ways to get people interacting. That's still a concern. But we are so much more fragmented and "private" now, it seems. There's much more emphasis on "Home entertainment", and electronic convenience. Here's the most captive audience; an audience that is VOLUNTARILY escaping to entertainment vistas. Tim Bednar of e-church is talking about how online spirituality is a big draw, and it is being populated and spearheaded not by church dropouts, but by the people heavily involved in traditional churches.
However, this is a false dichotomy. Our capacity for relationships is not zero-sum game. If I engage or belong to a cyberchurch, research (dating back to 2001) seems to show that I do not disengage from the local church when pursue spirituality online. In fact the opposite seems to be true, those most active in seeking spiritual information online are the more committed to local churches. (from Internet is changing the congregation)
What I'm stressing here is this: What's holding us back? As we do with much of our sense of call: STEP OUT THERE. What are we afraid of? That someone might be critical of us? That someone might complain? If they do, is this not an opportunity for not only us to respond, but for THE PEOPLE themselves to respond from their own experience. And is not the voice of the "person in the pew" more often accepted with less skepticism than when "defense" comes from "the seller"; those with supposedly so much to lose from being authentic?
And is this not our goal as a people of God? To be authentic. To admit that we NEED the voice of those so obvi ously willing to give us the critique we need? And is this not a way to harvest that coveted "focus group" accuracy of needs assesment?
This is a serious thing, folks. If we believe that the Church is about something serious (and yes, I do), and that God calls us, all of us, to be a part of the body of Christ and that we all have a role and a calling at any particular time, then this business of opening up all the doors of communcation is vital.
This client has been on my desktop for a while, but I keep forgetting to use it. The nice thing is spell check (since my typing sucks, that's a good thing).
OK, scratch that. Ecto bombed when I opened it for the second time. Not a hard crash, but an empty Profile Window, even though I have three profiles set up. I also can't get it to post anything now. It says "No such post" on a brand new post. Whatever. Keep looking.
After fighting for about a month with the longer post times for new posts in Movable Type, and being unsuccessful in trying to implement their "Dynamic Publishing" (I may succeed yet, but I am growing weary of the battle), and seeing the time from hitting "Save" to when Movable Type quits churning (up to about 2 minutes and then some), I am looking seriously at Wordpress (a snappy 10-15 seconds). This is due to a quick database update, versus writing static files and updating archives. The server resources may be a tad higher in dynamically showing posts, but my traffic is apparently not that high. I also would consider Community Server if it would give me a way to import my posts in.
Wordpress being an all-PHP/mySQL operation might make it more easily "tweakable", as well as Community Server (dotNet C#). The Perl modules of Movable Type are far too cryptic , as well as the various difficulties with having my host be a Windows host running ActivePerl (so that the many "tweaks" offered by folks are not directly translatable to my situation -- many of them offering assumed Linux-hosted tweaks).
The only problem is the RSS switch over. Other than announcing it, I don't think there is any kind of auto-redirect that can be implemented so that the old feed would bounce over to the new.
Anyway, the WP blog is over at wp.theoblogical.org. Maybe I'll call it Movable Theoblogical, Pressin' On! (That is, if I decide to make the switch)
Larry Hollon posts about rage online:
Raging on the Internet
while I agree that the connectedness we enjoy is also a challenge, I don't think it's the ultimate cause. It's a convenient tool to help pour salt. But it didn't create the wounds. The wounds are created by the daily humiliation and struggle of poverty. That they erupt with such explosive violence isn't a wonder to me. In fact, I've always wondered why those who struggle for survival everyday don't blow off frustration more often.But that takes energy, and when you've barely enough to eat or when you're grubbing for enough money to get through the day, you don't have time to make social statements.
As for anger in the developed world, there's another set of issues to be explored. I think it's about our feelings of being disconnected, voiceless and unable to control conditions that affect our lives. We're not in the same basic survival struggle that I've written about above. But we're not in control either. And we're being frustrated, victimized and diminished on a daily basis by big corporations, big government, big education and big health. It's little wonder that some think church bureaucrats are part of the same mix.
I think you do your best to engage in dialogue. You do your best to serve real needs. And you try to bring about constructive, meaningful change. This is about making connection, after all.
I rememeber MLK tellling Meet the Press that it was a miracle that more American Negroes had not turned to communism under the conditions in which they found themselves.
Actually, the people who CAN and DO blog have a luxury that those who NEED it most cannot afford, or have no connections to places where they could. We bloggers have a place, even though even that place is no substitute for an in-the-flesh, embodied community to whom we can turn. But even then it is nice to have a way to blow off steam and ask confronting questions without aiming the rage at anyone in particular, or holding back as we would in the physical company of others. Sometimes it simply doesn't seem polite or appropriate, and yet there are those thoughts and feelings.
The "disconnectedness" of life is one of those attributes of the forces of darkness against which we struggle. It gets quite overwhelming at times. And when one gets used to wandering about looking for a "connectedness" in the churches that goes beyond simple piety and civility, or even beyond the occasional "ministry project" that is carried out, the lack of connectedness often seems to be the "way it is". Not that "occasional projects" aren't "better than nothing", or don't provide real and needed help, but it doesn't seem enough. All too rare is the needed community that underpins it. The "active" churches are all too often bereft of the very structures of community that make for the habits that form the people that God would have us become. Without the prior commitments to knowing one another in depth, and living our life together such that we are geared toward the discovery of gifts and discerning mission, we tend toward the adoption of activity that operates more like the politics of the world than the polis of the people of God. It's very easy to align with Christian Progressives and yet remain in an arrangement of relationships that offers no deeper fellowship than that offered by normal civic societies. While I find myself at home theologically with the Progressive Christians than with the Religious Right (by quite a margin), I find it too difficult to take the disparity of the quality of fellowship of either from the "peculiarity" of the kind of people we are called to be and to commit ourselves to exploring, and forming habits that make this a way of life and an assumed posture.
I have come much closer over the past 5 or 6 years to having any conversation whatsoever about where I am theologically, emotionally, politically, socially in the online communities I have found. This is extremely sad that the level of struggle I have had in finding "connectivity" in the offline world has layed so much importance on the online conversation. I don't seek to replace online at all. I simply would like to find a face to face group of folks who wish to think anew about "Authentic Church"
The Mundane Life of Thunder Jones: Dumb, Lazy, or Controlled?
Our President is woefully uninformed. Worse, he kicks down and makes sure that, whenever he screws up, someone under him takes the blame for his mistakes. This isn't the Texas Rangers or some two-bit oil operation that he can fowl up, he is the President. His actions and mistakes take their toll on the lives and livelyhoods of US citizens.Honestly, can we afford three more years of this?
There's more. Read the post.
I commented:
Amen dude.
Not to mention how he did the same with Al_quieda, treating Richard Clarke like a leper (all those warnings about Bin Laden were a "Clinton and Gore thing" , and thus the Bush administration doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING about the now infamous Aug 9 PDB (it was actually presented to Condi Rice OVER and OVER as a matter of urgency by Clarke, and basically ignored....and Bush was , what elese? on VACATION in August 2001, and never read the PDB until Septemeber 10!)
You probably knew all this, but your post here just brought up all that absolute disgust out of me again. The ineptitude of these people staggers the mind. I really do believe they are nothing but Political Money Launderers; they just make sure that their friends get the most bebefits, the most profits, and the PR to back them up, while they dismantle every item traditionally assumed to be the responsibility of government. And so many are still persisting in their blindness and refusal to recognize how inept and evil these people are.
This post from Talking Points Memo brought back to mind the things that has been dancing around in my mind since the whole "ports thing" broke.
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: February 19, 2006 - February 25, 2006 Archives
From a TPM Reader BR from Houston: Being a War President, and the War on Terror itself, eclipses everything.Except when it doesn’t.
The people who voted for him genuinely believed that he would keep them safer than any alternative we could elect. And now he’s blowing it all off, under the guise of “fair play” for countries that have “played by the rules.” Aside from the cribbing from Clinton, just which rules is it he thinks the UAE has played by?
The cynicism of his defense of the port deal is just staggering. He’s not even interested in pretending he didn’t know, or hadn’t considered the psychological ramifications, etc. Not even a nod to “maybe we should review this one more time.”
Could be it’s money—there is clearly some conflict of interesting running around the Treasury Dept.
But maybe they just don’t care. It’s all been a show, from day one. Or, I should say, Day 911.
I hope this knocks some sense into Republican heads. From what I heard on Sean Hannity today, perhaps it has.
As I indicate in the title to this post, this seems to be like a new chapter for the book House of Bush, House of Saud, which chronicles the history of the long-standing relationship between the Bush family and the United Arab Emirates. I'm not at all convinced that Bush didn't know anything about this. It came as a surprise to me that the White House is now saying Bush didn't know. It seemed in keeping with the seemingly irrational protection the Bush administration afffords to the Saudis after 9/11. If the Saudis and the Neocons are in such a mesh of relationships, the ports thing is just one more of those "favors" that get passed around as rewards; a part of the whole "Money laundering" , political-legitimizing (or the attempt to make it so) by the PR machine of the Bush administration. That whole history is what arouses my skepticism about the claim he didn't know. Of course, I don't know why they think that "not knowing" is at all a flattering portrayal of Bush's competence as president. Maybe they figure that ....
I'm half way through Naked Conversatons, and there's been quite a few notes I've jotted down from the first half. I'll get into the specifics of those when we get back home later today (we're at the in-laws right now, getting ready to leave in just a bit). But the theme is all there, in the pages of Naked Conversations, just like in the Cluetrain Manifesto 6 years ago (but now, it is glaringly obvious, and companies are starting to get it, and so its time for the church to follow suit, and that includes the denominations (they're constituents/members got it quite a while ago; they're needing to play catch up (again---just as with most all previous "new media")
For me, the power of story and the power of unfettered opinion is what gives blogs their immense value for connecting the people of God with one another. The church example in Naked Conversations don't seem to be getting it. As much as they pushed the idea of blogging, it very much seemed to be getting done by the "PR" folk, who are using it in much the same fashion as the "top-down" old-school PR folks Scoble and Israel talk about. I say this because much of the "blog-buzz" sounded like commercials for the various programs happening at the church. There's nothing wrong with doing SOME of this, but for me, the strength of blogs is in giving a flavor for who the PEOPLE are; their interests, passions, concerns , and their perceived role in the church.
Just think…a place of connection…affordable clothes and furniture for poor people…some decent jobs…a hub for our community…a place to hold meetings…the metaphor of redemption…saving landfill space…a ‘Cheers’-like environment, where everybody knows your name…vouchers for those who need them…a fund-raiser for other ministry stuff…a place to hold birthday parties for people who need them…a point of entry for folks moving here to join us…a safe zone between rich and poor…summer jobs for the kids who want to grow…an approachable spot to for folks who need ‘in-the-mix’ counseling and emotional support…something that takes advantage of Marty’s and my gifts and experience…no ongoing fund-raising…from this post: Bart Campolo: Have you considered retail?---the permalink seems to have gotten deleted, so this is the comment pagethe line about "a safe zone between rich and poor" brought a couple of comments from people who, in my estimation, misunderstood. The commenters reacted with the complaint that "staying safe" is precisely the problem with rich folks, or with the "non-poor" when it comes to the kind of contact they prefer with the poor (which is "as little as possible"). The commenters may have thought Bart was talking about a "safety" that comes with avoiding danger; or "comfort". I didn't read it that way at all.A few days ago, I posted a quote from Schools for Conversion (Brokering.) It's worth reposting again, in this context:
When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. Brokerage turns the church into an organization rather than a new family of rebirth. She ceases to be something we are, the living Bride of Christ. The church becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get fed) but no one leaves transformed -- no new community is formed. People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for disrupting the status quo, for calling forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.from Schools For Conversion, p. 29--Bart replied to these comments with clarification of the sense of "safety" he had meant:Bart Campolo: A Safe Zone Indeed
To achieve its goals, an enterprise like this would need not only to attract both rich and poor, but also to connect and humanize them to one another. That, I feel certain, requires the safe zone Jesus was taking about when he told his disciple to fear not, because he - God himself - was with them.The "safety" is not equivalent to the "comfort" the well-off in our society feel in being separated by distance and class and the "usual comforts" we have come to take for granted. This "safety", as Bart points out, is in the "fear not" zone; where the gift of difference is brought home; and the eventual discovery (revelation) that these walls that separate are artificial; a product of separation that is obliterated by reconciliation. I am reminded of a line from the book The lion , The Witch, and the Wardrobe, where one of the children asks the Beavers about Aslan, upon learning that Aslan is a lion "Is he safe?" : The reply: "Safe? Who said anything about safe? Of course he's not safe. But he's good" The safe-zone is a reconciliation zone. It's not a "safety" as the world expects it. It's a safety that comes in discovering that gift awaits us.
In the fall of 2002, I bought Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs book. (There is an ongoing, active book blog that keeps updating all these themes here at smartmobs.com) . It took the theme of Virtual Community into the world of portable technology. I see this as a key element for Web 2.0/ Church 2.0.
My simple premise is this: If the church is really the center of our life; if it is the locus of all of our passion and the source of our life in Christ, then it is around this body that our communication interests and passi ons should revolve. The implication there is that the church be a source of enabling us to connect in as many ways and in as many places as possible; to keep us in conversatioln, to keep us learning and asking; to keep us in touch with those whom we have cast our lot. So there are scores of ways to enable us to "connect" during "downtime"; listening to podcasts on the way to work, getting phone messages or vibrates when blog posts are updated or RSS feeds update; a notification of a timely nature for the ministry we are involved with.
I'm still awaiting that device that combines ubiguity, effectiveness, dependability (not the least of which is the battery issue), and all-in-one functionality. Phone, browser, pager, MP3/Podcast player, RSS reader, etc.
I found this podcast on thier site (BloggingChurch.com), and I looked up some of the references they made (like the pastor they consider as a top notch pastor/CEO blogger, and listened to some of the premises of the book , some of which tackle topics of obvious church issues (Staff blogging, Why Blog?, Stories) but also has a section on "Marketing Your Church" which the podcast guys kind of scoff at the idea of people being critical of it, but I must say that I highly anticipate having quite a few problems , just getting a feeling that these churches are adverse to the idea of Christians being more concerned with Peace than with being "faithful Americans" (the pastor bloger made a few references such as :
EVEN protestors of the war--you may not agree with what America is doing...you may be outspoken...you may hate our government; however, if you are a follower of Jesus Christ then I will say how dare you speak or utter a word of protest if you have never lifted up the leadership of our country in prayer. And the next time you see a soldier--instead of getting angry at him or her...why not thank them for defending your right as an American to speak what is on your mind.
In fact, this is a major reason why I think it is even more important for churches seeking to live the way of Christ need to have blogers who are telling stories of what it is meaning these days to follow the Prince of Peace, and that their refusal to swallow nationalism run amuck is sorely needed as an indication to the blogosphere that there are Christians who take Jesus seriously, and what that might look like lived as a people.
Blogging Church is mentioned as an upcoming book that has been contracted for the Fellowship Church blog gurus. As you can see by my previous post on the initial reactions I had to visting their sites and blogs, I am skeptical of the amoutn of "church" that will flavor this book, based on the heavy CEO/Successful Church/Successful Pastor stuff that is plastered all over their sites. I'll probably want to get it simply for what it's theology of blogs is about; it's "theoblogy" if you will. I will, of course, offer my "theoblogical" take on it. They have a blog here
I was excited to see a "Church blogger" (Fellowship Church of Dallas TX) introduced in Naked Conversations (p.70), but as I looked at the Web site and the various blogs, I was initially struck with how marketing oriented it is, and very low on the items which I consider to be the valuable currency for church blogs: stories, conversation about ministry, etc. And when I say "ministry" I am talking about more than the idea of ministry as "keeping the programming going". As I looked around, it was very UN-obvious what the theology of this church is. It sounded much like "Mega Church" -like "Sucessful Churches" stuff, and all the "buzz" was about "what's happening in the events and programs on "Successful Church", but nothing on personal or communal theology, nothing on being anything like "Resident Aliens". IN fact, the whole blurb about this church's "Blogging" didn't sound any different at all from the other "CEO" bloggers, other than mentioning that they see blogs as a "tool for evangelism". It's hard to see how with no personal stories from people in that church that give any kind of a flavor for what people in that church care about. Every "blog" I saw there seemed more like a glorified ad-fest for the Church's programs (like "Brochure-ware", shoveled into a blog format, and using the first person pronouns as befits blogs) . I suppose that might achieve what they're aiming for: to create buzz about the church. It falls way short for me, although that may well say more about my idea of church than it does about my idea of blogging. I guess this church fit the bill for a book about Business and Blogging, having its "CEO" type culture surrounding the pastor.
Interesting section in the Chapter on blogging being done by CEOs in Naked Conversations. Intel CEO Paul Otellini, who blogs for 86,000 employees behind the company firewall. I have sugested to this to a church before when there were protests about the open nature of online community, for there were cases where certain things are better kept "within the family". OK, I said, there's security for online community, and its much more effective than the lack of privacy that exists in "sharing during worship", since there is no way to "filter out" people we don't know or people we aren't sure we can trust. There can be multiple layers of online security for blogs and forums.
(A fairly new piece of Blog/Forum software I've been trying out, Community Server from Telligent, has a robust array of Membership Roles and security levels, to lock down nearly every feature in the Blog/Forum/PhotoGallery tool. CS began as DotText, a dot-Net based weblog written as an open source project under Microsoft's new open source projects (dotNetNuke is another). The developer for dotText moved on to Telligent as the lead for the CommunityServer project. CS also includes by default a Blog Home page that aggregates posts from all blogs that are opted in to be published on the blog aggregated page)
The idea of a Private internet is foreign to a lot of people. But the rise of "ExtraNets" and "INtraNets" in the business world will begin to erode this notion, as more get experience with the "Internet Efficiencies" being deployed by their companies to aid their productivity and immersion in the issues of making their companies better. Although there are different and/or additional values in the church that are at stake, there is such a thing as "Internet Efficiencies" to be realized by the church. Not in order to create some "CyberChurch", but to bring to bear the conversational and aggregation power of Internet resources on the mission of the church.
In an earlier post here I note the discussion of "Internet Efficiencies" in Naked Conversation (p.41), where the authors make the point that Google, EBay and Amazon were all able to leverage these "Internet Efficiencies" that planted "word of mouth" all over the Internet.
The word of mouth factor has certainly born itself out, but it is the combination of "word of mouth" with many points of access that gives this kind of news unique impact...IOW, instead of moving across individual conversations from one physical location to another, it moves in and out of individual conversations that have garnered this information and opinion from Web conversations (many or most of these from Blogs), and so the spread of the word is given an exponential boost.
I would add that just as important as the power of this new combination of "word of mouth" and "multiple instances" of placement and access of this word is the personal power--- the outlet this provides for the expression of interests , passions, and concerns. The explosion of "categories of interest" in every field imaginable has opened up theological discussion; not just in the halls of academia (although ithas expanded this as well), but also in the churches (although the churches need to AWAKEN to the "efficiencies" offered by the Internet, especially those of the blog and other Web 2.0 features-----yes, I would argue, that blogs are a feature of Web 2.0 ----others may have said the same, but I haven't run across any of those conversations yet)
The churches need to awaken to this becuase they have allowed themselves to become event driven, and in the process, negelected the task of being a community where people are KNOWN. Blogs have shown how simple reflections on daily events and news, and on media, and books, and politics, and theology, make it possible for us to see into the lives of our fellow members, who may well sit next to us in church, but we have never had the occasion to know that they are thinking similar things, reacting in a similar way, concerned about the same things, including the way in which the church has succumbed to the culture of individualism and thus de-emphasized the need we have to be a place where the normal modes of relationship are challenged, and an alternate consciousness exists.
Internet Efficiencies p.41----see later post
Blogging is word of mouth on steroids p.43
"Blogging is faster and more effective than walking from village to vilalge and knocking on doors" p.44
Welll, not exactly (perhaps for products...not for the fuller engagment whcih leads to community, and more specifically, the type of community we are about).......the aim I have is to draw people to where conversation takes place and desires physical prescence in order to more fully know the human behind the stories; and perhaps to try to discern how we might "give a go" to the vision of church that happens when a particular two or three or more are gathered.
"Transparency is not high-risk unless you have something to hide"
Vic Gondrota, General Manager for Platform Evangelism, Microsoft in Naked Conversations, p. 17
Another quote from Microsoft's Tech Evangelist, Lenn Pryor:
"There's no doubt we moved the needle, he said, adding with apparent pride, "and we did it without so much as a press release"
p.16
The above attest to the power of the conversation. If we open it up,and show the customer/audience who we are, this speaks volumes; more so than PR talk. And this goes for church talk too. Nothing reveals more about a church than the interests and concerns of its members and participants in its missions/ministries. This is why I have advocated for church blogs. It's the best mediated STORY delivery medium yet.
A program I bought in November 2004, Bonhoeffer, is showing on our local PBS station tonight, and on PBS stations across the country at 10pm EST. Highly recommended. I also bought, in the same purchase, Hauerwas' book Performing the Faith: Bonhoeffer and the Practice of Nonviolence, which is the book that got me started reading Hauerwas (and Bonhoeffer, although I had read Life Together and The Cost of Discipleship about 25-30 years ago.)
When the church becomes a place of brokerage rather than an organic community, she ceases to be alive. Brokerage turns the church into an organization rather than a new family of rebirth. She ceases to be something we are, the living Bride of Christ. The church becomes a distribution center, a place where the poor come to get stuff and the rich come to dump stuff. Both go away satisfied (the rich feel good, the poor get fed) but no one leaves transformed -- no new community is formed. People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for disrupting the status quo, for calling forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them.from Schools For Conversion, p. 29
As in the kind of "nakedness" talked about in a new book by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, Naked Conversations: How blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers. I think I read somewhere in the intro that this book could be considered a sequel to The Cluetrain Manifesto (by different authors with the same message, with updated stories and new blog-enabling technological innovations.
So I sat and read a little of the intro on the way home at a Starbuck's as I sipped my latest favorite, Toffee Nut Latte. (I got 3 gift cards for Starbucks for Christmas, so I'm still plowing through those a month later).
After a fairly troublesome and worrisome day, my reading in this topic seems to have enlivened and lifted my mood a bit. It seems that this is the sort of thing that makes me feel I am close to what drives me. As you might know if you have clicked around the various categories on this blog, I feel rather strongly about the possibilities for the church with blogging. I have written several posts in the past about how The Cluetrain Manifesto showed me into a new innovative world of conversation. The Web had been called a conversation before, back at its beginning, but the barrier to entry into the Web World was a bit higher back in the early 90's, when one had to be something of an HTML user to figure out how to build a web and tell a story.
The blog world has changed that. The Blog tools have created a Word Processor for the Web, but much more than that, they (the tools) have joined the blogs together via RSS and Blogrolls, BlogRings, and Technorati's blog aggregating service and their innovative "Technorati Tags", which provide for the means to find posts on particular topics.
Most importantly here, the tags, the RSS, and the blogs amongst which these things live and join together, is the conversation. Readers here may also know I have been feeling quite estranged from church as usual. THey have in large part allowed themselves to be dragged into the world's way of top-down/ even/entertainment programmming-oriented , one way communicaiton. The conversation is perhaps even given lip service. But there seems to be little room for the relationships. I'll have more on this later.
Dave’s Wordpress Blog » How RSS can bust through
It must be easy to find relevant feeds. Too much hunt and peck is involved. The reason My.Yahoo and iTunes have been successful is that they centralize a lot of the discovery, they make it easy to find stuff you might be interested in.
Absolutely. And it is here that the Church 2.0 can gain big-time. When RSS hits it big (or bigger, depending on where you rate the success of RSS so far) this is where I see churches discovering much more of the rich array of gifted ministers we have amongst our number, and becoming more consistently connected with the things that are being done, being said, and being told. If evangelism is "good news", then anything which gives us more exposure to the "good news" amongst us is downright evangelistic.
And as for the traditional sense of evangelism: that of "bringing others to Christ", I believe that the stories from those on the fronts of the Kingdom is the most powerful form of "information evangelism", even though it does take some face-to-face reprentatives of this same good news to link these stories to what can happen in our own back yard, or maybe even what IS happening in our own back yard without our knowing it, and it took a story from someone online to alert us to God's activity in our "back yard".
When people who care about issues of human importance, and find that there are church folks who do this as a ministry and a mission, there are former opponents or cynics of the church who had dismissed the church due to a perceived irrelevance who get a dose of good news.
I'm off to church in just a bit, and I'm takin' notes on what I hope will be the start of a "A Web For the Church", the 21st centrury Sequel to a discusion I started about13 years ago on Ecunet, which was an ecumenical online community similar to that of The Well, and that discussion (called a "Meeting" on Ecunet's system) was called "A Compuserve for the Church" (since the Web was hardly in use by the public at that point ...late 92 early 93, Compuserve was the "Virtual World" of the day. Well, it's obviously a new world out there now (or, "in here"), and so many things have happened in the 13 years since. Web 2.0/Church 2.0 is what this kind of discussion has been dubbed out on the blogosphere. I should have a few notes to illuminate when I get back later today after an afternoon trek with the family after church.
The following is from a conversation on a Christianity Today blog where Brian McLaren explains how he is certainly Biblical in his thinking, but that "being Biblical" doesn't always jell with the "Biblical-ness" of those who often offer the public prounouncements of what constitutes "Biblical", particularly in America.
Leadership Blog: Out of Ur: Brian McLaren on the Homosexual Question 4: McLaren's Response
Please be assured that as a pastor and as someone who loves and seeks to follow the Bible, I am aware of Genesis 19, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 6:9, and related texts. Believe me, I have read them and prayerfully pondered them, and have read extensively on all the many sides of the issue. I understand that for many people, these verses end all dialogue and people like me must seem horribly stupid not to see what’s there so clearly to them. I wish they could understand that some of us encounter additional levels of complexity when we try honestly and faithfully to face these texts.
I agree with the above, and I also want to , and often have said to my more conservative Biblical friends that it seems "rather clear" to me that Jesus said "Love your enemies". They are often all too willing to "contextualize" and "qualify" on such sayings of Jesus, and remain quite unwilling to do so on their favorite prooftexts, unless it leads them to be able to affirm the pre-determined dogmas. I myself tend to START from the sayings of Jesus and the Gospels, and interpret the rest of Scripture from those "dogmas"; those ESSENTIALS. There is no Leviticus over Jesus for me; there's rather a reading of Leviticus in the context of a history that culminates and finds its center in Jesus as God's proclamation of his direction and lorship of history.
I fear that apart of the problem is the very presumption that theology constitutes "thought" which then must seek embodiment. Once theology becomes "thought", the church has laready accepted modernity's disembodiment of the Gospel.Stanley Hauerwas, from In Good Company, p. 21
Bart Campolo asks what many others are asking:
Actually, I don’t have many problems with what the President said; what bothers me is the gaping chasm between his rhetoric and the actions (and inactions) of his administration. I mean, does anyone really that George W. Bush is sincerely committed to breaking this nation’s addiction to oil?
Bush's statement strikes me as similar to Hitler observing "There's a lot of hate and prejudice in the world"
An even better comparison is how the tobacco companies are doing these "quit smoking" campaigns, which they are obviously doing in order to attempt to soften meausres taken against them. And there you have the Bush attempts to "soften the political backlash against them, and to keep people from recognizing how thoroughly the Bush family has been a driving force behind making oil consumption more attractive, and lack of concern about moderation in the form of fuel economy (ie. the explosion of the SUV market, fully encouraged by the Bush administration)
I still intend to look into and "theoblogize" around this Web/Church 2.0 thing.....just had a busy day today, and gotta start out early in the morning, too.
