Hacking Christianity

A Wikipedia article is a process, not a product, and as a result, it is never finished. For a Wikipedia article to improve, the good edits simply have to outweigh the bad ones. Rather than filtering contributions before they appear in public (the process that killed Nupedia), Wikipedia assumes that new errors will be introduced less frequently than existing ones will be corrected. This assumption has proven correct: despite occasional vandalism, Wikipedia articles get better, on average, over time. (pg. 119)

Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat...and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.

• challenges the sacred cows, the products, the finished or established ministries or areas of the church that are unmovable. By re-orienting a congregation to seeing all as up in the air and nothing as sacrosanct will certainly cause anxiety, but a nurturing hand can guide people to less idolatrous notions of church.
• dislodges the Frozen Chosen to become involved. In long-time congregations, people don't get involved because they feel "new." By allowing everything to be "new" again, people may feel more interested in becoming involved.
• creates breathing room for new ministries. Often when we walk to the budget table, the Finance, Trustees, P/PRC, Worship teams seem to get first billing as the "featured" products while everything else is seasonal stock items. By giving more credence and importance to every ministry at the church, it can level the playing field and allow ministries to really grow to their niches.
  

• "The Bible says so!" Well, does it? Like someone famous (anyone help?) said, "Don't just read the Bible. Study it. Either study the Bible or don't read it at all." We all grow up with conceptions (old knowledge) of what the Bible says. Read it and study it again. It may say something very different.
• "I've earned this by being a faithful member of this church." A role or position in the church is not a product you've bought with tithes and presence...it is a part of the process of being Church. Perhaps by faithfully re-examining your role in the machinery of church structure you can determine if there is a better fit than the one you've always had. In my congregation, a woman who was usually relegated to cleaning and maintaining the church found that she did that out of respect for the sanctity of the church. She is now my Acolyte Coordinator, which brings sanctity to the congregation.
  

“Fathers, our daughters are waiting for us,” Mr. Wilson, 49, told the men. “They are desperately waiting for us in a culture that lures them into the murky waters of exploitation. They need to be rescued by you, their dad.”

"premarital sex is seen as inevitably destructive, especially to girls, who they say suffer more because they are more emotional than boys."

You know what? At it's core, this is not about female virginity at all. It's about male honor, which apparently rests between a woman's (or girl's) legs.
Read what the dads are saying. It's all about them.

Although young people who sign a virginity pledge delay the initiation of sexual activity, marry at younger ages and have fewer sexual partners, they are also less likely to use condoms and more likely to experiment with oral and anal sex, said the researchers from Yale and Columbia universities.

"The sad story is that kids who are trying to preserve their technical virginity are, in some cases, engaging in much riskier behavior...From a public health point of view, an abstinence movement...may inadvertently encourage other forms of alternative sex that are at higher risk of STDs."

• In a Feminist Theology class I took in seminary, a fellow seminarian created a ritual celebrating teen girls who began ovulating. It sounds weird, but the service liturgy was very powerful. I'm all for a positive father-daughter ritual, and our culture needs more rituals to support these transitions into new ways of being and new biological ways of living too! Perhaps a reader can point us to religious resources dealing with teenagers and pubescence?

• Perhaps just subtle shifts in these event's theologies. There needs to be stronger emphasis that girls' worth to fathers has nothing whatsoever to do with their sexual activity. By removing the shame and guilt from women's perceptions of their bodies, then they will have the proper self-image and self-appreciation to say "no" when the time comes (and it will). Just tweak the theology a bit, just a bit...please?

• It is just criminal to take a abstinence pledge without age-appropriate sex education. If they don't know what they are pledging against, then how will they recognize it when the time comes? The higher numbers of oral sex say to me that youth don't see it as sex because they can remain virgins...while still being at-risk for STDs. Stop killing our children.

• Finally, a commenter at GetReligion wrote the following which hits at the holistic approach that could be taken:

To me it makes a lot more sense to teach one’s children honesty, integrity, responsibility, chastity (in the broad sense of the word), forgiveness and all those things — all those things that make one a fully functioning adult, and sex is just one part of that.

True purity involves a lot more than virginity. This just seems a bit unbalanced.

The world, once whole, then broken. Jesus came, suffered, died, lives. Yahweh’s creation restored. Spirit alive in us, in spite of us. Life! (Brian)

Was happy with taking the bad with the good. Jesus showed me the good could be great and the bad could be gone forever (Mark)

Christianity is not about what you do, but what God has already done (Paul)

God’s perfect. We’re not. God punished Jesus, the perfect Man, in our place, on the cross. Believe this, turn from sin, and live forever (David)

We seek revenge, but God knows only reconciliation has the power to end pain and transform the world. That's why God became human in Christ. (Jeremy...yes, I had two)

The first was a chance to exercise some unused mental capacities--I studied fractals in a college physics course in the the 1980s and was pleased to remember enough to be able to say something useful about it, however modest...
The second reason was vanity...the pleasure of changing something in the world, just to see my imprint on it. Making a mark on the world is a common human desire...
The third motivation was the desire to do a good thing...the genius of wikis is in part predicated on the ability to make non-financial motivations add up to something of global significance.

The problem that The Times suffered from was simple: no one cared enough about the contents of the Wikitorial to defend it, much less improve it. An editorial is meant to be a timely utterance of a single opinionated voice--the opposite of the characteristics that make for good wiki content. A wiki augments community rather than replacing it; in the absence of a functioning community, a wiki will suffer from the Tragedy of the Commons...

1. A desire to contribute a skill or ability.
   
2. A desire to be remembered.
3. A desire to do a good thing.
   

• Do community-building stuff to encourage trust and participation among each other. How long has it been since you've done a potluck dinner after church, or held a fun event just for the fun of it, even if it cost money? The more people interact, the more they can trust each other with ministry ideas.
  
• Articulate a Vision/Mission statement that ministry groups can coalesce behind. With a mission statement, then it becomes easier to "test" ministry ideas against that mission, rather than expressing "personal" concerns with the ministry ideas. This relaxes interpersonal conflict by holding up an impersonal yet deeply personal standard to judge ministry ideas by.
  
• Ensure there is space for ministry leaders to just worship or do bible study. In my church, I lead a Mission:Possible bible study and accountability group for my church leadership. They don't have to prepare anything or lead anything, they just come to be nurtured. This relaxes typical mindsets and allows leaders to grow towards one another.
  

• Get rid of Gold stars in Sunday Schools registering attendance. After the long tail plays out, it becomes obvious those who are unable to attend every week will never catch up to Suzie Sunshine with the 10+ Gold Star lead, so why bother trying? (unless you are Hillary Clinton, of course)
• Stop pitting church groups against one another in fundraising. At General Conference, a basketball was to be offered to the highest bidder of the delegations, so delegations started raising money and pledges from their delegates and home conferences. I saw my own delegation say "what's the point" when some other Conference easily took the lead with a ridiculous amount of money. They raised a ton of money, but at what cost? Demoralization of ministry groups, even when you are raising more money, is never good.

• What community-building ideas have you found successful in your local context?
• What incentives or competitive aspects of your context stunt ministry growth?
  

Why can’t Southern Baptist authorities crack down? Ah, there’s the problem. In a free-church movement — one with no bishops, no authoritative central structure — the churches are pretty much on their own when it comes to this kind of work...

. . . Some state conventions might have the staff and know how to create a data bank of information of clergy sexual abuse. But for Baptist leaders to do so, they would risk clashing with their tradition’s total commitment to the freedom and the autonomy of the local congregation.

1. a lack of central authority to report misconduct to, and
2. a suspicion of meta-church structures as "someone else's problem" because "it couldn't happen in my church."
   

• Central database of pastors and complaints
• This sounds good on paper, and is what the Southern Baptist Convention is pursuing now. However, it doesn't solve problem #2: working with meta-church structures. From the GetReligion piece:
  

If the board of deacons in a Southern Baptist congregation faced an in-house sex scandal and wanted help, where could it turn? It could seek help from its competition, the circle of churches in its local association. Or it could appeal to its state convention. In some states, “conservative” and “moderate” churches would need to choose between competing conventions linked to these rival Baptist camps.

• Central authority on pastoral complaints
• This also sounds good to address problem #1, but there are all the incentives to not have one...no one wants to take the fall, and since there is no "central church authority" anyway, then there's no legal standing anyway. Once again, from the article:
  

Everything depends on that local church and everything is voluntary. One more question: What Baptist leader would dare face the liability issues involved in guiding such a process? ...

For lawyers, the goal is to find a structure to sue, yet in the free-church way of doing things, there often is no structure larger than the local church or there are real questions about the authority and clout of the larger regional or national structures...

• Empower the laity through mandated sexual ethics training
• If we train parishioners on sexual ethics and give them avenues and resources, then they can be the point people when an ethical lapse occurs.
  
• I'm not sure how to implement this, as making it a law that one layperson out of every church seems ridiculous and unenforceable. Perhaps a "safe sanctuaries" type thing where churches who do go through the training are recognized or added to a list.
  
• The need is real, if nothing else than that the segment of churches which are utterly independent is growing at ridiculous rates. From the article, one last time:
  

Things get even more complicated in the rapidly growing world of totally independent megachurches, both evangelical, Pentecostal and Fundamentalist.

There are two big surprises here. The first is that imbalance is the same shape across a huge number of different kinds of behaviors...the second surprise is that the imbalance drives large social systems rather than damaging them. Fewer than two percent of Wikipedia users ever contribute, yet that is enough to create profound value for millions of users. (pp.124-125)

• Most edits are small edits, with only a few contributers doing over half of the work.
• Most contributers are below average.
• Efforts to map out the "average" wikipedia contributer will fail miserably.
• Even with below-average contributions and inequal distribution of work, wikipedia works!
  

[W]e found that the fastest growing churches depend on the least involved, least motivated, and least engaged Christian believers...Think of a baseball team where only one player is actually playing the game and everybody else on the team is just watching, or doing something else...This is what we found in the vast majority of ‘premiere’ churches – a whole lot of disinterested spectators.”

“They ignore the 10% (of the people) who are on fire for God to focus on the consumers. It isn’t a fair picture,” says a leader from Joel Osteen’s Lakewood Church.

• We want truly dedicated believers who are involved in every aspect.
  
• We tend to rely on the semi-professional laity to get things done right...rather than trusting the under-average crowd to try something new.
• Especially in the small-membership church, we tend to over-use our people who DO step up, and then wonder why they aren't exhibiting healthy self-care that makes others want to become involved too.
• On the meta-level, there's still a strong stigma that small churches are worth less than big churches. It's not true, but I hear it a lot.
  

• The soccer families that go out for pizza after their games. What if you sponsored a bible study for them to read while waiting on their pizza, or sponsored a social night at the church following games?
  
• The couple or three elderly persons who visit shut-ins. What if you paired them with a sunday school class and they went together on their visits?
  
• The people who do the dishes after coffee hour. What if you posted some hymns on the wall by the sink and they sang songs while they cleaned?
  

• Local church leaders can reevaluate their budgets and ensure they are throwing money not only at broadcast and storefront areas (like sunday worship) but all the small groups that are truly grabbing ahold of people's lives (the "long tail" of ministry).
  
• Church leaders can reflect the value of small churches and ministries in the way they evaluate churches. For instance, bishops that ask only how many professions of faith and apportionments are coming from churches are committing the sin of wikipedia: they are looking for an individual characterization rather than evaluating the collective whole.
• In extreme examples, maybe big churches can be broken up into multiple churches, or big ministries broken up into small ministries that aggregate together only on occasion.