Showing posts with label group theory. Show all posts
Showing posts with label group theory. Show all posts

What the Church can learn from Wikipedia [4of4]

Thursday, May 29, 2008 Labels: , , 2 comments

Here's part 4 of my four-part series on "What the Church can learn from Wikipedia." It is a weekly series, published every Wednesday in May.

Welcome to the last installment of this series on Wikipedia. There will be more series after this, but this is a shorter final entry. There will be a wrap-up with lessons learned later. Read on to discover how Wikipedia is a process not a product...and like radioactive elements, our own Discipleship has a half-life that must be maintained to keep us from becoming lukewarm followers of Christ.

Throughout all of this series, there's been one thing that I've neglected to mention but it bears nuancing for this final post. It is important to remember that Wikipedia is not a product so much as a process. Clay Shirkey, in Here Comes Everybody, writes about the origins of Wikipedia (written about in the first of this series)
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)
There's a false mystique here of a collaborative process of sunshine and puppy dogs. In reality, the articles come from argument and persuasion, from behind the scenes adding, rewriting, summarizing, splitting up entries, categorizing, and standards of presentation. As Shirky says, "the articles grow not from harmonious thought, but from constant scrutiny and emendation."

There are no "finished" pages on WikipediaIndeed, there are no "finished" pages on Wikipedia. From A-Z, from their own home page, categories, terms of service, and other "static" pages, they are all editable (though some may have restrictions). The lack of a finished "product" may sound like beta-hell, but it's the operating model of Wikipedia.

There's a reason why Wikipedia must be a process, not a product. Consider the product of an Encyclopedia Britannica: a wealth of knowledge in a series of encyclopedias, written by experts in the field. If they stopped publishing it today, and the finished product of all the expert articles was the final say, it would slowly become obsolete. Like reading an old edition of the DCM claiming homosexuality as a mental illness, or religion books that claim Moses wrote the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, old knowledge is simply not permanently correct as societies change and science marches on.

The half-life of knowledge makes products obsoleteKnowledge does not necessarily withstand the test of time. Indeed, there's a half-life of knowledge. Like the half-life of plutonium or radioactive elements that slowly break down into nothing, knowledge also breaks down over time. Like Men in Black when Tommy Lee Jones says to Will Smith:
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.
New knowledge must replace old knowledge that cannot stand the test of time. Not all knowledge has a half-life, but most of it does. In this manner, Wikipedia far outdoes Encyclopedia Brittanica because it can remove the knowledge that has become obsolete much faster than a paperbound edition.

The Process of Wikipedia is its greatest strengthIn summary, Wikipedia is not something you can download and get its full effect. Yes, there is knowledge in a paperbound copy, but it is in the growing, experimenting, categorizing, re-categorizing, and offering up every word and syllable to constant scrutiny that make Wikipedia what it is. While the tools help, and the software protects the system from hackers, it is considering nothing to be sacrosanct that gives Wikipedia its power and authority.

In the church, we strive to be more like Encyclopedia Brittanica than Wikipedia. We bring forth ministry ideas when they are more like "products" we are pushing on people. We just show the storefront of the Church to people without the behind-the-scenes wrangling that takes place. We like products and people to believe in products and contribute to making products better.

What if your church was a process, not a product?What impact would it have to consider your church a process, not a product? I guarantee it would radically impact how you view your groups: Disciple classes, homeless outreach, bible studies. These are not set-in-stone ministries, but instead are processes, temporary, relative to the context processes, not "products" you have to shove out the door weekly.

Perhaps a ministry can become a process that...
  • 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 half-life of discipleship makes following Christ a lifelong processMore importantly, our ministries have to reflect our own discipleship. There's a half-life of discipleship, too. We like to think we become Disciples of Christ when we pledge our hearts to follow Jesus and re-orient our world, but the feeling of ecstasy ebbs and flows. Summer camp experiences often don't transform our lifestyle because when we leave the wilderness, nothing has changed. We have to be willing to constantly test and expand our discipleship, because if not we lose its spark and tenacity. If not, then our half-life decays until we are no more radioactive than the culture around us.
A dead body, you see, will take on the temperature of its environment. Such was the case with the church at Laodicea. (source)
Consider the ways your discipleship's half-life may be stunting your spiritual growth
  • "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.

The process of church must be the forefront, not the storefront.For the Church to truly emulate Wikipedia, it begins with seeing the Church as a process, not a product. And that process begins with each of us individually: to see that our discipleship has a half-life, and if it is not kept up, we will become more and more unable to be recognized as faithful Christians. This is not a message to induce anxiety, it is meant to be honest that we cannot afford to become complacent in an ever-changing world.

Thoughts? Feel free to post a comment and introduce yourself!

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What the Church can Learn from Wikipedia [3of4]

Wednesday, May 21, 2008 Labels: , , 0 comments

Here's part 2 of my series on "What the Church can learn from Wikipedia." It is a weekly series, published every Wednesday in May.

The past two weeks we've hit on two important lessons from Wikipedia
  1. By lowering the thresholds to new ministry ideas, rough forms of ministry can emerge that would otherwise be snarled in bureaucracy (link).
  2. By empowering the smallest of groups in your ministry, you will be encouraging discipleship from your less-committed members (link).
So, those are the "how-to" aspects of what we can learn from Wikipedia. But what about the Why? Why do people contribute to Wikipedia, and why would people want to become involved in small rough forms of ministry?

This leads us to our third segment: motivation. What motivates people to contribute time and energy to a system, and why do they do it? And how does friendly competition actually de-motivate people and stunts ministry?

Why Wikipedia Works

Why do people contribute to Wikipedia?As is the norm in our series, we reach out to Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody to guide our discussion. Shirky writes about his editing of a Wikipedia entry on Koch fractals...something he knows next-to-nothing about, but was still able to meaningfully contribute. Why would he do it? Three reasons (text decorations are mine):
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.
Those are what motivates at least Mr. Shirky to contribute to Wikipedia. For others, there are hundreds of reasons: to correct or add on expert knowledge, to clean up grammer, etc. Contributing can also mean cleaning up vandalism (thieves!) of "the encyclopedia everyone can edit." Why would people do that, spend time cleaning up vandalism?

How does an open community defend against attacks?As an example of a failed wiki, the L.A. Times launched a "Wikitorial" feature where they allowed their editorial pages to be edited by the public, like a wiki. Almost immediately, the users defaced, deleted, and filled the pages with porn. It was pulled within 48 hours, and never tried again. Shirky explains (bolded and links mine):
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...
A wiki does not create community; it supplements an already strong community. In the absence of community, wikis fail to motivate people alone.

Everybody loses when incentives are inequalAs a final point, the most important motivating aspect of Wikipedia is that no one is getting paid. The social psychology experiment The Ultimatum Game involves two people getting $10 under two conditions: one can divvy it up, and if the other accepts the division, they both get the money. More often than not, if the dividing person chooses more than $7 for himself, the other rejects it, even though they would still be getting a free $3. Why? The experiment shows that if there in unequal distribution of money, there is less motivation to accept the system, and thus everyone loses. By removing monetary rewards (and even social advancement to Wikipedia moderators is not public knowledge), Wikipedia removes those barriers and allows for purely non-financial motivations.

In summary, Wikipedia works because of (a) personal motivations to better a communal product and someone's self-image, (b) the strong community to withstand vandalism, and (c) non-financial motivations make it more tolerant of the long tail of participation.

Competition and Community are Incompatible in Ministry

Moving to churchy stuff, Shirkey's three reasons to edit a Wikipedia page translate easily into the local church context.
  1. A desire to contribute a skill or ability.
  2. A desire to be remembered.
  3. A desire to do a good thing.
We see those at play in our churches all the time, there's no lesson there. However, the two other reasons are significant indeed.

Dedicated communities make open systems work.First, the presence of a strong supportive community makes open systems work. Admittedly, Wikipedia has built in tools to survive malicious people that the Church simply doesn't have: it is easier to clean up after an attack than it is to mount it in the first place. When a vandal defaces an entry on Islam, a Wikipedian just has to click the "revert to previous entry" and it is done. I'm jealous.

The community is the safeguard of the Wikipedia; thus, a strong community may be the safeguard of the Church. Consider these examples:
  • 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.
Focusing more resources on community-building may become essential to open ministry.

Demoralization of ministry groups, even with financial incentives, is never good.Second, open ministry is incompatible with competition, so seek the reduction or removal of incentives-based ministry. We saw from the Ultimatum game that when there is an inequality, sometimes everyone loses. By removing financial benefits and even social-capital-building benefits, ministry can handle both motivating people AND reaching out to the long tail of the membership. Our churches love to offer benefits to people and breed competition, so removing them will ironically remove barriers to motivation.

I see these barriers all the time in small forms that are well-intentioned.
  • 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.

I am part of a group that believes in me, and I believe in them.In conclusion, motivation is based on personal feelings and agendas. But motivation in group theory is also based on a feeling of closeness to one another, rallying under one banner, and by not feeling in competition with one another, especially when groups are gathered around the budget table. By removing the roadblocks to ministry, even friendly competition, we can grow into a community that sustains and complements a wiki-structured ministry.

Your Turn

Your turn to contribute to this discussion. In addition to general comments on the content, any thoughts on these two questions?
  • What community-building ideas have you found successful in your local context?
  • What incentives or competitive aspects of your context stunt ministry growth?
Thanks for taking the time to reply...much less read these looooong posts!

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Clergy Misconduct + Independent Churches = Where's the Accountability?

Monday, May 19, 2008 Labels: 0 comments

I was struck by the most recent clergy sex scandal, this one out of Plano, Texas.

  • The specifics of the case are awful, but not pertinent to this blog.
  • What is pertinent is how the congregational system of churches is unprepared to deal with clergy abuse in ways that connectional systems are (but don't).
Read on for ideas on a decentralized approach that may work well for central-authority-shy congregational churches.

GetReligion has a write-up here:
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.

So, with the congregational system, all churches are on their own, though voluntarily loosely-affiliated with one another. This leads to, at least, two main problems:
  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."
As documented in dozens of cases, abusive pastors are able to move often from church to church because of the lack of a central governing body.

In connectional churches (like the United Methodist Church), there is a central governing body that regulates pastoral changes between pulpits. In this way, there is someone to report incidents to that is not the press or police, and some assurance that the matter, if no criminal charges can be filed, will be dealt with internally.

However, this is not to say that connectionalism is any better at disciplining problem clergy. In the Catholic Church, RCC leaders like Cardinal Law moved priests around even though they knew about sexual abuse. I mention this not to harp on them, but to emphasize that connectional systems are still able to be abused by failures in leadership.

So, what's the solution for congregational churches?
  • 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...
Those are two of them, but you know this wouldn't be Hacking Christianity if I didn't advocate for a decentralized solution.
  • 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.
For congregational (or totally independent) churches, there is little structure in place to deal with lapses in sexual ethics by clergy or lay leadership. Offenders simply jump ship and go to another church, and the church they left is often happy with that by keeping quiet and privatizing the sin.

Thus, the best solution may be to empower the laity to be watchful even of the most charismatic of church planters. Even in connectional churches (in some cases, already present), a network of faithful laity who are also trained and given resources to deal with clergy misconduct may work well to cross denominational and independent lines.

What do you think? Would a decentralized, grassroots approach yield laity empowered to act in the face of misconduct? Or would it backfire by emboldening busybodies into the already scrutinized life of pastors?

Feel free to post your thoughts, and introduce yourself too!

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What the Church can learn from Wikipedia [2of4]

Wednesday, May 14, 2008 Labels: , , 5 comments

Here's part 2 of my series on "What the Church can learn from Wikipedia." It is a weekly series, published every Wednesday in May.

There has been much discussion about this topic on the blogosphere, so please forgive me for not responding to all points. This is very early on the series, and much of the conversation revolves around topics that I'm not ready to release my writings on yet. Thanks for your patience.

Still, on Richard's blog (among others) the topic for this week has come to light (emphasis mine):
[A]lthough Wikipedia has undoubtedly been a roaring success, the wiki idea does not seem to have really caught on. The editors of wikipedia are a very small fraction of those who read it. Similarly, in the church we talk of ‘the ministry of the whole people of God’, how many church members and friends are really prepared to get their hands dirty with ministry?
Richard has preempted the topic for this post. We can learn this week that when we scale ministry, it does (in fact) look a lot like Wikipedia, and there's a crucial lesson there for how to structure ministry.

Who Contributes to Wikipedia?

There's a common idea that everyone who visits Wikipedia edits. This is only mostly true. A large number of visitors to Wikipedia DO make edits (and become "contributers"), but it is a small percentage of the "audience."

Clay Shirkey, in his book Here Comes Everybody, writes about the "long tail" of the internet (also called the 80/20 rule and power law distribution). Basically, the top contributers (represented in green) contribute significantly more than anyone else when it comes to Wikipedia and other social networks. On any given article, there is usually one major contributer, who gives twice as much as the number 2 contributer, who gives as much input as the next 10 contributers combined, and then a ton of people who have made one edit each. You see from the graph that the "long tale" is the large group of people that make small contributions to a system (represented in yellow).

But that's not the interesting part to Shirkey.
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)
In other words, even though many people are freeloaders, and even those that contribute do so very unevenly, this imbalance does not (in itself) damage the system. By the sheer scale of Wikipedia, for instance, 2 percent of the users is a broad enough base for it to all work out.

We are tempted to move into churchy stuff, but not yet. Two more observations. The first is a simple statement: most participants in a system are below-average. That sounds insulting, but it is true. In an imbalanced system like this, the average is well above most of the users (where the green meets the yellow above), so most people *are* below-average.

The second observation is that when we try to map out the "average" user of Wikipedia, there is no representative user, and the habits that come from thinking about averages are not merely useless, they're harmful. As Shirkey says, "You can't look for a representative, because none exists. Instead, you have to....concentrate not on the individual users but on the behavior of the collective."

So, to summarize, when it comes to wikipedia entries and involvement:
  • 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!
Who Gets Involved in the Church?

Now, what does this mean for the church? A former seminarian linked to the following report written by Dan Dick from the UMC's General Board of Discipleship (I can't find it in digital form except on this weird iPaper website...let's see how this embed trick works)


The article, if you can't read it, is the results of a 75,000 person survey that concludes that most mega-churches are filled with below-average Christians. No surprise. However, Dick's point is that in mega-churches, most of the attendees are far below average.
[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.”
Which, rightly so, has people angry from those churches.
“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.
But it is a fair picture, by their own admission. Bringing in Wikipedia's distribution of involvement, they match perfectly: 10% are on fire, 80% are spectators. The vast majority of Christians who are in broadcast-based churches are not involved beyond presence and pocketbooks.

But let's not point at the Six Flags over Jesus churches. Let's bring it down a bit. My church has a membership of 150. Of those, 1 is super-involved. My #2 is about half as involved as #1. Then the next 15 people are involved in various ways. My sunday morning attendance is about 40. And my CEO attendance (Christmas & Easter Onlys) is about 60. So you see the distribution of involvement matches perfectly with the mega-churches and Wikipedia alike.

Map out your church involvement. I bet you get the same graph.

The Long Tail of the Church and Wikipedia

The lesson from Wikipedia is that no matter how small the contribution, the entirety of the whole is better for it. That is a tough concept for the 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 secret of Wikipedia is this: By grabbing ahold of the long tail of ministry, churches can experience significant renewal. It is exactly those small areas of ministry where the church can be renewed. Consider the following small groups that may be in your church or community:
  • 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?
Those are little examples of how to focus your energies on the small groups in your church. But it expands to denominational systems too. It is OK to have small churches! The "below-average" crowd (any church under 150 attendance, by most estimations) is the "long tail" of the Church and needs to be embraced to further grow the church.
  • 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.
C.K. Miller, in Next.Church.Now, writes that churches that are successful are those that tie worship to a discipleship system. By further empowering small groups, and focusing more of our church resources on the "long tail" of ministry, then we can experience renewal in the church.

What do you think? How can we grab ahold of the "long tail" of our church membership and encourage discipleship, while realizing that our traditional modes of ministry (worship, bible study, dedicated accountability groups) don't reach the long tail like they have in the past?

Thoughts? Comment below! Thanks for reading.

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Closed Systems of Discipleship & Accountability

Monday, May 12, 2008 Labels: , 1 comments

One of the basic tenets of hacking is that nothing is impenetrable.

  • No matter how closed the system becomes, there is still a chance for breaking into it.
  • The more closed a system becomes, the more restrictions are placed on the insiders of the system.
  • Thus, a proper balance must be made between closed doors and openness for a system to breathe and properly run.
As the United Methodist Church limps away from General Conference 2008, there is one unresolved question: how closed will our system be for the next four years? How closed will our ordination process be? How closed will our doctrines be? How closed will our church membership be? How closed will our interfaith dialogue be?

The question of "how closed will our system be?" is one asked in many areas of life, and the most consistent answer may surprise you.
  • The more closed that systems become, the more harmful they become to insiders of that system.

Music & movie security hurts consumersWe see this in the world of music and movies. With the creation of Digital Rights Management (DRM), there are more layers of security on music and videos to keep people from copying them. However, people who bought legitimate downloaded MLB videos were eventually unable to play them or obtain refunds. Sony CDs often won't play in your computer, and even if they do, Sony installed rootkits in them to compromise your computer. Even supposedly DRM-free iTunes music has your account info embedded in it. In short, even though DRM is easily surpassed by hackers, people who legitimately bought the media get hurt.

How closed should the system be?

We see this in the world of public policy. My home state of Oklahoma has some of the most stringent anti-immigration laws on the books. A recent op-ed in USA Today has this to say:
Oklahoma, which has one of the toughest new laws, now bars illegal immigrants from receiving state services, requires employers to verify that new workers are legal, gives people a way to sue companies that hire illegal immigrants, and makes it a felony to transport, harbor or conceal an illegal immigrant. It was meant to be harsh, and it is.

It's also undeniably effective. Oklahoma Hispanic groups estimate that as many as 25,000 left the state after the law was approved last year. School attendance dropped, workers disappeared, church attendance shrank and Latino businesses lost customers.

...By intent, the laws have also hit businesses, which have scrambled to replace lost workers. Employers say they're being asked to become immigration police with imperfect tools. A study in Oklahoma predicted that the law could cost the state's economy more than $1 billion a year, and a firm that specializes in finding new locations for businesses said some companies have crossed Oklahoma off their lists.

Harsh immigration policies destroy legal ethnic communitiesThe more closed a system gets, the more people inside the system it hurts. The legitimate Hispanic-serving businesses close up shop, my pastor friend's Hispanic UM church closed, and yet illegal immigrants still live in Oklahoma or simply move one state over. The system is closed, but who is truly paying the price?

How closed should the system be?

We see this in the church. General Conference failed to address church membership in a meaningful way, so in the meantime the Judicial Councils' JC1032 decision regarding pastoral authority in determining church membership stands:
As part of these administrative responsibilities the pastor in charge of a United Methodist church or charge is solely responsible for making the determination of a person's readiness to receive the vows of membership.
By all accounts, and including the dissenting opinions, this decision renders that pastors have sole authority to determine church membership readiness. By giving pastors the gateway, without accountability to a DS or the laity, pastors can, in the words of Jon Capen:
Because of the majority’s ruling, pastors across our great connection will not only enjoy the rights and privileges of ordination, they will also enjoy the additional power, discretion and authority that are now ordained by judicial fiat. Pastors will be able to screen out persons seeking membership to safeguard our churches against all varieties of sinners. While churches without sinners may be a precursor of heaven, the decision to pursue such a path must, under our system of church governance be made by the General Conference after the idea has been debated, tested and refined in the legislative processes of our church.

Lack of diversity in congregations hurt its mission and ministryWhen the gateways of a church (click for bible study) are not accountable to the church, then the system is closed, the gate guarded by one entity who has discretion to keep out potential disciples of Christ from the merits and privileges of membership because of whatever fatal flaw they have.

How closed should the system be?


Like DRM which tries to keep pirates from stealing music, and public policies which try to keep immigrants from stealing jobs, our membership policies are put into place to keep thieves from our churches.
  • Thieves who would join a church just to get a discount on weddings and funerals (see my post here: Top-down polity v. bottom-up policy)
  • Thieves with different theological backgrounds who will try to steal our church's long-standing (and thus...correct) identity.
  • Thieves who are just here to worship and not get involved with any disciple-making opportunities.
  • Thieves who would join a church to try to remove the pastor by gaining church membership en masse.
It is human nature to despise thieves and keep them from circles of trust, and that is reflected in JC1032 and the debates on the floor. However, is that really a human nature that we want reflected in our polity and practice in the church...fear of thieves?

Our church leadership has failed us in guiding us to better standards of membership that are not based on fear. It's time for us to do something about it. Following the local policy is better than upper polity model, local church policies can be put in place that render a pastor's decision accountable to the church in some manner.
  • Maybe submit a petition or policy to your local Charge Conference to get a report from the pastor why they denied membership to someone. Not restricting pastoral authority, that's against the Discipline, but ensuring pastoral accoutability. Because if any pastor makes a cookie-cutter church and allows in only those who would keep the system closed, that pastor should be accountable.
  • If you are a pastor or layperson in leadership, sponsor a round-table discussion on standards of membership. If you have education in that background or get some resources, it can be enlightening to your membership.
Church polity such as unaccountable pastoral authority in membership are satisfying for those who want to keep out thieves. But they worsen a polarized atmosphere that ill-serves our great denomination and breeds mistrust and fear.

In short, closed systems of discipleship hurt the church if there is not accountability. There must be grace in discerning membership readiness. And ultimately there must be more trust in God to change a person's heart than we can judge. Maybe some stronger and more articulate local church policies on membership can help our congregations come to stronger understandings of what membership looks like.

We are the ones who are being hurt by pastors who make cookie-cutter churches, and by laity who are silent and only friendly to those who look like them. By basing membership on suspicion, we are further from the kingdom of God.

Your turn: what do you make of this? What policies or standards would help us embrace one another not out of fear, but out of a shared sense of mission? What very real situations should we be aware of to guide us to a balance of accountability and accessibility?

Just so there's no guessing...my take? Love them all. Let God sort them out.

Thoughts?

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What the Church can Learn from Wikipedia [1of4]

Wednesday, May 7, 2008 Labels: , , 10 comments

Here's my promised series on "What the Church can learn from Wikipedia." It will be a weekly series, every Wednesday in May.

Wikipedia is the internet phenomenon of an encyclopedia of knowledge that anyone can edit and contribute to. It is largely self-regulated by passionate wikipedians (is that the proper term?) who remove false information and vandalism. Over time, Wikipedia articles get better and more accurate. While hard to believe that an encyclopedia that anyone can edit could possibly work, it is a phenomenon because it DOES work!

The Church (United Methodist or any bureaucratically organized church) can learn a lot from Wikipedia in the way they initiate new ministries. Read on for more...

Clay Shirkey, in Here Comes Everybody, writes about the origins of Wikipedia

Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia in 2001 as an experimental offshoot of their original idea, a free online encyclopedia of high quality called Nupedia. Nupedia was to be written, reviewed, and managed by experts volunteering their time. (pg. 109)
Too many hoops stunt new ideas' growth.As Shirkey continues, the bolded section was the downfall of Nupedia. In the first nine months, it finished only 20 articles because of the reviews and hoops articles had to jump through to "get out there." If any section of the seven-stage process of publishing hung up, then it would take forever to get an article out the door.

Hence, a few months later, they created the polar opposite to Nupedia: Wikipedia, the encyclopedia that anyone could edit.
Wikipedia surpassed Nupedia in the total number of articles in its first few weeks of existence. By the end of the year, with fifteen thousand articles in place and the rate of growth continuing to increase, two things were clear: Wikipedia was viable, and Nupedia was not. (pg. 113)
Ease of beginning new things promotes growth.The crucial difference between the two was that it was easier to initiate new articles in Wikipedia. All you had to do was create a placeholder with a few words, and others would come and add to it. The threshold to contribution was very low, almost ground level, and thus the ease of contribution lowered immensely!

This is the crucial point, and as a final quote, Shirkey shows why this is important.
Since anyone can act, the ability of the people in charge to kill initiatives through inaction is destroyed. This is what befell Nupedia; because everyone working on that project understood that only experts were to write articles, no one would even begin an article they knew little about, and as long as the experts did nothing (which, on Nupedia, is mostly what they did), nothing happened...In a system where anyone is free to get something started, however badly, a short, uninformative article can be the anchor for the good article that will eventually appear. (pg. 121)
By leaving ministry to "experts" we are sucking energy from new ideas.When we leave ministry to the experts, we are stunting ministry. As Disciples of Jesus Christ, we are called to reach out to the world in relevant ways. But how many of those relevant ways do we really try? Why not leave those to the pastor and other established laity...they are experts! They know better!

We structure our churches to squash new ideas and 'professionalize' ministry. Consider the typical church process for a new evangelism initiative: to send out a mailing to known middle school students showing the parallels between Iron Man and Jesus Christ. That's hip, right?
  • First, someone with the idea pitches it to the pastor...after all, she's the expert, right?
  • It has to be approved by the pastor, at least in the tentative stages.
  • Finance decides if there is funding for the mailing.
  • The Evangelism committee makes the mailing (or, more likely, leaves it to one person to work on their spare time).
  • Finance committee again decides if there is money for the mailing and sends it to Administrative Council.
  • Administrative Council approves it at their monthly meeting.
  • The pastor approves the final product.
  • The church secretary has to filter through the phone book for all middle-school age families.
  • The church office has to find volunteers to lick stamps and put it all together.
  • BAM! It is mailed out.......6 months after the movie came out.
Like Nupedia, our church structure 'professionalizes' ministry, and along the chain of authorization, the impetus behind the topic loses steam. If it works, and if the people pushing it are thorough, then yes, a lot of people can get behind it and it has a polished look. But the timing is off and out-of-sync with culture, and often ministry ideas can lose out to the church calendar.

What if rough, unpolished ministry ideas were let loose? The Horror!What if your church structure looked like Wikipedia and allowed for "rough" forms of ministry to try out? Untried, unfinished, possibly disastrous forms of ministry. Doesn't that scare you? It should...can you imagine our reputation if we let un-thought-thru forms of ministry run amok? (*cough* like sponsoring Halo game nights, anyone?) But if Wikipedia taught champions of Nupedia that dedicated amateurs could be better than professional products, then can't our ministry initiatives learn the same thing?

It could start like this:
  • It could begin with an unstructured think tank, like people batting around ridiculous ideas during a coffee break or while watching kids at the park.
  • Inviting fresh peeps to committee meetings, and purposefully giving them time and the courage to offer feedback and ideas.
  • "Just doing it!" on a small scale: a bible study participant emailing everyone in a bible study about the parallels between Iron Man and Jesus Christ, then beginning a weekly email on Christ figures in the media...which could then turn into a short-term bible study.
  • This may sound crazy....but actually offering leadership training NOT TO YOUR COMMITTEE PEOPLE could lead, I don't know, to MORE LEADERS. Something like a non-leaders' leaders' training, where everyone knew everyone else was on the same level.

Offer tools for growing good ideas, and safeguards against bad ideasThe key is giving as much freedom as possible to the regular parishioners, and not concentrating power in your committees and "experts." By allowing regular members to start ministries, it can get really scary really quick...but if like Wikipedia you build in mechanisms to remove harmful ministries and funnel energy towards viable ones, then you may have a bottom-up energy for ministry in your congregation...and nothing else can stand before that!

There you have it: the Wikipedia way of starting new ministries. Put it out there in raw, unfinished form, and see who will champion them and make them better! This is also the HackingChristianity way of doing things: bottom-up ideas are often better than top-down ones that follow a bureaucratic structure.

Thoughts on these ideas? I know, they are scary as yesterday's meatloaf, but can Wikipedia teach us a thing or two about ministry, and expose how the way we professionalize ministry stunts its effectiveness?

Your thoughts are appreciated!

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UMC Hymnal Survey: The power and peril of online groups

Wednesday, April 9, 2008 Labels: , 3 comments

While this is a ministry-oriented blog, I will throw in other entertaining stuff related to my stated interests: ministry, social justice, and internet-age group theory.

This post somehow incorporates all three. Really.

Reading through Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, he talks about motivation in the internet age is influenced through a plausible promise: the action called for must be "big enough to inspire interest, yet achievable enough to inspire confidence."

One such plausible promise that ties this all together is the RickRolling of the New York Mets by Fark.com. (Rickrolling is defined here, example is in this video of the Pope falling down the stairs) Fark.com had its readers fill out an online poll for a new in-game song for the Mets with the Rick Astley song. Low barrier to entry (filling out an online form), high anticipation of success (Fark's fanbase is huuuge). It won, and forced the Mets to an in-game run-off to neutralize the power of online groups. By raising the barrier to entry (namely forcing in-game participation), they removed the plausible promise of success of an organized online group.

Also, Stephen Colbert regularly uses internet groups to deface Wikipedia, name a bridge after Colbert, and other online hijinks. Colbert has definitely discovered Shirky's balance of "big enough and easy enough" by choosing obnoxious targets with online voting. Wikipedia neutralized the Colbert threat by locking page edits and forcing people to wait a few days to be able to edit their pages. By raising the barriers to entry, they removed the plausible promise of a rabid Colbert fan base.

So, to the question at hand (reworded a bit):
What is the plausible promise for ministry groups trying to influence church doctrine?


Recently reported by T.L.Steinwert is the results of the UMH Hymnody survey. The online survey had a relatively low barrier to entry, and thanks to the renewal groups, a call for populist outrage. The Good News movement requested this:

We would encourage you to participate in a hymnal survey being done currently by the church. You can share your ten most favorite hymns as well as the ten least favorite that you would like to see removed from the hymnal. Hymns such as "I Am Your Mother," "Mother God," and "Womb of Life" to just name several, have problems theologically. They would be good for your removal list.
I'm sure the other groups did too, this is just the online one I could find online evidence for.

There were 4,000ish responses. Here's the results of the bottom 20 for The Faith We Sing supplement:
1 12% Mothering God, You Gave Me Birth FWS 2050
2 10% I Am Your Mother FWS 2059
3 9% Womb of Life FWS 2046
4 8% She Comes Sailing on the Wind FWS 2122
5 7% Bring Many Names FWS 2047
6 3% A Mother Lined a Basket FWS 2189
Well, the plausible promise of the survey was achieved for the renewal groups. 6 songs with feminine images of God at the bottom 6. Well done.

But wait...what about the bottom 20 of the UMH Hymnal?
1 17% Daw-Kee, Aim Daw-Tsi-Taw 330
2 14% ¡Canta Débora, Canta! 81
3 13% Battle Hymn of the Republic 717
4 13% America (My Country, ‘Tis of Thee) 697
5 12% Onward, Christian Soldiers 575
6 18% America the Beautiful (O Beautiful…) 696
7 10% Camina, Pueblo de Dioa (Walk on…) 305
8 10% Jaya Ho Jaya Ho 478
9 9% Am I a Soldier of the Cross 511
10 9% Cantemos al Señor (Let’s Sing unto the Lord…) 149
11 8% En el Frio Invernal (Cold December) 233
12 8% Cuando el Pobre (When the Poor Ones) 434
13 8% As Man and Woman We Were Made 642
14 7% Nothing but the Blood (What Can Wash Away) 362
15 7% Silence, Frenzied, Unclean Spirit 264
16 7% There Is a Fountain Filled with Blood 622
17 7% De Tierra Lejana Venimos (From a Distant Home) 243
18 7% In the Garden 314
19 6% Heleluyan, Heleluyan 78
20 6% God of the Sparrow, God of the Whale 122
Holy carp. Look at the bolded entries. 9 outta the bottom 20 of least favorite songs are from other cultures? What kind of message are we sending to the worldwide United Methodist Church that songs from other cultures are distasteful?

It reminds me of when the Renewal groups were going to picket a Reconciling Ministries event at Lake Junaluska. They decided not to show up when the KKK said they would stand side-by-side with them. They didn't want their theological outrage to be associated with the racist and homophobic outrage of a white supremacy group.

Well, here's the difficult moment, isn't it? Alongside theological outrage at feminine images of God is ethnocentric discomfort with songs from other cultures. Let's be clear: I won't try to prove there is causation in this correlation, or even that the same people voting against feminist images of God are also voting against other culture's songs. But whenever ethnocentrism and anti-feminism collide, I am curious and wary of the results.

I see these disappointments coming from this online poll:
  • What the UMC authorities wanted was a response to their survey. What they got was a heavily politicized response that may be honest, but heavily influenced by renewal groups and caucus groups (the liberal/progressives were heard clearly too, with the battle "victory in Jesus" and blood atonement songs also in the bottom 20 of the UMH)
  • What the renewal groups wanted was outrage at feminine images of God. What they got was a survey where the majority of the least favorite songs are songs that are from our international brothers and sisters: the very people the renewal groups depend on for mostly-consistent conservative votes at General Conference.
  • What the United Methodist worship leaders wanted was a handy poll to show what songs people really like. What worship leaders in the bible belt got was little incentive to introduce songs from other cultures...because clearly, they are not welcome.
So, where do we go from here? All the tenets of an open system like United Methodism lead us to suspect these trends:
  • Surely the UMC Hymnal would get only MORE diverse as we incorporate more world voices. There will be even MORE songs that whitebread bible-belt America will be uncomfortable with. The christian symbolism will get even MORE diverse with different cultures.
  • But at the same time, group efforts to REMOVE diversity in opinion become easier to sustain. The barriers to entry of lots of people in the internet age will lower or collapse, so we will see MORE of the group-action like this and will have to deal with the responses we get.
  • I realize the UMC has a built-in defense: General Conference. Like the NY Mets and Wikipedia, the barrier to actually change and make decisions is high. But on the public image side, there are no such barriers: anyone with a following can influence public perception of the UMC. How can we vote for unity when the bitter taste of divided opinions becomes louder?
How do we as a church encourage unity in diversity in an internet age where groups wanting to remove diversity have a much stronger voice?

I don't have an answer. But maybe this link does. Discuss.

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More than a Brand Name

Friday, April 4, 2008 Labels: , 0 comments

To start us out, this is Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody, who writes internet theory and group dynamics theory.



This is frivolous, since it is on Colbert, but I'll post other vids of Shirky later. For now, read on for my thoughts on group dynamics challenging the institutional power structure.



The topic of how the internet is changing group dynamics is fascinating to me as a pastor.

Shirky writes that there are now abilities for groups to get together without institutional backing, without institutions dictating how they act. Prior to the internet, there was no simple medium for people to speak out. If you did speak out and find either a newspaper or just a soapbox (ala Wesley), it was localized and could be stifled at great personal cost to yourself. Not so in the digital age! Even though there are issues of truthfulness and fact-twisting, the simple ability of getting your message out or finding others with similar issues...well, the cost is zero. There's much more of this in his book, which I'll respond to in coming weeks.

But for now, the guiding question: How does the internet, with its new abilities at organizing people, affect the Church?

For groups that seek to collaborate together to change church doctrine, this is revolutionary. Groups that seek to change Church stances (on everything from ordination of women to missionary fields to accountability for sins of omission) can find like-minded people through the internet and coordinate. We've seen this for the past few years, so this is nothing new. By being able to find the pockets of people and coordinate or commisserate has led to many renewal or doctrinal reconsideration efforts by various groups in the United Methodist Church (to name one!).

So, with all this power being shifted to the people groups and grassroots level, at what point will the Institutional Church have no power whatsoever and be simply a brand name for all these quarreling groups?

Some feel we have already gotten to this point in the Untied Methodist Church, but I think there will always be the "Methodist Middle" who do not affiliate and are the rocks that keep the church together even in the face of differing groups. We started this process of considering unity in GC2004 (with the GC voting and opposing the grassroots "amicable separation" movement of the renewal groups), so I'll be very interested in this dynamic in a few weeks at GC2008.

What do you think? With group organizing now at the grassroots level, communication channels growing faster for them than hierarchical structures, and the echo-chamber of ideas becoming more and more prevalent...how can the UMC remain more than a Brand?



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