Showing posts with label wikipedia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label wikipedia. 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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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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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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