Church 2.0

I’ve been blogging some thoughts on church innovation, sparked by Tom Kelley’s book The Ten Faces of Innovation. The subtitle of the book is "Strategies for beating the devil’s advocate and driving creativity throughout your organization."

Well, Seth Godin has a scathing post up of actual quotes taken from blogs that illustrate how a devil’s advocate can crush innovation and keep the status quo firmly in place. Some of my favorites:

• "That will never work."
• "Can you show me some research that demonstrates that this will work?"
• "Well, if you had some real-world experience, then you would understand."
• "Well, this might work for other people, but I think we’ll stick with what we’ve got."
• "It’s never been done before."
• "We’ll get back to you on this.

I find Kathy Sierra’s Creating Passionate Users blog to be one of the most consistently helpful reads for me in thinking through issues of church leadership. Which would seem odd, since the blog is about helping companies create people who are passionate about their products. But then maybe that’s not so odd, because the church is all about making disciples of Jesus Christ who are passionate about seeing his kingdom come, seeing his will done on earth. Creating passionate users is a lot like creation passionate disciples, I guess.

Kathy wonders if your users are stuck in "P" mode.

From the article:

Several weeks’ back I took a one-night Digital SLR class, and at the
beginning the teacher asked us each to say why we were there. All 18 of
us said the same thing, one after the other: "I know I have an SLR that
can do so many things, but I’m still stuck in "P"–Program Mode–and I
don’t know how to use anything else." In other words, we were all using
our pricey bazillion-megapixel cameras like point-and-shoot
disposables.

Here we are with all this power and flexibility, and we can’t get past AUTOMATIC.

So here’s what I’m wondering: are the people in your church stuck in "P" mode, only understanding the very basic uses of their new life in Christ? Are people tapping into the power and creativity and vitality of the new kind of life God has given them through the Holy Spirit, or is their ability to live Christianly perhaps very limited? Do they understand all the wonderfully varied and creative things that can be accomplished with a life lived fully, or is going to church and being nice the only thing they know how to do with their Christianity? Are people learning how to minister to and pray for one another, or just how to bring their friends to church so the "pros" can pray for them? Are people learning to think intelligently and Christianly about the world, or are they simply being fed pre-approved answers? "We’ve done the hard work for you, just put it in ‘P’ mode and take the picture."

Are we as leaders really equipping people to "do the work of ministry" (Eph 4:12) or are we only equipping them to staff programs? Are we teaching people how to live a full-featured faith, or are we stopping after they learn the basics? I suspect that in most churches, the expensive, feature-filled digital camera of Christianity is being used like a cheap point-and-shoot camera. We’re not tapping into the depth of the Christian life because it’s safer to just keep it in "P" mode. You won’t screw up as many pictures that way (it’s "safe"), but your pictures sure will be boring (safe is risky).

If we’re going to faithfully lead people, we’ll need to take them out of the safety of "P"-mode Christianity and show them some new things, like shutter-priority mode, aperture-priority mode, and possibly even (shudder to think) FULL MANUAL MODE! With a little knowledge, people might just start experimenting with the camera faith, creating some truly innovative pictures ministries that tap the depths of new life in Christ. It will take the intelligent application of new knowledge and new skills, and there’ll be a few bad pictures mistakes along the way, but the result will be much more creative and useful pictures Christian living. Let’s teach people to use all the features of their faith.

Yesterday I introduced something called the Participation Problem. The biblical ideal is for participational, missional communities, but the cultural reality is that people don’t want to participate, because they’ve been trained to simply consume and stay quiet (oh, and give us your money). How do we bridge the gap?

In the same article I mentioned before, Bill Simmons thinks back to being a Celtics fan during the Larry Bird era in the 80’s (for those who don’t know, Larry Bird is regularly called Basketball Jesus, for his phenomenal play and the way he "saved" the NBA, so to speak), and how things are so different now:

We didn’t need a Jumbotron or musical prompts to tell us what to do.
When the Celts were introduced, we screamed for every starter and saved
one extra decibel level for Bird. When we needed a defensive stop, we
stood and shouted at the top of our lungs. When Bird found a wide-open
cutter for one of his gorgeous no-looks, we were cheering even as the
pass was being delivered — that’s how attuned we were to his passing
skills and how they spilled over to everyone else on the team. The best
moments happened when the C’s would blow someone off the floor and
force a timeout, and the roof would practically come off, and we’d keep
cheering and cheering — all the way through the timeout, no organ
music, no other noise, nothing. That’s how we judged the level of
excellence, by how long everyone felt obligated to cheer. If we made it
all the way through the timeout, the horn would sound, which only made
us cheer louder because we had lasted so long. I’m telling you, there
was nothing quite like it. And this happened all the time.

Things are different now, though:

During Angels games in baseball, the crowd waits to make noise until a
monkey appears on the scoreboard. You can’t attend an NHL game without
hearing the opening to "Welcome to the Jungle" 90 times. Even our NFL
games have slipped — you cheer when the players run out, cheer on
third downs, cheer on scores and sit the rest of the time. It’s a
crying shame.

I agree with Bill. And I think we’ve seen the same stuff happen in our churches. When was the last time we couldn’t sing the next song because everyone was singing too loud? When was the last time we got a little too rowdy during worship? We’ve settled for spectatorism and consumerism because we’ve found that fighting it is a very steep hill to climb. Also because we recognize that we can’t simply "hype" people into participation. We can’t be the announcer at the ballgame, whipping people up into obligatory, forced applause ("I can’t hear you! Lemme hear you make some noise!"). It has to come from somewhere deeper inside if it’s going to be authentic.

But how realistic is it to think that everyone will be a participator? A recent Guardian article suggests that there is an emerging rule of thumb that says if you get 100 people online, one will create content, 10 will interact with the content in some way, and the other 89 will just view it. It’s called the 1% Rule (1% of people will create online content, 10% will interact with it, and 89% will just look at it). At the very least, it should give us a reality check about the plausibility of an entire congregation interacting online. The article was specifically talking about online content, not church services or community life, but I wonder if there are similar percentages in churches, and if this is just the way it is, or if we should be thinking bigger.

[Read more…] about The Participation Problem, pt. 2

Here’s how the Participation Problem goes in my head. Biblically, participation is where it’s at. Priesthood of all believers / everyone has a gift to share with others / equipping the saints for the work of ministry. It’s all over the place, and it’s a beautiful picture. However, in my experience, people resist this. We have been taught that things should be left up to "experts", and in most areas of life, we have relegated our normal participation to the experts. For example, people don’t fix their own cars anymore, because they’re too complicated. We hire experts to fix our cars. This is probably fine, but we do the same thing with our spirituality, and that’s not fine. We relegate our spirituality to experts, and we somehow come to the topic as though we have nothing to offer, no way to genuinely participate, because there’s probably someone else out there who does it better than me, so can’t they just do it for me? An example:

Bill Simmons is my favorite sports columnist. In a recent article where he details his exercise of picking which English Premier League to follow this year, he mourned the death of participation in American sports, especially when comparing American sports fans to
European soccer fans.

European soccer stands out because of the superhuman energy of its fans
— the chants and songs, the nonstop cheering, the utter jubilation
whenever anything good happens, how the games seem to double as
life-or-death experiences — and I can’t help but wonder if that same
trait has been sucked out of our own sports for reasons beyond our
control. … By pricing out most of
the common fans and overwhelming the ones who remained, professional
sports leagues in this country made a conscious decision: We’d rather
hear artificially created noise than genuine noise. That’s the biggest
problem with sports in America right now. And there’s no real way to
solve it.

We’d rather hear artificially created noise than genuine noise. Wow. In the church, would we rather hear 5-6 great singers and musicians perform a song, or would we rather sing the song ourselves? Would we rather have our sound systems make noise, or make a joyful noise ourselves? G.K. Chesterton began to see this kind of trend even in his day, saying that men used to sing choruses around tables, but instead now we have one person sing the chorus into the microphone for the "absurd reason" that they can do it better than everyone else (I love the way that guy thought!).

I have sometimes wondered if our own technology (or more accurately, the way we use
our technology) often conspires against us as we try to build
missional, participational communities. I wonder if the way we use our
sound systems and video projetors and multi-media presentations have
turned our congregations into compliant spectators, and it’s no wonder there’s hardly any genuine participation or spontaneous emotion in our meetings. Of course, those technologies aren’t doing anything in and of themselves, but the way we use them is doing something to the character of our communities.

Part of the problem, of course, is that this is the direction our entire culture is heading. There isn’t nearly as much spontaneous, genuine cheering at sporting events; people wait to be prompted by the jumbotron, or goaded by the announcer ("I CAN’T HEAR YOU!"), or awoken by the blaring music. We watch hours and hours of TV every day, hardly ever choosing something to watch. It’s like our culture has been numbed into apathy. Normal rambunctiousness and precociousness has been called ADHD, we’ve been told to take our soma Ritalin, calm down and not be a nuisance.

With these kinds of cultural forces occurring, it’s no wonder we see similar things happening in the church. The problem is that the space between the biblical ideal (participation, mission) and the current reality (spectatorism, consumerism) is a big one. I can understand why people create communes and monasteries. And I’m not talking about retreating from life in a pouty way, like someone who can’t deal with reality, so they suck their thumb, pull the covers back over their head, and go back to sleep. The best monasteries aren’t ones that completely close themselves off to the outside world, but instead they are simply trying to create enough space to cultivate a genuine community in the midst of a culture that is hostile to community. From that place of strength they can engage the world.

Part 2 tomorrow: Old-school Celtics games, the 1% rule, and a way forward.