There is an interesting article on the Leadership site by Jonathan Acuff who explores the pros and cons of tweeting. As someone who has entered the Twittersphere in the last few months I have found it a better experience than I expected. It has given me one more channel to keep the conversation live! with people. And it is quicker than a conventional blog, so when time is really a premium it has enabled me to keep in touch.
There are of course drawbacks to Twitter, and for those of us using it I am sure we are still finding our way through by our mistakes. I know I am.
Well, it was only a matter of time, I guess. Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill in Seattle have developed their own iPhone Mars Hill app.
It allows you to:
Listen to any Mars Hill sermon available on marshillchurch.org
Watch any Mars Hill sermon video
Stream any Mars Hill music
Email sermon links to your friends
Give to the mission of Mars Hill
Stay informed and up to date through the blog
Get campus locations and listings
The blub on their site reads:
"At Mars Hill we live for Jesus as a city within the city — knowing
culture, loving people, and seeing lives transformed for Jesus. Part of
that mission is utilizing the technology available to us to reach as
many people as we can in our cities and around the world.
God has often used technological advancement to spread the Gospel
through the church. At the time of Paul it was the Roman’s system of
roads. For the Reformers it was the printing press. For Billy Graham
it was sound amplification systems and stadiums. For Mars Hill, we have
been blessed to have the opportunity to use the advances in video and
internet distribution."
Anyone else out there heard of a church developing an app or, for that matter, any other church organisation?
As ever I have far too many books on the go and often fail
reading them from cover to cover, but one book that I am finding hard to put
down is a book that I had recommended by Management Today:Throwing Sheep into
the Boardroom by Matthew Fraser and Soumitra Dutta (Wiley).
In a nutshell, it’s about how online social network media is
changing the way we live life, work and, indeed, the world. For instance, did social network sites like
Bebo and Facebook really help fuel the tragic suicides in Bridgend, as
suggested by the news media?
What I find interesting from a Christian perspective is the co-authors‘ reference to Christianity.
A lot of our identity, whether Christian or not, is drawn from
the dominant value systems around us like School, Community, Government and the
Church. For us in new church movements we might think we are free from
institutional thinking, but I am afraid we are more affected than we think.
One of the main reasons given why the early church was a
frustration for the Jewish authorities and Romans was because it had little regard
for hierarchy, i.e. it thought horizontally, not vertically. It was a network of impassioned and highly
motivated believers, who learnt not to be bound by culture or nationality and were
often well out of their comfort zone. But nothing would stop them from
spreading the word – thankfully for us.
Later on through the centuries the Catholic Church looked to get organised and borrowed the Roman law system, and name, to become the
Roman Catholic Church. Thus, with the eventual demise of Roman empire the
Church ironically became one itself.
Centuries later, much is made about Philippe le Bel, the
King of France being upset with egocentric papal-blessed Knights Templar
because they were not an accountable institution, but a network and answerable only to the pope. (It is probably
best to keep quiet that they were the forefathers of investment banking in the
present climate.) Their non-hierarchical style and influence was an irritation,
so he set about rubbishing their reputation and eventually outlawed them, which conveniently
in the process saw their property and assets seized and the Vatican
moved to France where the king could put his own man in.
There is a desire even today among institutions to control
non-hierarchical networks, such as online social network sites. For a lot of people it is
messy, dangerous, unaccountable. In short, it is far too democratic – as everybody now has a louder voice and is becoming increasingly fearless to
use it.
Is this the start of the
breakdown of society?Or does it give
rise to new opportunities? An an optimist, I would like to think the latter. I
think of those early Christians who were horizontal thinkers and how radical
they were. Rather than trying to convert the authorities with a vertical approach
they talked peer to peer.
The authors of the book say that one of the fruit of the Web
2.0 culture will be not how we treat people we know, but how we treat
strangers. Interesting, don't you think?
Lastly, it is no coincidence that online organisations now have people with job titles such as Chief Evangelists. Just goes to show there
really is nothing new under the sun.
This week I have been involved in a healthy discussion with other
Christian bloggers where, alongside other stuff, we looked at a theology of Web
2.0. Nothing unusual in that you may say, until I tell you it was face-to-face!
Shock! Horror! Gasp!
Having maybe picked yourself off the floor and imagining me
relating to real people in the flesh, you may still be slightly cloudy over
what Web 2.0. actually stands for. Allow me to elaborate very quickly.
When we first discovered the joy of websites they were set
up as informational sites.It was where
we went to be told what an organisation or company did.In essence, it was where we found an online
version of a printed document.
Then along came Web 2.0, a wholly new revolutionary form of online
communication. The internet was no longer a monologue, but an interactive
stream, allowing ‘conversations’. The arrival of Web 2.0 applications such as FaceBook,
MySpace, Wikipedia, Flickr, Typepad, Skype and, of course, YouTube meant that we
could create our own content and publish it for the world to see. We no longer
needed to be spoon-fed content. We can now choose to not only digest what we
want, but also hold any shape ‘spoon’ we wanted too.
But along with that new-found freedom has come some
challenges, such as people will post anything and everything and editorial
control has become a challenge.We can
no longer edit the information we want people to read. Where there was once
just one version of the Bible in Latin which only the monk or educated priestly
scholar could own, read and interpret for the masses, everyone can now have access to
information and can interpret it in their own way.
I guess it is the
ultimate experience of Western Liberal Democracy at work, which is why the
Chinese authorities had such a hard time at the recent Olympics in Beijing.
With that freedom we criticise people, leak secrets, devalue
world brands with our stories of flaws in people, products and bad customer
service experience.I remember a US bike
lock company went almost bust because someone posted a video showing how you
could unlock a bike and ride off on it with just a Bic biro. This became one of
the earliest and most successful virals ever.
Right now all over the planet people are having
conversations with strangers. The chances are they will never meet each other.Then there is the FaceBook
community. If you are on this application, you’ll have people who are vaguely
familiar to you requesting that you accept them as a friend, so do you?
There appears to be minimal accountability on the internet.
You can call yourself anything, say anything, believe anything and feel
nothing. I know this bothers a number of churches and institutions.
One of the things I love about bloggers is that the majority
of them, like me, are not famous. They are not celebrities.Many write because they need to write. And I
think that is not a bad reason to blog.
So the question is, do we, the Web 2.0 generation want our
experiences or preferences to continue in the same way in our offline world.
For instance, if we go to church, do we want to be preached at or have a
conversation?
Do we stay within our comfortable church community of
like-mindedness and take everything the pastor, like me, says for granted or do
we look for the opportunity to say, “What do you mean?...What if...I am not sure I
totally go along with that...Can I just ask a question here?”
Another issue is the apparent loss of absolute truth.
For instance, I heard a fact recently that if anything is
put up on Wiki connected to Islam and is wrong it is corrected in less than two
minutes. I guess this is where life gets interesting. I was thinking that
where Web 1.0 had one contributor/writer/editor (or at most a selected body of
experts) Web 2.0 has literally thousands of contributors. For example, I
read that there are 75,000 editors on Wiki alone. We, therefore, are starting
to take our truth from the many, not the one. Does this lead to
relativism or can The Truth still find a way through? One of the emerging
strengths of Web 2.0 culture is surely self-regulation. It takes a strong
dislike to anyone trying to conform it to its way of thinking.
This made me think about the Bible’s reliability.Being as Christians are a ‘one book’ people,
it could be seen at first glance as being very Web 1.0, but actually that is
far from the case, as scholars will tell us.
It is noted that while historians usually settle on a few or
even a single fragmented eye-witness account, the Bible is made up of literally
dozens of individual sources which were reviewed for patterns of consistency (I’ve got the actual number somewhere, but don’t have it at hand).
Maybe, just
maybe some books of the Bible were written later than their time of happening
to ensure the sources were validated and tallied with one another before
committing to print. An interesting thought, isn’t it? Maybe this goes to show
that there really isn’t anything new under the Sun, just the language and
experience of contextualisation.
So there are some challenges for the Christian Church today.
But these are my mutterings, what’s your take on it?
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