Pastors and Technology: We Need to Re-Imagine Our Roles

Some of the commenters from my post yesterday got me thinking about some things that I just briefly want to comment on.

I ended my post with two thoughts:

Two things I think pastors, church leaders need to start wrestling with if they haven’t already:

1) Shift from geographical based ministry to online community/networking based. This does not mean people still won’t gather, but how, where and when they gather will change.

2) Technology is allowing the people/congregants to self-organize, collaborate and participate without having to go through traditional means and hierarchies of the church. I think this will change the role of the pastor drastically from the top-down leader, to more of a facilitator. I think that means we will see less and less traditional roles of pastors, and maybe even less full-time positions, etc.

Here is what I’m thinking. And I’m thinking these things not on any official research I have done, but more on conversations I am having, trends I am seeing, what I am reading, etc.

One of the issues about #2 is that people are concerned about a “consumer” mentality in the Church…more than we already have now. Also, what will be the role of the pastor.

Couple of thoughts. And they are simply thoughts, not completely worked out, but stuff I am hypothesizing and thinking on.

I think the “modularity” of Church that Andrew Jones talked about won’t drive more church consumerism, but will actually reduce it.

Why? Because churches used to be the resource for all information (phone numbers, emails, addresses, theology, Christian education, prayer chains, etc.) and churches controlled the market on the ability to gather and organize. Think Sunday worship, Wed. night Bible studies, etc, etc. People traditionally have relied on the Church as the resource to gather people and dispense information.

Because of this, people would drive miles and miles to attend the church that could attract, gather and dispense the information for them. Often this process has pulled people out of community…driving miles and miles to attend a church that is not rooted in their community where they live, etc.

I think that now people can easily organize, collaborate and dispense information themselves, they will no longer need to rely on the Church as needing to fulfill that role. I think there will be a desire for people to organize and gather in their own communities of locality, rather than feeling the need to drive to churches who used to have to do that for them. I am not saying there will not be church or people won’t go to them. They will, but I think church will look different than it traditionally does now.

In Short: Technology=Ability to Organize and Collaborate=Congregants Taking the Responsibility Into Their Own Hands.

What about the pastor? I think there will always be the need for a pastor, but what is a pastor is my question? Have we possibly gotten away from the Biblical role of the pastor?

In the NT we see the correlation between the shepherd and pastor. I have been told before by some pastors that we are to be ranchers…not shepherds. That has a whole other connotation in my mind.

One commenter said that it’s actually not the pastors who do the shepherding anymore, but the small group leaders, etc. I agree with him. It’s hard to find a pastor who shepherds.

I believe that with the ability to gather, organize and collaborate that technology affords us, it frees up the pastor to do the work of actually shepherding, rather than being the CEO, rancher, etc. I used the word facilitator in yesterday’s post, and what I mean by that is that the Church is beginning to have the ability to organize on their own, which frees the pastor up to facilitate the movement and truly shepherd the people.

In Short: Technology=Ability to Organize and Collaborate=Congregants Taking the Responsibility Into Their Own Hands=Pastor Can Truly Be a Shepherd.

Of course my own theology and praxis is shining through there, some of which you may agree with, and some which you may not agree with.

But for any of this to take place (which I think is a great thing for the Church), churches, pastors and ministry leaders are going to have to let go of the “power” they have traditionally held, and instead be a church and people that walk humbly amongst the people they are there to serve. Even questioning their roles as pastors in the Church.

In closing, I’m aware that some traditions/denominations already seem to embody this theology and praxis. I wonder if Wess Daniels can shed some light on these thoughts in light of the Quaker tradition that he is a part of.

If you are wondering what to read on some of these issues, here are a few suggestions. There are a lot more, but here are some that I have found helpful and challenging. Please add to this list and let me know what you are reading that has been helpful in thinking about the issues of technology in redefining the role of pastors and the Church, especially as it relates to gathering, organizing, collaborating, etc.

Check Them Out

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations by Ori Brafman and Rod A. Beckstrom.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky.

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Dan Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams.

Facebook for Pastors: How To Build Relationships And Connect With People Using The Most Popular Social Network On The Internet by Chris Forbes

The New Media Frontier: Blogging, Vlogging and Podcasting for Christ, edited by John Mark Reynolds and Roger Overton

Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff

 

Technology and the Future of the Church

There are a lot of amazing things happening in the world of ministry and technology. So much so that it’s hard to keep up with all of it. Some churches are on the leading edge of innovation, while others are still trying to get a website put together. Wherever you fall on the spectrum, below are four links that might interest you from this past week.

First:
Author, blogger, video guru and Church 2.0 leader Greg Atkinson has a great post which basically introduces the Digerati Team from LifeChurch.tv, SPOTLIGHT: LifeChurch.tv’s Digerati Team. Many of you don’t know that there exists such a team on a church staff. But I think that trend is changing, and as you read the article you will definitely see their fingerprints all over the world of ministry and tech.

Greg says:

You might be wondering: “What in the world does “digerati” mean?” To get to the bottom of something, I go to Wikipedia. Wikipedia reads:”The digerati are the elite of the computer industry and online communities.” From what I know of my friends Terry Storch and Tony Steward (and the rest of the Digerati Team) this fits them very well.

Maybe you don’t recognize the team, but you may recognize their work. Here is what the Digerati team has been up to and is responsible for:

* YouVersion (Web, Mobile, and iPhone)
* OPEN
* ChurchMetrics
* Internet Campus
* LifeGroups
* LifeShare
* OnePrayer

Second:
If you can make it to Pasadena, CA this Friday, then you need to so that you can attend Church Tech Camp. It’s the first in what I think will be a growing group of church leaders who are on the innovative edge of integrating technology and ministry, especially as it relates to social media, web 2.0 tools. If you can’t make it, then watch the live stream of the get together. Not only is the technology and its use in ministry innovative, but the organization of the camp itself is on the leading edge. Check it out and you will see.

Third:
Check out Andrew Jones’ Powerpoint presentation from his talk at GodblogCon, The Missional Church in the Internet Age. You can listen to Andrew’s podcast as well at Podcasts of Godblogcon 2008, as well as all the others from there.

Fourth:
Godbloggers Prepare to Invade ‘Sin City’

 

The Dark Side of Living Online–Are You a Slave to Your Technology?

A few weeks ago I read a Twitter by social media guru Chris Brogan. His twitter was a link to the blog of Terry Starbucker. The post was titled Danger Will Robinson! The Downside of our Digital World.

And…it scared me to be honest.

Am I a slave to my technology is what I kept asking myself?

That’s a question we should all be asking ourselves. If Terry’s article was not enough, then read the article that spurred his post….you will have a lot to think about.

Connected, Yes, but Hermetically Sealed by Ben Stein

“MAN is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,” said Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

What would Rousseau have made of the modern-day balls and chains with which we shackle ourselves? They are not made of steel or iron, but of silicon and plastic and digits and electrons and waves zooming through the air. These are the chains of all kinds of devices, like the BlackBerry, the iPhone and the Voyager. These are the chains with which we have bound ourselves, losing much of our solitude and our ability to see the world around and inside us.

and

But try a day without that invasion of your privacy. Or a week. You will be shocked at what you discover. It’s called life. It’s called nature. It’s called getting to know yourself. I have a close friend who is in prison. He used to be imprisoned by his P.D.A. He has many stories, but the most haunting one is about how, without his phone, without his P.D.A., he has come to know, for the first time, who he is.

 

My 9 Posts for Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry (and ministry in general)

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry

• Part 1–Simplicity, Flexibility, Cost and Speed.
• Part 2–The Purpose of Your Website
• Part 3–Why You Should Be Blogging
• Part 4–Using Facebook Effectively
• Part 5–How Twitter Can Catalyze Your Ministry
• Part 6–Using Social Network Platforms as Your Central Hub
• Part 7–Flickr, YouTube and Other Forms of Sharing and Streaming
• Part 8–Ministry Collaboration Using Wikis
• Part 9–Opening Up Your Ministry’s API



Thoughts?

Suggestions?

Corrections?

Affirmations?

Resources?

I’m listening….

 

Thinking Out Loud: Making Disciples in an Age of Information Extraction

Caution: Thinking out loud as the title says, so a bit of a choppy post. But I’m curious of your thoughts.

It is often true that we look back at how we did something as being the only way something can be done. For example, if I took all these classes (Greek, Hebrew, exegetics, etc.) in seminary, then every student should take them to get that Master of Divinity. Or if ordination required A, B, and C, then I have to do A, B, and C as well. But often, we don’t re-evaluate how things are changing, and what things need to change along with them.

I’ve been thinking about this issue for several reasons, but primarily because I think the Church, and most often ministry gets caught in a pattern of doing things the way they have always been done, and fails to be innovative in its thinking. Don’t get me wrong though, many Churches are innovative in ways that need to be innovative, and not just for the sake of it.

So my thinking out loud concerns the amount of information now available to us online, and will continue to become available online. How will that change how we do things?

Last month Wired Magazine ran an incredible series of articles called The Petabyte Age: Because More Isn’t Just More–More Is Different. In this series one of the articles was The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete, and it begins with this:

Sixty years ago, digital computers made information readable. Twenty years ago, the Internet made it reachable. Ten years ago, the first search engine crawlers made it a single database. Now Google and like-minded companies are sifting through the most measured age in history, treating this massive corpus as a laboratory of the human condition. They are the children of the Petabyte Age.

The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy to — well, at petabytes we ran out of organizational analogies.

At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later. For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.

And thanks to Guy Kawasaki I came across this article World’s Oldest Bible Goes Online. This is just another classic example of what was not available to us before will now be online. Think how information like this will change seminary education, pastoring, Church life, etc. as it becomes more available online.

Ever been sitting there, late at night, thinking, “Gee, I’d like to find a good Bible quote, but how do I know if it’s been accurately translated?” Well, you’re in luck! Portions of the Codex Sinaiticus, dating from 350 and thought to have been written by early Egyptian Christians, will be available on the internet courtesy of the Russian National Library, British Library and St. Catherine’s monastery in its entirety by July of next year. The oldest complete version of the New Testament, the original text may baffle those unfamiliar with ancient Greek, but translations in English and German will also be made available. “A manuscript is going onto the net which is like nothing else online to date…It’s also an enrichment of the virtual world — and a bit of a change from YouTube,” commented the director of the Leipzig University Library.

So what does all this available information mean to us as pastors and leaders in the 21st Century?

A few months ago I wrote a post called The Changing Seminary–The Changing Pastor where Scott McClellan of Collide Magazine
interviews Craig Detweiler in the article Culture and Seminary. Here is a brief exchange:

Detweiler: No, that’s the right question. Seminaries were created in an era where ministers were prepared to have the most information. The ministers were supposed to be the most educated and the most informed about the Scriptures.

COLLIDE: The most literate maybe?

Detweiler: The most literate. And none of that has necessarily changed, but we’re now dealing with an age of too much information. And so, the job is to help people sort through all of the inputs to find out what matters amongst the avalanche of information. It’s about pointing people to reliable sources, pointing people to credible interpretations, inviting people into ongoing dialogue with their friends, neighbors, and coworkers around the pop cultural expressions. So, it’s moving the seminary education from pastor as most informed to pastor as most insightful because people no longer have an information problem. It’s not about lack of information. It’s about lack of discernment. Information is available to all. Wisdom and discernment remain rarer than ever.

Observation: As more and more information becomes available online we will need more and more discerning Christian leaders who can sift through all the information and apply/teach/preach it appropriately. But it seems to me that the Bible is not just information, or should not be reduced to that. I remember my Greek professor telling me that it’s not enough to simply know the meaning of a Greek word (caution to everyone who looks up the meaning online and assumes that’s how it is used in the NT), but one must understand the context of the word in that letter, how the author uses, it, etc, etc.

Question: So how do we cultivate discerning Christian leaders to not simply extract information, but grow disciples in such an age?

 

POST: Re-Structuring and Moving Collective Muse

We define the four-step POST process for creating strategies–people, objectives, strategy, and technology–and reveal why starting with the technologies is a mistake.

That is the advice I wish I would have read 6 months ago as I was thinking about creating the college ministry network Collective Muse.

I came across it in the must read book Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff.

In it they have developed the acronym POST which stands for the following:

P=People
O=Objectives
S=Strategy
T=Technology

When creating strategies for social media this is the process they recommend. Most of us think about the technology first, rather than thinking about the people who may use it. At least I do that. Hopefully not any more though.

But to create a community one was must think about the people first, and what objectives and strategies will help you accomplish your goal. Will your people create content, or do they prefer to respond? Do they respond, or do they just like to read? Lots of things to think about. I just thought about technology because I love college ministry and wanted to gather college leaders from around the country…not taking into consideration if it was/is the right tool for them, and whether or not there is something already available for them.

With that in mind I also realized through reading this book that fostering online community takes time, of which I don’t have tons of with two jobs, a family and lots of interests.

So I have decided to move Collective Muse to a Christian site that is built around gathering people around their passions…ROOV. What is ROOV? ROOV is:

Roov.com is an online community that connects like-minded individuals around shared experiences and passions within their church and cities.

You can now find Collective Muse on ROOV by going to ROOV and searching for Collective Muse, or clicking on this link when you are logged in.

I hope by moving Collective Muse to ROOV several things can be accomplished:

1. I don’t have to be responsible for maintaining a whole network (coding, providing content, fixing bugs, etc.)




2. The network doesn’t revolve around me, but is decentralized on an already existing site. I will still have to work part of this out though as I created Collective Muse on ROOV. But for now, I suggest people just add Collective Muse as a friend and we begin to gather around our passions related to college ministry.




3. You will find lots of people interested in college ministry who never would have joined Collective Muse, and you will find other things you are passionate about.




4. We are joining a new and exciting network (ROOV) which is devoted to gathering Christians around their passions, and moving them towards action. So it’s a good base to start with.




5. By being a part of ROOV, hopefully it will be more than a group that people simply join because they are interested, but that our interests and passions drive us towards actions, and opportunities to gather.

Last, I know that there are many groups that you can join, and that by doing so takes time that you sometimes don’t have. So I apologize for moving Collective Muse off a Ning, a site which you spent time joining, but I appreciate your interest, and I know that in the long run that making this move is much smarter than staying on a site that is not very active.

Sometimes we so much want to create something new, but often there are already tools and sites that exist. And so sometimes it’s better to join those that are already doing a great work. ROOV is doing a great work and has a lot of potential. So those of us who love college ministry I hope we can gather around Collective Muse on ROOV as well as others who are passionate about this topic.

And hopefully, the more I do this, the better I get at it, and the less mistakes I make.

 

Formulating an Online Strategy for College Ministry: Part 1–Simplicity, Flexibility, Cost and Speed

DISCLAIMERS: 1)There are better technical people out there concerning the web. 2) Do as I suggest, not as I do. I’m trying to keep up myself, and our college website reflects almost nothing of what I talk about. That’s how fast things change. 3) There are a lot of college ministries out there, and there are a lot of online tools to use, but it doesn’t seem like many are thinking through how to best utilize the new media and Web 2.0 (and yikes, Web 3.0) in their groups. 4) Knowing that things change overnight in technology, I hope to somehow impart to you some of the things I have been learning and wrestling with in these areas. You don’t need to be an expert in this area, just know enough to think critically about the issue. 5) If you have feedback, suggestions, criticisms, please comment. This is by no means all encompassing.

Starting Out

There are a lot of good books out there on the new media, web 2.0, building web platforms, etc., but no book has challenged my thinking, and convinced me to turn in certain directions as did the “manifesto” Getting Real by the guys at 37 Signals, when it comes to the issues of simplicity, flexibility, cost and speed. I consider it a must read in this area.

Getting Real is about skipping all the stuff that represents real (charts, graphs, boxes, arrows, schematics, wireframes, etc.) and actually building the real thing.

Getting real is less. Less mass, less software, less features, less paperwork, less of everything that’s not essential (and most of what you think is essential actually isn’t).

Getting Real is staying small and being agile.

Getting Real starts with the interface, the real screens that people are going to use. It begins with what the customer actually experiences and builds backwards from there. This lets you get the interface right before you get the software wrong.

Getting Real is about iterations and lowering the cost of change. Getting Real is all about launching, tweaking, and constantly improving which makes it a perfect approach for web-based software.

Getting Real delivers just what customers need and eliminates anything they don’t.

When a college ministry decides to have an online presence there are a few things to keep in mind. Some of these things are:

• student participation
• the fast changing culture of college/university life
• finicky tastes/styles
• revolving body of students and leaders
• budget
• access/control
• etc. (these are just a few)