In the Coracle
“It’s almost like you’re writing a book one post at a time” - Kedge
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Social Networks and Community
In thinking about social networking and social software that I often find myself running into ideas and concepts that I think are worth considering for the church - especially the emergent church. I don’t necessarily mean emergent in the sense of Emergent Village - though I like them - but more in the central meaning of Emergent as a social structure - like wikipedia puts it,
In philosophy, systems theory and the sciences, emergence refers to the way complex systems and patterns arise out of a multiplicity of relatively simple interactions. Emergence is central to the theory of complex systems.
So, complex systems and patterns that start out of simple interactions. Relationships that multiply in complexity.
That’s the topic of a fascinating little web page over at Orgnet.com, which looks at ways to graph social relationships in online communities and social networks. Consider this intro to the paper, and when you think about how it relates to MySpace and Facebook, think also about how it relates to the church as a social community:
The diagram above shows an actual on-line community [OLC]. Every node in the network represents a person. A link between two nodes reveals a relationship or connection between two people in the community — the social network. Most on-line communities consist of three social rings — a densely connected core in the center, loosely connected fragments in the second ring, and an outer ring of disconnected nodes, commonly known as lurkers. Communities have various levels of belonging. [Again, the source page]
Now, if you’ve read Joe Myers’ excellent book The Search to Belong, you’re nodding your head here. Same, if you’ve read The Celtic Way of Evangelism (both of which I recommend highly).
There are a couple of pages of excellent summary, and then this in the closing section:
Social network analysts do not focus solely on attributes of individuals. They look at relations and exchanges between people and how these connections influence choices. They examine the affect social networks have on the behavior of individuals — how people influence social structures, and in return, how those structures affect the individuals embedded in them.
Growing a community is not just adding new members. It requires adding both people and relationships — nodes AND links. A community thrives by its connections, not by its collections! It’s the relationships, and the prospect of future relationships, that keep members active and excited.
A few things that I’ve been thinking about this evening after reading this:
- How can the church engage people in its mission by leveraging “the prospect of future relationships”?
- What does this mean for a community that, if truly modeled on Jesus, aggressively welcomes the outsider as much as it challenges the insider to not feel particularly comfortable? (a community with both an inward and an outward impulse)
- Can relational structures be created, or can we only create an atmosphere in which relationships can be created and thrive?
- Can we learn from the online communities who see widely varying levels of engagement and participation?
I hope that if you’re interested in the church and its health and growth, you check out this little paper and join in a discussion here.
Seth Godin of Purple Cow Fame explains resistance to the Gospel
Well, not directly, but hang in there.
Seth Godin, a very insightful and quick-hitting writer on the topic of modern creative marketing, wrote an entry in his (fantastic) blog yesterday that hits close to home for those of us interested in demonstrating and telling the story of God in our time.
I’ll quote the whole blog entry here, and make some comments below. I highly recommend that you subscribe to Seth’s blog or read some of his books if you’re at all interested in audience perception (whether for the church, your business or art, social dynamics, …).
Seth writes:
I got more mail about this story in the Washington Post than any other non-blog topic ever. I saw it when it first came out, but didn’t blog it because I thought the lesson was pretty obvious to my readers. [World-class violinist plays for hours in a subway station, almost no one stops to listen]. The experiment just proved what we already know about context, permission and worldview. If your worldview is that music in the subway isn’t worth your time, you’re not going to notice when the music is better than usual (or when a famous violinist is playing). It doesn’t match the story you tell yourself, so you ignore it. Without permission to get through to you, the marketer/violinist is invisible.
But why all the mail? (And the Post got plenty too). Answer: I think it’s because people realized that if they had been there, they would have done the same thing. And it bothers us.
It bothers us that we’re so overwhelmed by the din of our lives that we’ve created a worldview that requires us to ignore the outside world, most of the time, even when we suffer because of it. It made me feel a little smaller, knowing that something so beautiful was ignored because the marketers among us have created so much noise and so little trust.
I don’t think the answer is to yell louder. Instead, I think we have an opportunity to create beauty and genius and insight and offer it in ways that train people to maybe, just maybe, loosen up those worldviews and begin the trust.
Check out that story. Just the finish, even. Instead, I think we have an opportunity to create beauty and genius and insight and offer it in ways that train people to maybe, just maybe, loosen up those worldviews and begin the trust.
A friend of mine uses a great term when he’s talking about the challenge to contemporary Christians who want to be disciples of Jesus, and who want to share our story with others: Americans are innoculated against the gospel. They think they know what it is, and they think they’ve checked it off their list, and there’s nothing else to do. Eighty percent of Americans self-identify as Christians; 45% of Americans find it morally acceptable to abort a child. Perhaps these dilemmas aren’t really dilemmas at all; perhaps we see Christianity simply as being innoculated against ‘going to hell when I die’.
I personally believe that the story of God’s involvement in humanity, culminating in the person and life of Jesus, and his life in us here and now, is much like the world-class violinist playing on a multimillion dollar instrument in a rundown subway station. It’s deceptively beautiful and simple; we think we should only expect to find the story of God in the right building on a Sunday (temple or church), and that’s where it belongs.
This brings us to the point of Incarnation - the first biological entry of God into humanity, the enfleshment of God in the person of Jesus, born to a carpenter and a young girl in a backwoods town in a backwoods state. This little data point provides us hints that the story of God isn’t only sung in the concert halls. It’s sung in the ghettoes and the taverns and the farmhouses and the suburban cul-de-sacs, as well as the concert halls. The story plays everywhere.
The story is told, as we’ve been told enough times to inoculate us against hearing it, in our lives. In our everyday interactions; in how we deal with issues of greed and power and sexual identity and workplace interactions. We carry the story of God in our human interactions. We carry, as St. Paul said years ago, a treasure of incomparable worth surrounded by ordinary clay pots. We’re not the point of the treasure; we’re the bearers of the message and its impact in our lives.
I don’t think the answer is to yell louder. Instead, I think we have an opportunity to create beauty and genius and insight and offer it in ways that train people to maybe, just maybe, loosen up those worldviews and begin the trust.
Amen, Seth. As it is for marketing Cheetos, so may it be for the hope of God.
Off to Servant Leadership School
I’m leaving tomorrow morning (6am flight, egads) for Servant Leadership School. I may be blogging a bit from there, or not. Hard to tell. See you when I get back.
Shopping Mall
I found this quote today while googling around on church names. This was from the pastor of a church who changed their name from something that was admittedly a bit tired to something newer:
“We describe our church as a shopping mall of spiritual opportunities,” says (the pastor)[...]. “We’re offering ministry to everyone. We have a divorce-recovery ministry, a blended-family ministry, a grief-recovery ministry — something for everyone’s needs.
Maybe it’s my rabid aversion to shopping malls, but I wonder if that’s a beneficial analogy to use. It is an apt description of a particular model of church, but I find myself so far away from that analogy that it’s weird to me.
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