The Office Curmudgeon

Carol Johnson, over at Lee’s Summit United Methodist Church sent me a link to her article that was published yesterday at Church Solutions. If you are have one of these projects in your future, I recommend reading the article. It provides some first steps to anyone managing a web project:

So, you have secured a line item in the church budget for “Website Improvements,” now where do you begin?

I had the opportunity to work alongside Carol in raising up Lee’s Summit’s current website on the TYPO3 / WEC platform a couple years ago. The project took 9 months and cost just over $14,000. Aspects of the strategy mentioned in the article were adopted from Sprint, which as you can imagine is an enormous company that manages massive technical projects.

In 2006 the website project won an “Award of Excellence” at Church of the Resurretion. Although I’m horrible at accepting compliments for my work, it was pleasurable for some of my work to be recognized.

Well, I have to say I saw it coming. The Appian Way was slowly running its course, and I kept dreaming of one day setting up a blog of my own where I’m more apt, yet not guaranteed, to post my thoughts and musings on a more personal level. (We’ve yet to see if that’s really what this world needs.)

So here is the release of my very own blog! I have to say it was fun setting it up, and helping Clif get his set up in the process. I feel a sense of ownership with it now, which will hopefully make me a more prolific blogger.

Thanks to all those who have encouraged me to continue blogging.

I’m here at the church IT event organized by Tony Dye and friends. Our first day is vendor presentations – but first we started off with a short worship service. It was amazingly high energy for a ~30 minute service. In short, they rocked, we worshiped, and when they finished everyone simply stood in awe and silence for many seconds until someone started that quiet “is it ok yet?” clapping.

Thus far I’ve been thrilled to meet some of the guys I know only by blogs and e-mail addresses. I expect shock and awe over the next few days. Geekfest.

I came across the Skypecasts beta directory on Sunday, I don’t even remember how. I have been aware of Skypecast for quite a while now through Jason Powell’s blog, and had always thought of it as an alternative to hold on-line meetings. I was blown away to find a directory of open discussions taking place about all sort of subjects!

I clicked on a “Join this Skypecast” link for one of the entries, and found myself listening in on a Arabic speaking discussion as though I was standing in a public square in Saudi Arabia and just walked up to a group of people, listening to the conversation. This is wild!

I began thinking, the potential of this is huge. This is not just free conference calling, this is a globally accessible public forum. If you want to hold a discussion on any subject all you need is to download Skype, advertise the discussion in whatever manner you chose, and host and moderate it. The barrier to holding a discussion is broadband Internet access, a computer, a headset with microphone, and the knowledge to get Skype installed and a Skypecast created. This is exactly the flat world that Thomas L. Friedman discusses in The World is Flat. I found people hosting their own sociological and political discussions, some of them with very controversial subjects, with people from all over the world participating.

Think about that for a moment. If you were to mash the technical ability of Skypecasts up with the right social networking service, you could bring a great deal of the worlds population closer together than ever before. Say you’re a student and you are writing a paper on antibiotic resistance. You’ve got a few questions that you’re not able to answer through the Internet resources, so you set up a Skypecast for next Wednesday evening and publish this event through a social network service, asking for help from any experts on the subject. On Wednesday you get to talk with a couple other people writing similar papers and you all share resources, and in the middle of that you get a leading expert join in that has seen your advertisement for the discussion and now multiple people benefit.

The potential uses for churches and small groups really excites me. Imagine a globally diverse small group that anyone can be a part of, or just listen in on. A pastor can host a discussion on applying the scripture to your life, and interact with real people with real questions in a moderated format. I think these sorts of technologies will ultimately re-define the roles of evangelism and caring in the physical church to include the global community. The phrase, ‘your neighbor,’ will not mean what it used to mean.

I haven’t posted here much, so to reiterate why this interests me so much, I am very driven to get churches on-line. By that, I mean encouraging churches to utilize web ministry and enabling them to use technology for ministry and evangelism. Why? Because I strongly believe that on-line evangelism will be highly important in reaching future Christians, and that God has many great things in store for technologies such as Skypecast and social network services.

A disappointing thought crossed my mind as I drove home early Saturday morning from a late night out. (The late night BTW was much less harmless than it sounds. My wife and I attended a high school musical in support of a friend, and we stayed up late conversing about different subjects.)

What if, on the whole, the United Methodist church can not reach postmodernists? I mean simply can not do it. What if the things that make a worship United Methodist are exactly those things the postmodernist revolts from?

I began thinking about the church reaching the postmodernist, and recalled conversations that I’ve either witnessed or been a part of. They all go something like this:

UM Pastor: “You say that the service doesn’t speak to you, but give me an example of how would you change it?”

Postmodernist: “There needs to be more music. It needs to be cool, not boring. Hip! It needs to be more emotional and less institutional.”

UM Pastor: “But those are not specific examples of what you would change about the service today. I understand what you said, but I don’t understand how you want us to do that.”

The conversation usually goes down hill from there, with the postmodernist trying desperately to explain what hip and cool means and how they could be so very moved if it were done better. Both parties walk away having no idea what the other meant.

I’ve heard at least one pastor explain this as, “They aren’t able to explain what they want.” That baffles me, as I’m pretty sure I just saw human beings who speak the same language converse about what they want. This ends up sounding like the modernist saying they are open and willing to improve the worship experience, as long as they don’t have to change anything about it at all. Why can’t you just be happy with the way it is now?

To me it comes down to this: The answer that modernists are looking for is which portions of the service today need be changed to reach postmodernists, without changing or losing the structure of the worship? What the postmodernist is trying to answer politely – everything. That being said, I’m sure there is a middle ground. I believe that churches that are successful in reaching postmodernists are those finding ways to say yes rather than no, and still hold in their hearts the significance of denominational traditions. Those that tie the significance of a worship service too tightly to the rigid procedural tradition may have a really tough time reaching postmodernists.

Where does your church apply the significance of worship? The process, or the expression? Are they doing church, or being the church?