Hacking Christianity

Saturday Musing

Sin is...the beginning of empathy.

(original David, hat tip Jeromy)

Thoughts or reflections?

Funny Tithing Video [video]

WARNING: I don't know which is worse: the disease or the cure!

(hat tip: Participatory Bible Study Blog)

Daily Read 01/30/2009

on the journey • profits / prophets
tags: no_tag
Court says school can expel lesbians - Feministing
tags: no_tag
- I don't know what to think: the injustice done to these girls, or the fact that the "Yes on Prop 8" people were blatantly lying. - post by umjeremy
- A private religious high school can expel students it believes are lesbians because the school isn't covered by California civil rights laws, a state appeals court has ruled.
ThinkGeek :: 3D Star Wars Starfighter Kites
tags: no_tag
Profit trumps preservation for Boy Scout councils nationwide
tags: no_tag
- This is terrible. My childhood merit badges are wilting... - post by umjeremy

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Tyranny of the SEO Church

Following up on last week's post about Google's contributions to the Echo-chamber, I want to expand on one point:

What are the responses of Christian web ministries when their websites get less hits because people self-select "Saddleback" or "CrossWalk" and drive up their narrow viewpoints on the search lists?

I started to think about this more. As more and more people turn to the Internets for answers, what if the top 10 hits on theological questions become the most read and thus the "standard?" Read on to see what the tyranny of a search-savvy viewpoint might become.

Wikipedia dominates Google Search results.This becomes more and more likely with the emergence of Google offering the top results in searches to Wikipedia. Nick Carr ran some google searches for a year or so and documented wikipedia entries moving into the top spot of those searches in a year's time. Should we worry about this? Maybe. (hat tap: Andrew Sullivan)

[W]hat we seem to have here is evidence of a fundamental failure of the Web as an information-delivery service. Three things have happened, in a blink of history's eye: (1) a single medium, the Web, has come to dominate the storage and supply of information, (2) a single search engine, Google, has come to dominate the navigation of that medium, and (3) a single information source, Wikipedia, has come to dominate the results served up by that search engine. Even if you adore the Web, Google, and Wikipedia - and I admit there's much to adore - you have to wonder if the transformation of the Net from a radically heterogeneous information source to a radically homogeneous one is a good thing.

Is culture best served by an information triumvirate?

Hmm. While Wikipedia's mystique is of a huuge number of editors, a populist ideal, the reality (from our "What the Church can Learn from Wikipedia" series) is that a small number of editors really put together the pages. So, in other words, the top search result in Google isn't written by computers, but by small groups of Wikipedia gatherers and editors.

Is this bad? With any ownership of information by a small group of people, I would worry. I would worry about a group of evangelical Christians rewriting the Atonement entry of Wikipedia to be entirely blood atonement, which is not representative of all of Christianity, yet it gets top billing in Google.

Trouble brews when one party controls information.Jonathan Brink wonders the same thing on his post called "the End of Myth" where he describes how control of information (historically the Magisterium) begats myths to sustain that control:

The power of myth is essentially this: If I control truth, and you want to know truth, you need me. And if you need me, I can tell you what to think, how to act, and even where to give your money. I can even create visions of a hell that exists when you don’t follow me. I can in essence control you through fear. And when the cost is your soul, the weight gets increased exponentially. And worse, I don’t need to be right. I just need you to believe I’m right...

Magisterium power lies in the control of information. To protect orthodoxy, the Magisterium essentially withheld Scripture from people, providing it in a foreign language.

See the relationship? For the Magisterium, they controlled information flow and propogated myth that reinforced their position. For Google, they control information flow, allegedly by computers, but wikipedia is clearly edited by a small group of humans.

Could theological viewpoints be search-optimized, or worse, buried?What it means to me is that any theological viewpoint that receives strong SEO (search engine optimization) can become the new "truth." If you can get that viewpoint to the top of google searches, or better to cover the majority of the first page of results, then that becomes more and more "truth." And this alliance between Wikipeda and Google can perpetuate this narrow viewpoint and bury (send to a lower ranking) theological viewpoints that do not agree with the SEO viewpoint.

I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat, this is happening today. Search for the United Methodist Church on Google and the Wikipedia entry comes up #1 (ABOVE the umc.org website! Seriously!). Thus the publicly editable website is above the UMC-written doctrine. But to the point: in the section on "beliefs on homosexuality" (click here), there's very little nuance of the doctrine. A UM friend of mine edited the section to better reflect the conflicting doctrines on this issue. Within hours, it was deleted and the monolithic viewpoint restored. This kept on for several days until the UM gave up. So, to any gay UMs wanting to see themselves in UM doctrine, they did not see it because of one or two people who kept reverting the UM Wikipedia article to its monolithic viewpoint.

The Tyranny of the SEO Church...what next?So, the tyranny of the SEO Church is that any theological viewpoint which receives higher status thanks to SEO efforts (either coordinated or consequential) becomes more "true" and read than opposing viewpoints. It doesn't become more true in fact or validity, but like the Magisterium, true in our belief that it is true.

Whew. Tinfoil hats on. I have more to write about this, but that's the gist. Thoughts so far to help me focus this conversation a bit?

Is Chewbacca in my nightstand? [video]

Only one way to find out: challenge the nightstand in dejarik. If you win and your arms are ripped off...then yes, it was Chewbacca.

[/nerd]

Fake News as Good News [Update]

Some people try things out in their church and look for feedback online. I try out my crazy ideas online and use the feedback to make my local church ministry more awesome.

Back in November, I wrote about the effect a fake New York Times had on people and I wondered what would happen if we did something similar in the church: Using Fake News as the Good News.

Well, I tried it this past Sunday. Here's what happened.

Note: yes, there's a lot of "I" language in this. While the laity are very involved in worship, I made this a pastoral secret effort that surprised even the most well-connected of people. I would not recommend it, it was a lot of work!

The Plan

Form

The original plan was to send a mailing out to everyone with a fake newsletter with an explanation of how we need to envision the future. This was scrapped due to time constraints.
The modified plan became to put it in the bulletin with the tagline above, but also with another slip of paper with the instructions "Write the headline you would most like to see on the slip of paper and drop it in the offering plate."

Content

Most of the headlines had to be idealistic but not crazy. In other words, I didn't want them to seem pie-in-the-sky, but still feasible. Do we have a bell choir? No. Do we have a confirmation class this year? No. But we could. Could one of my members be knighted for saving the Queen from falling into the river? No...but it was funny.
Headlines were written only, with filler text being used in place of articles so the focus was on the headlines not the "how did we get there"

The Newsletter

I wrote the fake newsletter in full color, dating it July 25th, 2009 (six months from Sunday). Some headlines read:

Evening Worship Service Draws 250 People on First Night
Capital Campaign Exceeds Expectations, Raises $125,000. Excess given to Food Pantry
Sunday School “Casting Nets in the nets” program offers bible study between soccer games on Sundays
Adult Bible Study Writes Acclaimed Curriculum for Global UMC on “Lifetime of Bible Reading
Children's Choir cuts new CD of Christmas Music
The Bell Choir is going to state bell choir competition in November
Church Leads UM Conference in Baptisms. Confirmation class largest ever at 30 youth
Rev. Smith, [and two others] arrested (again) protesting the inhumane treatment of pound puppies, third offense for Smith.

At the bottom of the newsletter, I included a section of

...What if this were all true? It can be. This is just a vision, one possible future. What does the future of our Church look like to you?

The Reception

People were smiling in the pews, laughing at some of the more ridiculous headlines.
There were a few members there that I called out specifically and included their names in the newsletter (I redacted them above). I could see there was some light shined when I called out their hidden passions for everyone to see.
One member in particular said to me "you know, I've always thought about this." Those are golden words to pastors!
One bad reaction: I didn't have time to write the content of the stories, just the headlines. So I filled the articles with small-case latin "Lorem Ipsum" etc. This should have been a giveaway it was fake, but one member complained about us putting the bulletin "in Spanish" without english translation...needless to say, the member was quickly corrected!
We had a first-time visitor that day, and the visitor's words at the back of the sanctuary were "When I first read it, this church sounded awesome." I didn't ask what he thought after reality came crashing down, but it was an affirmation regardless!

Lessons Learned

Do this in a context you can control. Sending it out in mass could work, but in a worship service where you can frame it worked marvelously. I incorporated the newsletter into the sermon not as a preacher's trick, but to illustrate the value of embodying and envisioning what the Good News looks like.
Take the time to write the stories. Filling them with "Lorem Ipsum" was a time-crunch decision, and not a good one. Do it.
Include response where people can write their own headlines. That was well-received and I got many of them back (we asked them to write their own headlines on pieces of paper and pass them in the offering plates).

So, there you have it. Questions about our experiment, or ideas you want to share about your own? Discuss.

Daily Read 01/23/2009

Would You Pay for Something if You Didn’t Have To? | Friendly Atheist by Hemant Mehta
tags: questioning
- People who regularly attend service at church pay 22.1 cents less for the Sunday tabloid… This is a large effect, and we can only speculate with regard to its reasons. One reason might be that the church attendees lacked the coin money to make a proper payment. Active religious participation is high in the region, and on a typical Sunday morning it is plausible that many people might have donated some of their coin money to the church. Of course, this explanation does not change the fact that church attendees are particularly dishonest when paying for the newspaper. Another possible explanation is that the church attendees share relevant social traits. Gneezy (2005) found that honesty interacts with social preferences towards the person who benefits from one’s honesty. According to this explanation, a typical church attendee might believe that it would do little harm to the wealth of the publisher if he does not pay for the paper.
Blessed Beyond Belief
tags: emerging
Twitter For Churches
tags: twitter