Hacking Christianity

Revisiting 'The Language of Insiders'

A worship.hack (defined here) is a proposed change or question of the way worship typically works to open it up to more people, either in substance or in style. Read on for relevant critiques of worship!

Back in April I asked about the language of insiders, about the way how we use names and references that reflect the experience of the "insiders" to the church turns off visitors and outsiders.

Also at the first part of HX's series on "What the Church can Learn from Apple" we talked about using archaic language may turn off outsiders, but there was a lot of pushback from readers that countered by claiming language creates a sense of continuity with the past and a sense of "insiders" that is affirming, not turning-off. That caused me to think more on this subject that I've been musing on since April.

Luckily, a fellow thinker on this topic, dynamo new blog "Beyond Relevance," wrote about the Starbucksian language that Starbucks cultivates to create insiders...but also how they draw outsiders into speaking the language. Read on for more.

Check out their blog post. I think by using Starbucks as an example (heck, the entire website could be called "What the Church Can Learn from Starbucks"), they've hit on something. My critique of archaic language is that it is our grandfather's and parent's language...not common. However, the key point is that it is someone elses' language. There needs to be bridges built between whatever insider language is being used...and the outsiders who do not have a frame of reference. This is a practical concern, but a discipleship one as we learn how to draw people in.

What Beyond Relevance points out is how Starbucks baristas build bridges between outsiders and insiders. He challenges us with this:

Make this commitment: never let a service take place where you don’t break down church vocabulary for the visitors present and tell them the story behind our inside jokes. The secret behind this is two-fold: if you commit to it, 1) you’ll build stronger bridges and 2) you’ll get tired of bringing in so much context to all your insider verbiage, that you'll cut it down to the minimum.

So what are some practical ways we can do this?

Pastors can translate as they speak. Instead of "we are doing communion by intinction" they can say "we are doing communion by intinction, which means you take a piece of bread, dip it in the cup..."etc.
Include sections in the bulletin that explain the process. For instance, in my communion liturgy, there's an italicized section that says that it is welcome to everyone to participate.
Gracious and trained ushers. I've seen churches where ushers are considered an entrypoint, when they are often the first and only people that talk to visitors! Train them to recognize and learn how to, like baristas, ask guided questions to push people towards understanding.

So with the language of insiders, it is not terrible. But it does need trained people to do the translations, attentive clergy to the ways we use archaic "inside baseball" terms with reckless abandon, and an eye towards the bulletins of how we can translate without offering a three-page encyclopedia at the end.

What do you think? What other ways can we build bridges between churchy language and a population that increasingly doesn't speak it? Discuss.

"My Church is not perfect"

In the midst of contention, with the Episcopal Church facing schizm and other denominations weathering storms of their own making, what if we are able to say this:

Two years from now, I want the people to be able to say, "My Church is not perfect; there are some things my pastor does that get on my nerves. But you know what? I feel like the Church is working for me. I feel like it's accountable. I feel like it's transparent. I feel that I am well informed about what church actions are being taken. I feel that this is a Pastor and a Ministry Team that admits when it makes mistakes and adapts itself to new information, that believes in making decisions based on reason and on faith as opposed to what is politically expedient." Those are some of the intangibles that I hope people two years from now can claim.

Edited (mentions of government, etc replaced by Church, etc) from Time's "Person of the Year" interview with Barack Obama.

Thoughts? How will you foster this sea-change in your own church and make the church struggle together instead of drift apart?

Merry Christmas* (see stipulations)

Merry Christmas! But in our legalistic culture, here's a disclaimer for this wish:

Article I: The use of the expression "Merry Christmas" and its synonyms on this blog (henceforth referred to in this document simply as "Merry Christmas") is not to be construed as a declaration of war, whether real or metaphorical.
...
Article VI: The use of "Merry Christmas" on or around December 25th is not to be understood to imply that the birth of Jesus occurred on or around that date.
...
Article IX: "Merry Christmas" is not to be contrued as a contractual guarantee (or otherwise creating a binding legal agreement between the author of this blog and its readers) that Christmas (on whatever date it is celebrated) will in fact be merry.

Read the full post at Exploring Our Matrix for more. Hilarious!

Merry Christmas anyways!

Daily Read 12/23/2008

Dead wrong and proud of it | OKG Scene.com
tags: no_tag
- Op-Ed by Robin Meyers on Oklahoma voting 100% of its counties for McCain...pretty vicious but interesting to read. - post by umjeremy
Video Games Will Turn Your Kid Gay - Momlogic
tags: no_tag
- Hilarious! - post by umjeremy
- the mutual fund The Timothy Group, which bases its investments on companies they deem moral, has put out their annual list of questionable video games. In their "score card" they use categories such as "Sex," "Violence," "Drugs," "Comic Mischief," and of course "Gay/Lesbian" to determine a game's morality. Huh? Here's the breakdown of the games they found questionable:
Unclutterer » Archive » In with new, out with old
tags: no_tag
- Now is the time to take stock of what you received and what those new gifts can replace — one new gift in, one old item out.
Toward a New Vision of Productivity, Part 1: Transformation - Stepcase Lifehack
tags: no_tag
- This is the first part of a 12-part series I will be posting over the next several weeks, examining the current understanding of productivity and where the concept might be heading in the future
Three Movements Killing Christianity « twice infinity
tags: christianity
- Christianity has always been a diverse faith. The various theologies, political ideas, and other views held by Christian groups throughout last twenty centuries have varied widely. This has made Christianity strong, adaptive, and dynamic in furthering the truths it posits. However, parellel to its historical strengths have always been weaknesses: movements that, though often well-intentioned, have done more to hurt the cause of Christ than help it.
  
  In American Christianity today, there are many such movements.

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

Reserved Holiday Pews? SERIOUSLY? [bad.hack]

Is The Onion on this? Is this National Lampoons ? Or Landover Baptist ? Or the Daily Show ?

Check this out: German Politicians want holiday pews reserved for regular congregants, not the holiday-only attendees. Yes, it's true!

Politicians from the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) told Tuesday's daily Bild newspaper it was unfair if regular attendants of church services couldn't find a seat at Christmas.

"I support making services on December 24 open only to those who pay their church tax," a member of the CDU board in the south-western state of Baden-Württemberg, Thomas Volk, told the mass-market daily. Germans pay church tax along with their income tax unless they opt out.

The head of the FDP's parliamentary group in Berlin, Martin Lindner, said it was intolerable that in the past, active members of church congregations - often the elderly - had been forced to stand through the Christmas service because the pews were full.

"Church tax payers should not be kept outside during such important services," he said. "Church members should be given tickets, for example, to give them priority seating."

A few short thoughts:

Thank God for a non-national church in America. This way no politician can tell me what to do with my parish.
Church attendance is a privilege, not a right.
My favorite shorthand for holiday parishioners is CEOs (Christmas-Easter-Only's). Har har har...whew.
First shall be last, last shall be first anyone?

Luckily, the Churches themselves have their heads on straight:

"We should not be giving the impression that there is a two-class society in the church," said Stefan Foerner, spokesman for Berlin's Roman Catholic Archbishop. "Jesus would not ask whether someone paid their church tax or is baptised."

SERIOUSLY???

Church[beta] version .61a [working title]

A month or so ago at Gizmodo, a tech/nerd site (you BET I'm a reader!), one of the editors ranted against beta culture: the tendency of manufacturers of software/hardware to put out unfinished products which will then be "fixed" by software updates and such.

I'm tired of this. This sense of permanent discomfort with the technology around me. The bugs. The compromises. The firmware upgrades. The "This will work in the next version." The "It's in our roadmap." The "Buy now and upgrade later." The patches. The new low development standards that make technology fail because it wasn't tested enough before reaching our hands.

Read on for how beta-culture is frustrating but can be an integral part of developing new ministries and tinkering with established ones in the Church.

For the record, I'm with anti-beta-culturalists (?). When I buy a quality product, I want it to work out of the box: no software updates or "new features" which should have been there in the first place. Sigh. I'm sure you have your own consumer horror stories of new products not working like they should. It *does* seem to be more pervasive now...

I think one commenter nailed it though, that the problem is that beta-culture is in the operating model:

Beta is just a way to shift R&D and testing expense to the consumer. Free feedback from users to increase profit margins. I wont buy a first model year car and wont adopt early technology for that very reason. Pay me to be your guinea pig or forget it.

Yes, it is frustrating that now we are the guinea-pigs for new products. But this is not all sunshine and puppy-dogs for companies. The problem with shifting beta-culture to the consumer is when consumers go too far with your beta product. Take for instance the case of Daniel-K, a consumer who was frustrated when a sound card's drivers wouldn't work under Microsoft Vista. He took matters into his own hands and fixed it, releasing the drivers on his website, and was sued, forced to take them down by the sound card company, Creative Labs. The resulting backlash from consumers and tech support caused Creative to drop the suit and release the drivers themselves as an update. The lesson is that if you encourage beta-culture, you may not like where it takes you.

So beta-culture is dangerous for companies and frustrating for newbie customers. What possible good can come from it? And what on earth can the Church learn from it?

The Hack: Church[beta]

Let's move seamlessly from technology to church ministries. In some ways, we want the same thing for the church as we do for our tech products. We want our church "products" (ie. ministries and missions) to be complete and well-thought-through, glamorous and squeaky-clean. We don't want to be a part of some half-thought-out ministry idea, do we?

We don't have to! One of the things we looked at in our "What the Church can Learn from Wikipedia " series is that seeing programs as processes (in process...essentially beta-culture) instead of products that need to be well-finished can yield higher participation and ownership from the community.

From the last part of the series :

In the church, we strive to be more like Encyclopedia Brittanica than Wikipedia. We bring forth ministry ideas when they are more like "products" we are pushing on people. We just show the storefront of the Church to people without the behind-the-scenes wrangling that takes place. We like products and people to believe in products and contribute to making products better.

And a quote from the first entry:

What if your church structure looked like Wikipedia and allowed for "rough" forms of ministry to try out? Untried, unfinished, possibly disastrous forms of ministry. Doesn't that scare you? It should...can you imagine our reputation if we let un-thought-thru forms of ministry run amok? (*cough* like sponsoring Halo game nights, anyone?) But if Wikipedia taught champions of Nupedia that dedicated amateurs could be better than professional products, then can't our ministry initiatives learn the same thing?

Take a look at those two sections of the series and comment there. The important part is that allowing beta-culture to take root in the Church can lead to innovation and new groups that find themselves newly empowered because they don't have to be as polished as the Disciple bible study.

Again, the parallels between technology and ministry are inspiring:

Look at the legions of people who work under Linux because they are part of a beta product. Where's the Microsoft lovers? Table for two in the back room?
How many people have edited a Wikipedia page? And how many people have written into Encyclopedia Brittanica telling them of an error? Yeah.

One of the commentors on the Gizmodo website nailed it for the church:

The flip side of the beta culture is playing it safe and putting out products that work flawlessly but are obsolete must more quickly.

If we want relevant ministries, perhaps forming a beta-culture in your Church is a good way to get fresh ideas flowing and stale ministries thrown out.

There are problems with Church[beta], of course.

For one, people will disaffiliate for the smallest reason. A friend chose a Wii over a Xbox 360 over the Red Ring of Death. So any church program that is not flawless people may choose to disaffiliate with because "it's just not run well." That's a risk....but on the bright side, it helps weed out the champions from the critics.
For another, that sort of anarchic breeding may foster resentment between the church hierarchy and the laity that are inspired...again, from Daniel-K, the church may not always be happy with whatever ministries crop up. So a helpful process for working out tensions between the hierarchy and the popcorn ministries needs to be in place to facilitate the beta-culture process.

Your turn. What do you think?

Is beta-culture a good way to frame church ministry development?
Or is it just anarchy and shoddy versions of established ministries that nonetheless gets people involved?

Discuss.

Why Connectionalism Matters

There are essentially two types of church denominational systems: connectionalism and congregationalism.

In connectional systems (United Methodist, Presbyterian, Episcopal, Catholic, etc):

pastors are assigned to churches
churches are accountable to meta-church agencies and boards
church buildings and property are owned by the meta-church (the denomination) and held in trust by the local congregation.

In congregational systems (United Church of Christ, Southern Baptist, etc) or individual congregational churches:

Pastors are selected by the local congregation.
churches are accountable only to their own rules and regulations (which is not terrible, look at the excellent structure in place when Ted Haggard was removed from his church)
local congregations own the church building and property.

While both are legitimate ways of doing church, Connectionalism has taken some hits in the last month, especially to our sisters and brothers in the Episcopal Church.

First, the schizmatic churches in the Episcopal Church have wrested ownership of the church property (you know...the ones that the denomination owns and the local congregation holds in trust) from the denomination. In other words, they have taken from the denomination that which for its entire existance has been considered to be the denominations. There have been isolated incidents of this previously, but this is a major change in denominational understandings and in understandings of local churches holding property "in trust" not "owning it themselves." It's a terrible step, in my opinion.

Second, even though much hoopla has come up of the rival Episcopal denomination that is emerging, there is not much hope for denominationalism as a whole. ReligionLink.org reports:

At a time when denominations are floundering — even the Southern Baptist Convention is losing members — the formation of another denominational-like structure runs counter to all the congregational trends of the past 40 years. Study after study — the latest by Mark Chaves of Duke University — confirms that increasing numbers of churches choose not to affiliate with any denomination.

Further on this point, the article collected the responses of why congregations want to dis-affiliate from the denominations. Let's look at these from a HX.net perspective:

Leaders of these churches don’t want to get caught up in politics. It tends to drive away newcomers.

Translation: Leaders of those churches have not succeeded in changing the denominational structures or policies in ways that are agreeable. So they want to take their ball and go home where they can play in their own sandpit. Instead of continuing the conversation, they opt to leave for their own echo-chambers where their perspective is shared and reinforced, not challenged.

They’ve dropped many of the trappings of the Anglican Communion, such as vestments and formal Anglican titles (rector, vestry, senior warden, etc.)

Translation: They have moved away from a sense of unity and common purpose/history with their brethern and sought to remake their local congregation in their own image, not reflective of the denomination. Impossible? You'd be surprised how many anti-denominational sermons and actions I've witnessed in the denominational churches I've worked with.

They’re used to giving away money for specific projects and are unlikely to welcome a superstructure that demands monetary commitments.

Translation: At least in the United Methodist Church, people want to stop paying mission shares (apportionments) because part of it pays for the General Board of Church and Society which is at the cutting edge of promoting social justice and thus has to take controversial stances in the name of promoting human rights. They want their money to go to only like-minded projects...again, the echo-chamber.

They’d rather avoid fresh battles over the role of women or the use of the Book of Common Prayer.

Translation: There's a fresh wind of the spirit blowing through denominational structures, and they want to shut the door.

At Hacking Christianity, we are fascinated and disturbed by the ecclesial echo-chamber, or the ways in which we customize our lifestyle to avoid dissonant messages and reinforce our beliefs. It is my firm belief that this trend towards anti-connectionalism is another facet of the echo-chamber: entire churches becoming like-minded that they disaffiliate from the meta-church.

Hacking Christianity takes an anti-authoritarian viewpoint on most things. That's our own bias, admittedly so. Connectionalism has its flaws and we expose them here. But the structure and the spirit of connectional churches helps keep us talking to one another, keeps us appointing different pastors to churches to get them to grow, moving pastors when they become cults of personality, and, basically, keeping the conversation going. Otherwise, connectional churches risk falling into echo-churches (ooo, that's a nice new term).

Your turn:

Thoughts on connectionalism? Are you familiar with connectional or congregational churches?
If you are congregational, in what ways do congregational churches keep from becoming cults of personality or a like-minded echo-chamber?
Other thoughts?

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