If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less — General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U. S. Army

This is one of the quotes from a Tom Peters book shown in an ad I saw in WIRED yesterday. I thought it hit dead on the Church’s technology problem. Resistance to change causes an extreme gap in the ability to communicate. (Like in Cool Hand Luke: “What we have here, is a failure to communicate”). When we are not present in an obviously very significant shift in culture and “ways of doing things”, then irrelevance spreads like wildfire. When we are simply not there, and we fail to take advantage of the “ways of keeping in touch” and “ways of expressing our deepest passions”, then other “outlets” are found to “host” the conversations. When our passions and concerns are not heard, then we simply move on to somewhere where people listen.

I find this to be true in the blogging community. I have found voices of people who find similar things to be disturbing, enlightening, or instructive. We find one another via Google and other bloggers, and an adhoc community forms.

When Churches and , worse, agencies of the Church charged with providing resources for those churches, flat out fail to acknowledge the need and desire of people to connect on issues and share rants and all manner of “passionate involvements”, then irrelevance rules their approach.

Old Saint George has recognized the “time” ; the “kairos” represented in the possibilities for online community, and that it is undoubtedly TIME now to engage in projects that respond to this. To be a “Great Good Place” requires of us that we become an “easy place” to be heard. And there is no easier response than to jump in and build applications which emanate “exploration” and “invitation” and “affirmation”. This is much of what it means to be Church. To be a place in which passions which emanate from a sense of CALL are explored and are the source of dialogue about what can be done, and how our God-given gifts equip us for it.