The previous post, referring to my post about “WHAT MATTERS”, pinpoints some difficulties I have in understanding why Church groups think they are “communicating” via the Web. There is certainly contact made, but the potential for conversation and the finding of such conversations via search are so much more powerful and useful than the email link that invites comments. The Website’s audience misses out on the conversations, and the rate of response to such “invitations to respond” are likely very low, since the prospect of having our opinion read by “who knows” in some office somewhere is not much of an incentive to comment. There is no conversation there. The only response we are likely to get is a form response thanking us for our post and that someone will “keep it on file”.

This is like a Church thinking that Discussion classes would thrive by posting a “comment box” on a table and inviting people to submit their thoughts. Not only are most people not interested in this, but it misses the power of the “conversation” by ignoring the “exchange” and the direction a group relationship takes when it moves from reply and response to other related replies and responses. In other words, the conversation is there before us, and not a “straight-line” , “here’s my opinion” single response to a very general topical question.

The article goes on to point out how it is not neccessarily the Dean campaigns particular stance on issues that garners him support:

Dean has been reluctant to take a position on core Net issues like copyright law and peer-to-peer file-sharing. But that didn’t matter. The power of Dean’s campaign does not come from his appeal to Net users as an interest group but from a fateful concurrence of other forces: a strong antiwar message; a vivid, individualist candidate; a lucky head start with Meetup; an Internet-savvy campaign manager in Joe Trippi; and, most important, a willingness to let a decentralized network of supporters play a tactical role. With these assets, Dean gained a potent lead. The very structure of the networks his campaign has built – a structure that enhances the power of feedback – creates obstacles even for a rival flexible enough to challenge Dean on his own ground.

I believe this is an important and neccessary insight for the Church. My take on the Church is that God does not filter the call of an individual to a particular task through a heirarchical structure, but that people discover call through community, and through exploring together what we can do as a team. The Web offers the Church a “structure” to “enahnce the power of feedback”; to provide another avenue of participation, and one which is expanding outward into the “unwired” world and becoming more pervasive and “always on” via PDAs and WiFI.

This is just one audience, and I do not suggest that this is everyone’s answer to finding relationships and community in the Church. But it is, nevertheless, an audience and a “culture” that is growing fast, and becoming something which people EXPECT to have available to them to keep them connected to thngs they want to “carry with them”. I always thought that this “Church thing”; this matter of “doing what God is calling us to do” is a matter worth “carrying with us” at all times. Our jobs are a means of supporting our support and work for the Church. Our “running around” and “making contact” and “organizing our projects” are management techniques and technologies that the Church should be harnessing to maximize their own mission….and there are plenty of passionate and capable yung (and old) professionals who have the aptitude and the understanding and familarity with the technologies to use it effectively, and “expect” to use it to help them manage their “important business”. Isn’t the Church and our part in its mission an “important thing” that warrants our best stewardship?