Dave Winer has a good post about trusting.   This is a lesson that churches and their organizations and support agencies need to learn.  I see a whole lot,  thus far,  of church orgs announcements about their stories,  and not much at all asking its people what they think of all the other content out there (where most of their members are reading,  and NOT reading what the church is shoving at them.

There isn’t enough trust in the world, imho. People can’t tell, or don’t take the time to find out, if someone is trustworthy. The other day I asked this question of an editor at a major newspaper — why don’t you trust your readers? I ask this of Apple, why don’t you trust your users? What about the government, why doesn’t it trust its citizens? Ultimately all these institutions must listen to the people they serve. The news and tech industries, even governments — will eventually listen.

Thanks Matt for listening… (Scripting News)

I was talking to Dennis Benson,  a former seminary teacher of mine (still very much a teacher and a friend),  and he reminded me of McLuhan’s observation that new mediums always have most of its users shoving in content from the previous medium.  I also remember Gavin(@gavoweb) posting about that in something I just read recently from one of his Youth Ministry articles.  The church is still stuck in this mode.  They have yet to learn that unless they are present in the conversations,   no one is going to “find” their content,  or if they do,  they are unlikely to read it if that church or org is not already on the “trust” radar.  And one gets there by jumping out there into the twittersphere and the blogs and the “connective” social media that have learned how to link , organize,  and aggregate conversations that are important and interesting to their community.