Anymore  than we could envision a church growing out of a bunch of tools (like a big sanctuary with big screen and projectors/LCD/LEDs)  and just say ,  here’s a bunch of people and great tech…now be a church.  It still depends on creation of  content…even collaborative content needs creators and curators.

Curators  is what we are in the church.  A major  source of info for us is , of  course,  the Bible.  But we  also have the pools of theological work,  resources and stories,  that are themselves a result of a curation process.

This concept came tome as I reflected (and continue  to do so)  about Ecunet,  the initial Web community that got  me going on the idea of Online Church and Online community in the church.  People might argue re:  the “re-establishment” of Ecunet that there are already churches and church orgs “doing Social Media” well enough.  But this falls flat with me.  Here’s why.

In the 1980s when Ecunet  was conceived  and built,  people could have said “we already have church people who  know how to use computers”.  That seems so obvious to us now that this entirely misses the  point.  A network has to be BUILT,  and help provided to get  people into the  usage that builds the value of that network.

The key to the community is the mix of people.  And the mix of people will lead to sharing of perspectives and resources.  And we all know that in the  church,  there is a wide variety of opinion as to what “church people” should be doing,  thinking  about, acting upon,  and what the tools we use to share all that can add or may detract from what we’re doing, thinking,  and taking action upon.   Within each of these communities of theological practice,  there are unique “curations” of content ,  and people attach themselves to the community largely because  they value the news they aggregate (which in turn is a function of the community of people contributing  to that pool of resources)

Underneath all that is the value of the conversations we can have by getting the right mix of people. Well,  that’s not an exactly theologically correct way to say that.  That implied that we decide on what we want to talk about before we build the community,  and then go and seek out the “right mix” of people.  That defaults to exclusion.  No,  the right order of things is to start attracting people by proclaiming an ecumenical vision,  and then letting the conversations happen;  letting  them bubble up from what happens as the community congregates. 

My meetings  on Ecunet in the 90’s happened after I got there.  I didn’t arrive in Ecunet with “A Compuserve  for the Church” in mind.  It came  about and was conceived in the  context of a few conversations that sprung up in other meetings.  This is not to say that conversations similar to that or “extending” on that would not be worthwhile.  I would consider the introduction of such as a picking up where we left off,  since it  was not the issue of Church and  technology that fizzled,  but the  online space in which it occurred. 

The tools that we now have (via various “Social media” platforms and apps)  gives us the opportunity to quickly reconstruct a space that seeks to gather the same kind of living , buzzing community for man of the same reasons.  We now know that the content (the back end) is not limited in its various options for the kind of “front end” we have.  And the “front ends” are getting better and better at illuminating just what possibilities lie in the back end. 

More to come.