Sorry, who killed the church?

In the middle of last year Richard Beck wrote a post called How Facebook Killed the Church, which has just taken off on the blogosphere again. It's a provocative title, and it's true in relation to what he actually says in the article, where he talks why people who went to church primarily for the social element find it's no longer necessary when there are umpteen technological ways to make contact. I quote:

No doubt, the vast majority of the people in a friend list on Facebook are strangers, acquaintances, or old school friends you haven't seen in years. But no user of Facebook is confused enough to think that she is "in relationship" with any of these people. These are just the penumbra around the core of our Facebook interactions, connecting with people we actually know and are friends with.

In short, Facebook isn't replacing real world relationality. Rather, Facebook tends to reflect our social world.

Beck isn't saying that these people who no longer go to church were thoroughly involved in being disciples - at least I don't think that's what he's saying. There are a great number of very comments to this post, and these clarify and deepen the discussion in a variety of ways. These are as much worth reading as the original post.

Unemployment in NZ

In the latest Vulnerability Report from the NZ Council of Christian Social Services shows that the current unemployment rate is 7.3%.

This is even more alarming when it’s broken down into who is most affected: youth, Maori and Pacific peoples and benefit dependent households are bearing the brunt.

The unemployment rate for youth aged 15-19 years is a staggering 23% and the unemployment rate for Maori aged between 15-24 years is nearly 26%.

Also of concern is the longer term impact of financial deprivation on our youngest citizens. A wealth of research indicates that now is the time to build up investment in our children and young people.

The Report covers a great deal more material in its seven pages, and is well worth reading for anyone who wants to know what's happening to the poor and disadvantaged in our society.

What return?

A great organization is one that delivers superior performance and makes a distinctive impact over a long period of time. For a business, financial returns are a perfectly legitimate measure of performance.

For a social sector organization, however, performance must be assessed relative to mission, not financial returns. In the social sectors, the critical question is not 'How much money do we make per dollar of invested capital?' but 'How effectively do we deliver on our mission and make a distinctive impact, relative to our resources?'

From page 5 of Good to Great and the Social Sectors: a monograph to accompany Good to Great, by Jim Collins.

On Emergence (not emergent - or emergency)

A couple of extracts from an article by Margaret J Wheatley, called Using Emergence to take Social Innovations to Scale.

Wheatley explains 'emergence' this way:

Emergence violates so many of our Western assumptions of how change happens that it often takes quite a while to understand it. In nature, change never happens as a result of top-down, pre-conceived strategic plans, or from the mandate of any single individual or boss. Change begins as local actions spring up simultaneously in many different areas. If these changes remain disconnected, nothing happens beyond each locale. However, when they become connected, local actions can emerge as a powerful system with influence at a more global or comprehensive level. (Global here means a larger scale, not necessarily the entire planet.)

Emergence comes about through Networks:

Networks are the only form of organization used by living systems on this planet. These networks result from self-organization, where individuals or species recognize their interdependence and organize in ways that support the diversity and viability of all. Networks create the conditions for emergence, which is how Life changes. Because networks are the first stage in emergence, it is essential that we understand their dynamics and how they develop into communities and then systems.

This article was written back in 2006, but even at that stage, emergence (especially on the Net) was a considerable force: Linux, Wikipedia, Tribes to name a very few. The current strength of social media on the Net is another example; it may not entirely be what Wheatley had in mind, but is has the same sort of elements.

Getting it wrong - dead wrong

We must reject the idea - well-intentioned, but dead wrong - that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become 'more like a business.' Most businesses - like most of anything else in life - fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?

So says Jim Collins, in the opening paragraph of his monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors. Yet so much of the church continues to think that being 'businesslike' is a good thing.

Paul Windsor on Mission

There's a substantial post on Paul Windsor's blog (the art of unpacking), called: mission: inspiration, concern, hope.

Paul takes up Harold Turner's three levels of mission and looks at them in turn, then follows these up with comments about the words in the heading. Here's a long quote from the first part of the post.

Level One focuses on the individual-personal, incorporating spoken evangelism with acts of compassionate service. Words and deeds by individuals.

Level Two focuses on the public-social world with communities as the centerpiece. The community we know as the church - the distinctive, alternative, and attractive people of God - building bridges and walking across them into the wider community. This is where home and workplace are honoured. This is where social and economic systems are challenged. This is where the Kingdom of God becomes visible.

Level Three focuses on the deeper-cultural world. If society is a tree, the concern here is for the roots. If society is a boat, the concern here is for the tide. Level Three recognises that it is the invisible which tends to be influential. It agrees with CS Lewis in asserting that "the critical ideas in society are not the ones being argued, but the ones being assumed." This is mission to worldview or, as Turner expressed it, this is "deep mission".

The whole post is worth a read...in fact, I've made a hardcopy for our office to chew over.

Social Networking 101

Do you still think that there's no great value in being involved in sites like Facebook, My Space and the like? That they're just places where people waste time, and don't have anything real to do with each other? That they're not really the sort of thing churches should be getting involved in?

Well, check out this speedy little piece of teaching on Social Networks.



It's done simply, cleverly and with humour, and gives you an easy way to understand the value of Social Networking (which, it points out, isn't anything new - it just happens to take on a slightly different flavour on the Net).

Church of the Saviour

The Church of the Saviour in Washington has always been unconventional (or maybe that should read: real). Now with the retirement of its long-time leader, (he's only 91), the church is facing another change in its journey.
It's never been into 'big' church, and has split into smaller groups before. Even at the last sermon, there were only 70 people attending. The rest of the 'church' are elsewhere, doing church, or being active in the community in health, AIDs, housing, ministry to athletes, homelessness.
The Church has been well-known for its activist Christianity for decades, and continues in this vein. With a major transition in the retirement of Gordon Cosby, there is some concern that things will go in a different direction.

Michelle Boorstein, in The Washington Post, has written a longish and entirely sympathetic article on the Church and its current transition.

The photo shows the church building, as unconventional as everything else about the place.

Bowling Alone, Tribes and Facebook

Robert Putnam, in his book, Bowling Alone, claimed that Generation X people were disinclined to join community organisations. He said, ‘social capital has eroded steadily and sometimes dramatically over the past two generations.’

In an article entitled, Social Tribes: from Bowling Alone to Facebook, Tamara J. Erickson disagrees - at least in part. She says this generation is very closely tied to long-standing friendships, rather than becoming involved in social groups where friends have to be made. These are sometimes called ‘urban tribes.’ In fact, ‘tribes’ is the in-word (Seth Godin has written a book based on it).
So what about Facebook, Erickson asks? She has some interesting stats. You may not be asked to join as a ‘friend’ of one of your children, but the fastest growing demographic on Facebook is the 35-54 year olds, with a 276.4% growth rate. Not far behind is the 55 and over demographic with a 194.3% growth rate.

From my small experience of Facebook in NZ, I would say this is happening here too.

Yet again there's an opportunity for the church to be innovative.

Social Gospel

Any gospel which is not social is not gospel. God so loved the world that.... He didn't just sit in His great theological rocking chair stroking his white beard and glory in His love for the world. He did something about it. He became social in the form of His Son. He lived, interacted, and behaved in a real social environment, disclosing God's social way. In the incarnation the spiritual "word" became a social "event." To say it another way, the social event was itself a word which communicated to men. Word and deed are inseparably cemented into one in the incarnation.

Donald Kraybill
The Upside-down Kingdom

The idea that we have an obligation to society beyond the demands we ourselves wish to make of it is
becoming unfashionable. Utilitarianism – the greatest happiness (or welfare or benefit) for the greatest
number – is a philosophy now held in severe disrepute.
Individual endeavour is adulated, as is personal autonomy. Utilitarianism might deter the huge efforts, for
huge gains, of the talented entrepreneur. Thus society looks less at the welfare of the whole, and more at the welfare of the individual. And the intervention of the state is seen as less than desirable, and often less than benevolent to boot.
Meanwhile, the old sense of mutual obligation, somewhat fostered by war-time, has taken a battering. We are into understanding ourselves, into selfimprovement: improving our homes, our looks and our minds. And our view of faith is also increasingly individualistic. We choose the elements of faith that suit us – we may go to church, synagogue or mosque. Individual salvation is part of the appeal of the evangelicals. Personal salvation is the carrot held out. But the requirements our faiths put on us to consider and care for others may get less than their fair attention.
We look at ourselves, not beyond. And despite all the surveys demonstrating widespread belief in God,
despite the huge readership of religious books and the increasing attendance at evangelical churches, our
views about social solidarity, evening up the inequalities and making a difference to groups or individuals who suffer, have taken a battering.

From Unkind, risk averse and untrusting – if this is today’s society,can we change it? - the latest (Sept 2008) report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's series on social evils.

Kevin Rudd and Religion in Australia

In a blog post on the 7th August, Jim Wallis (of Sojourners) writes:

One of the stories I first heard on my recent visit to Australia was about what helped swing the vote last November to Kevin Rudd, the new Labor prime minister. I read some new political data by veteran pollster and researcher John Black, who is respected across Australia's political spectrum. Black reported that the pivotal swing vote to Labor this time was among evangelicals and Pentecostals, especially in some key seats in the states of Queensland and South Australia.

Kevin Rudd [is] a new kind of Labor candidate who speaks openly and comfortably about his faith. Rudd is a Catholic, is theologically articulate, and even likes to write articles about German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Though Jim has apparently got it wrong about Rudd being a Catholic - he was brought up as one, but is now a practising Anglican, that doesn't change the point. Here's a practising Christian in Australia's top job, and social justice issues are one of his major concerns.

Read the rest of the article here - it has some other good things to say about Australia (!)

And one other word about social justice:
Social sin is the crystallization ... of individuals’ sins into permanent structures that keeps sin in being and makes its force to be felt by the majority of people.
- Oscar Romero
Salvadoran archbishop, assassinated in 1980

Not 'either or'

It is not a matter of engaging in both the gospel and social action, as if Christian social action was something separate from the gospel itself. The gospel has to be demonstrated in word and deed. Biblically, the gospel includes the totality of all that is good news from God for all that is bad news in human life—in every sphere. So like Jesus, authentic Christian mission has included good news for the poor, compassion for the sick and suffering justice for the oppressed, liberation for the enslaved. The gospel of the Servant of God in the power of the Spirit of God addresses every area of human need and every area that has been broken and twisted by sin and evil. And the heart of the gospel, in all of these areas, is the cross of Christ.

- Christopher J. H. Wright
International director of John Stott Ministries (from Knowing the Holy Spirit Through the Old Testament)

The debate continues - thank goodness!

A few posts ago I wrote about an editorial that appeared in the NZ Herald which berated the Christian churches for not speaking out about poverty in NZ. It seems more and more likely that whoever wrote the editorial was struggling for something that might be a little controversial. Suffice to say, an opinion piece by Tapu Misa showed up some of the fallacies in the editorial, and on Friday, David Moxon and Brown Turei also added the voices to the debate.

At least the Herald was gracious enough to allow some differing opinions on the matter. Moxon and Turei's piece finishes with these sentences:
Outside the state, the churches are the biggest providers of social services in this country. This field is our daily reality. Challenging political policy and wanting to influence the shaping of policy with Christian values in these areas is crucial. It always has been and always will be.
You can read the rest of the piece by clicking here.

Archbishop David Moxon and Archbishop Brown Turei are Co-Presiding Bishops of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia.