International Women's Day....was yesterday

Yesterday (8th March) was International Women's Day - and was a special occasion in that women around the world were celebrating 100 years of Women's Day.

While we're a bit late in posting about it, (though for many people it's still the 8th March, anyway) that doesn't mean that many of the options available to both men and women in terms of celebrating the day have been left behind. Jenny Baker offered the following bunch of suggestions - many of which you could do at any time of the year...

• Contact a woman who has inspired or encouraged you and tell her how much you appreciate her
• Join the Big Inequality Debate at http://www.weareequals.org/
• Follow Ruth Wells' example and take action against the objectification of women, or get involved with Object
• Get in touch with a younger woman who has leadership potential, or who inspires you and offer your support and encouragement.
• Use videos and information from The Girl Effect to raise awareness in your youth group - or among your friends - about the injustice faced by many girls around the world.
• Find out more about women around the world on Christian Aid's website.
• Get involved with Restored, Tearfund's new initiative to challenge the church on violence against women.
• Give the money you could have spent on a treat for yourself to help women in poverty around the world - why not give it here, here or here?
• Join Womankind's twitter campaign and tweet your #wish4women

Tweeting from Edinburgh

Some tweets from the Edinburgh 2010 Mission Conference, which has been taking place over the last couple of days or so. These are rather randomly listed - I copied the ones that most interested me....

First some stats:
In 1910, 80% of Christians lived in countries of at least 90% Christians. In 2010, 33% of Christians live in 90%-Christian countries – from Edinburgh 2010.

Across all faiths, the world is “less religious” in 2010 than 1910 - and yet, the world in 2010 is more religious than it was in 1970.

In 2010 about 27% of all Christians are "Renewalists": Pentecostal, Charismatic, Neo-Charismatic - Todd Johnson's report is context for...?

In 1910, 66% of all Christians were European, with an additional 15% from N America; in 2010, 25% in Europe, 12.5% in N America.

86% of Muslims, Hindus, & Buddhists do not personally know a Christian. This lack of interfaith *friendship* is a crisis in mission.

These statistics mentioned by Todd Johnson for #th2 are from the Atlas of Global Christianity project.

And some pithy statements, some of which take a bit of unravelling:

Fr. Jan Lenssen: Real, radical "communities of hospitality" make more of a difference than sheer numbers of Christians.

1910’s urgency to conquer diversity has paradigm-shifted into 2010’s reluctance to smother diversity..

In order to reach people in contexts of secularism and pluralism, witness must embrace religious tolerance rather than confront it.

*Understanding* other faiths is a priority, before either dialogue or evangelism: there is a place for the Qur'an in Sunday school...[This one struck me as adding more complications - Sunday School often seems to struggle to teach Christianity, let alone the Qur'an!]

priority: Inter-generational dialogue. Dialogue between "native speakers" of modernity and "native speakers" of postmodernity.

priority: Deepening our understanding of God's mission, rather than inventing and carrying out our own.

The secular world also adds to our discourse – it helps us “discern the spirits”. Indeed, we cannot uncritically affirm religion..

Rev Roderick Hewitt from the United Church of Jamaica talks to participants about child resiliency & building ‘youth friendly’ churches. [This should please NZ's Presbyterians, who have a Kids Friendly programme in place, and running very successfully.]

Our plurality today - diverse cultural, theological, ecclesial flourishing - is a sign of hope and vitality, not lack of direction...

"How can we possibly claim to be a credible witness community if we are still far from practicing equality, charity, etc, in our lives?”

How easy it is to be confused or dismayed when what we see in the world does not match our learned categories of understanding!

Congregational Websites

A website...is an increasingly strategic tool for congregational communication. One of my sons, who is 30, calls websites “our new front door,” and he says most people in his generation would never consider visiting a place they haven’t read about online. Money spent on website design and maintenance is well spent.

From Lynne Baab - in an article called Electronic Communication and Congregations in the Presbyterian Candour magazine (unfortunately I can't link to it!) Lynne recently finished writing a book on friendship in the Facebook age.

Changing Face of Church?

In a short(ish) piece, Todd Rhoades and Dave Travis outline what they think is the changing face of today's church.

Some of their suggestions may be temporary - multi-site churches, for instance, seem to be a fairly controversial approach in some quarters, and may not outlast the idea that church is local. (See David Fitch, for example, on the topic.)

The widespread adoption of social media - not necessarily in church, as in using tweets to tell the preacher what you're thinking - but in the culture at large.

Internet campuses, online giving, the use of iPhones, more multi-racial churches....and the list goes on. I'm sure there are other trends we should be keeping an eye on - Rhoades and Travis don't make any mention of the Saga Generation, though of course they talk about young people (who apparently are 'flooding' non-institutional churches).

What's your take on the changes?

Twittering Theology?

I know that Twitter - indeed, social media in general - isn't everyone's cup of tea, and many people are not persuaded of its value in terms of preaching Christ. So it's interesting to read Scot McKnight on the topic and find that he can see value in it for Christian leaders, and for Christians in general.

Social media like Facebook and Twitter has received an abundance of critique, not the least of which is that social media users are self-absorbed. But I wonder if we might turn answers on Twitter to the question “What are you doing?” or on Facebook’s status update into an opportunity for self-examination. It might even be an opportunity for Twitter and Facebook users to examine not just what they are doing but how it aligns with our mission.

For a typical anti-viewpoint on Twitter, check out this blog post from Alan Rudnick, in a blog called On the Bema in Ballston. (Don't ask me, I have no idea why it's called that.)

3 Subjects: Posts, updates and a Webinar

1. I'm very surprised to find we're just about up to 500 posts on this blog. If I get some time today, we might make it.

2. I've been out of the office for a couple of days...hence the lack of updates on here. This week will see that made up for!

3. Most important of the three subjects here:

On Tuesday, September 22, 2009 4:00 pm Eastern Daylight Time - that's four hours behind Greenwich Mean Time, or 16 hours behind NZ time, if my calculations are correct - Lynne Baab will be holding a webinar called Facebook and Twitter 101 for Congregations, in other words a webinar for Facebook and Twitter Beginners.

Lynne Baab is a well-known author and experienced webinar leader. She'll be connecting with Alban Institute from New Zealand and will provide an overview of the following:

how Facebook and Twitter both work;
how groups, such as congregations, can use them;
a brief discussion of whether we need to be concerned about online relationships replacing face to face relationships.

If you've been wanting someone to help you evaluate whether or not your congregation should be considering these social networking options, this webinar has been designed just for you. (And if you're in New Zealand, you can get involved in this Webinar....just make sure you've worked out the time difference!)

Lynne M. Baab is a Presbyterian minister and author of the Alban book Reaching Out in A Networked World: Expressing Your Congregation's Heart and Soul, as well as six other books and a Bible study guide. She recently completed a Ph.D. in communication at the University of Washington. She lives with her husband in Dunedin, New Zealand, where she is a lecturer in pastoral theology at the University of Otago. She is the author of two other Alban Institute books: Personality Type in Congregations, and Embracing Midlife.

Forget Economics, Think Socialnomics

I found the following video on Bosco Peters' Liturgy site. The stats are most interesting, and have probably all been surpassed since the video was made, such is the speed with which internet social media is moving.




As Bosco comments on his site: If social media is here to stay - how is the church responding? How is your parish or Christian community participating? The seven last words of a Christian community are, “we never did it like that before.”

Is social media here to stay? Certainly for the next reasonable period of time.

Spiritual Practice of...you name it!

Want some interesting topics for sermon ideas? Check out the growing list of Spiritual Practices at Godspace.

Spiritual Practices? Nah, been there, done that. Don't want to go down that old road of contemplation and monasticism again. That's so 90s (or maybe it was 80s?) and so Richard Foster.

But you might be a little surprised by this list: it includes the spiritual practice of love-making (I'll never forget hearing a guy at a Full Gospel Businessman's meeting telling us he and his wife used to kneel down and pray before making love), the spiritual practice of composting by New Zealander, Steve Taylor (I can fully understand composting as a spiritual practice); the spiritual practices of driving and smoking - these are two separate practices, I hasten to add. And don't forget twittering, blogging, and taking a shower.

Value

And without wanting to overload you with Seth Godin, here he is again, this time telling us in about two minutes, where value lies in social networking, and where it doesn't.




We've talked a lot - and with enthusiasm - about facebook, twitter, and so on. These things are of value when there are real connections. Yes, it's great to have lots of facebook friends, and lots of followers on twitter - but in both cases there has to be a connection that makes the friendship and the following real. And that does happen: not with everyone, but certainly with some.

Twitturgies

Gerard Kelly is the founder of the Bless Network with his wife Chrissie. They live in the Netherlands, where Gerald is Senior Pastor of Crossroads Amsterdam, a church of 40 nationalities. Gerard also writes poetry (see Spoken Worship) more recently he has shared some of his verses through twitter under the name twitturgies.

Kelly coined the name Twitturgies, asking "Why not use Twitter as a means of prayer, all the time accepting the constraints of communication in less than 140 characters? In essence I simply took the Twitter question “What are you doing?” and translated it as “What are you praying?” taking the prayers I was praying in any case and crafting them into personal liturgies."

240 Twitter prayers later, he's found that not only do hundreds of other people appreciate the prayers, but that being disciplined into 140 characters makes his prayers very focused.

Meanwhile, Ireland’s top Catholic Cardinal Sean Bray has urged his flock to use Twitter as a means of prayer. In a speech in honour of the late Father Patrick Peyton, the Priest famous for coining the phrase “the family that prays together stays together,” Cardinal Bray insists that a new movement of prayer can arise using new technology and social networks.

Photo is of Gerald and his wife, Chrissie. Courtesy of the Godspace blog

Twitterstats

In relation to the various posts on here about Twitter and other similar social networking devices, I was interested to read some stats on Twitter which showed that it's being used differently to most other social media sites, such as Facebook and MySpace.

1. Although men and women follow a similar number of Twitter users, men have 15% more followers than women. This is interesting in view of the fact that only 45% of Twitter users are men, while 55% are women,

2. An average man is almost twice more likely to follow another man than a woman, and 40% more likely to be followed by another man. Women are 25% more likely to follow a man. What is surprising about this is that on a typical online social network, most of the activity is focused around women - men follow content produced by women they do and do not know, and women follow content produced by women they know.

3. The top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. Many Twitter users use it once, or rarely. Compare this to Wikipedia, where 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of the edits.

There's more detail in the article, which is worth checking out if you're interested in stats, and the conclusions that can be drawn from them. And then considering how any of this relates to how we 'do' church...

Social media in business

At a bloggers' summit, held as part of the International ITB Berlin trade show in March, four top social media trends were noted.

1. A change in philosophy from the top of an organisation recognising the importance of social media.
2. Organisations will have social media specialists in the company.
3. Public relations will be using more social media channels
4. Twitter

These four were the result of a variety of possibilities suggested, such as PR on social media sites; 'crowd sourcing'; hyper local news; feedback 2.0; 'maps' as a new interface; integrated video.

The information above comes from an article in NZ Management called Social Media: when context is king, by Annie Gray. (June 2009, page 36)

As always, it's worth noting how what's being considered here is of interest to the church: where does social media fit? Is Twitter just a fad or something of value to the church? Is there someone in your church who is passionate about both Jesus and social media? Can they bring these together?

Twittering during the sermon

Some churches in the States have decided to allow people to Twitter during the service. Westwinds Community Church in Jackson, Michigan, for example, flashes worshipper's Tweets on large video screens.

Distracting? You bet!

However, this is a church that already twitters people with information about service times, sermon titles (The Top 5 Things We’ve Done That Made People Mad but Were Worth It, for instance), church notices and congratulations on people's baptisms. So twittering is part of their modus operandi.

But then there a church that's well and truly into the techno age: a look at their homepage shows podcasts listed, video streaming, blogs (there are at least five, and here's a post on the twittering 'issue'), and various other Internet-based areas on prayer, discipleship and so on (which I spent far too much time playing around with).

Here's a comment from the blog I linked to above: For Westwinds, the use of Twitter, among many other things, are [sic] appropriate for us but may not be for everyone. It is our culture. It is expected we will try different things. Some will fail. Some become part of us.

I'm happy I found out about Westwinds....they look as though they're trying out all sorts of possibilities in the technological area, and doing well with most of them. And here's another blog post from another one of their staff with no less than 25 points on the Twittering issue.

Pastors and their time

I imagine every pastor has been accosted at some point in their career by someone demanding to know how they spend their time. Is the congregation getting 'value for money?' I'll even admit to heckling a young pastor in my church one day many years ago (along with a couple of other equally ignorant members) about what he was doing with his day.

So I was a bit surprised to see Todd Rhoades encouraging people to use Twitter to find out how pastors are using their time. He introduces his brief article in this way: Most church conferences have a time set aside for speaker Q&A, and one of the first questions asked nearly every time is "What does your day look like?" In other words, "How do you schedule your time, and how do you prioritize your tasks?" The answers are always interesting and insightful.

He then goes on to list a bunch of pastors who have offered their Twitter addresses to the concerned public at large. Is it just me who thinks this is crazy? Do pastors really need to account for what they're doing to such a degree?

Rhoades writes: You can find out when their days start, what they're reading, the meetings they're attending, how they balance their family time, and what gets them really pumped (or ticked off).

Good grief. Twitter only allows 140 characters at a time. Is this really going to tell anyone what their pastor is doing, and shouldn't these people be doing something more productive with their lives anyway? As my colleague says, he's a right twitter!