How Churches Are Like Record Labels and Newspapers
By Fernando Gros, re-posted from Fernando’s Desk:
Neo-Baptist has fast become one of my favourite blogs for challenging and intelligent commentary on churchy stuff. In recent months the blog has rally found it’s voice in terms of humour, criticism and encouragement.
Today’s post, on Learning To Love Generation F, really got me thinking. The point really isn’t about Facebook, per se, but rather about how online “community” is challenging our assumptions about real world community.
For a long time I was a critic of what I saw of local (Baptist) church culture because it reflected and to a large extent aped, the corporate world. However, that’s something of a historical anecdote, but the corporate world today has, in many ways moved well beyond what we see in churches, with a lot of business leaders exhibiting a greater sense of the importance of relationships, self-reflection, education and critical thought.
I’m not saying that everybody’s working life is a haven of human flourishing, but many workplaces embody a culture of openness and collaboration that for sheer scope of freedom put our so called “free” churches to shame.
The 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life that are cited just highlight that. Consider, for example,
Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed.
Resources get attracted, not allocated.
Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it.
Intrinsic rewards matter most.
For a long time I was puzzled by the way some church leaders reacted to the Web and social media. There was a rush to dismiss websites and then blogs and even the compliments handed out to online communities were backhanded. At first I thought it was simply because these media allowed alternative voices to be heard and present themselves as challenges to the status quo.
Now I wonder if these new media, present a more fundamental challenge not just to power structures within church life but to the core of some kinds of ecclesiology.
Increasingly I’ve come to wonder if churches are, to some extent, analogous to record labels and newspapers. The latter two business built their limited resources and high barriers to wealth; printing newspapers and promoting hit records is an expensive game. But, the Craigslist, blogs, DAWs and MySpace have become deal-breakers — especially if you don’t lay awake at night dreaming of wealth and a home in the Caribbean. Both record labels and newspapers created wealth through the way a resource problem was answered and structured. You needed a label to get your music out, now you don’t. You needed a newspaper to create a PR buzz or post a classified, now you don’t.
This truly is a blessed time for those for whom doing is a reward in and of itself, regardless of the rewards. The way of doing for the “ordinary” person has changed, if they are really focused first on the doing.
How does this relate to church? Forgive me for waxing economical, but to me church is a kind of resource problem (or collective action problem). We “do” church because there are things a Christian just can’t “do” by themselves. In a way, ecclesiological power was like the power of the record label or newspaper in time when access to theological education and resources was scarce and expensive. A lot of theological education is still built on that model today (Matt Stone has been blogging on this topic lately).
There was a time where possession of a Bachelor of Theology degree put your near the top of the educated within a western society. But, today it is usually very unlikely that a pastor would be anywhere near being the most educated person in their congregation in most churches. Moreover, the explosion of christian publishing means that theological resources are more available than at any time in the history of the church. And, it doesn’t stop there, the possibilities for mentoring, retreats and spiritual direction are no longer confined to clergy and their professional development.
Which brings us back to the online thing. The open, flat, collaborative, fluid dynamic that marks out online culture is a place that problematises a lot of the assumptions that feed the church-as-answer-to-scarce-resources model. Put simply, we no longer need that kind of church or the denominational structures that were built to support it. If anything, that kind of church is becoming more and more repulsive to people of my generation and will be totally alien to digital natives.
That’s not to say that there are no more collective action and resource problems because there are. But, they have largely changed from problems of access to problems of choice. Or, to put it another way, the economics have shifted from a problem of scarcity to a problem of abundance.
We still need wisdom and to some extent leadership. But, there’s no question we need a different kind of church, different habits and to be blunt, different leaders.
Photo by Kathleen Bennett
Fernando Gros is a writer and musician, living in Hong Kong. A former pastor, chaplain, banker, and pizza maker, he blogs on issues on faith and globalisation.
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I’m currently a part of an Episcopal congregation and my role is continuing to expand in the life of the community. My priest and a few others are encouraging me to consider a “vocation”, or a pursuit of ordination. I’m reticent, not because I don’t think I’m not called to “minister” (that word has too much baggage attached to it for me to feel totally comfortable even typing it) but rather because I don’t know if ordination is relevant to the part I play.
I don’t need an institutional validation of God’s purposes in my life and I can normally keep up with a professional academic in the realm of theology. Also, maybe half of what I do takes place outside the specific context of our congregation in a community based network. What will ordination accomplish? I’m not looking for a professional license to be a ‘religious person’ especially in that I don’t think I’ll ever accept money for what I do.
We’re between two worlds right now, or at least I am. I don’t want to simply abandon the one that is passing away because people I know and love live there, but I don’t know that I can plant stakes there to set up a permanent camp.
Oh well, I’m a mess. :)
The Church and local churches have been around and grown for 2000 years. There are more Christians and christian churches on the planet than at any time in history. A local church is at its core the free association of repentant, regenerated believers in Jesus. They come together for the purpose of corporate worship of the savior, mutual encouragement, inspiration, and discipleship. The organizational structures are organic, gift based and reflect Paul’s 5-fold ministry. Sometimes this church operates as a subset of the local church, sometimes it operates outside the confines of the organized church, whether anabaptists, moravians, early methodists or charismatics. In a sense its probably more like the open, flat, collaborative, fluid dynamic organism.
The organization you describe is a pecularily American artificial construct, a business and entertainment entity designed to provide social connections, cultural affirmations and sometimes economic improvement for impoverished social classes. That organization, whether it is Baptist, Presbyterian, independent mega-church or Emergent may go the way of newspapers and record labels. They are a reflection of their time and place. And yet there will be more churches than ever. It is simply fulfills a deep human need and spiritual necessity whether in a modern society, post-modern society or fuedal society and is, to put it directly, God’s design.
I’ve just discovered the emergent church and am meeting a gentlemen, who has a cohort group here in my small town, to talk about my joining it. I have known for a long time that I did not fit into any church, but as a Christian I thought this was it. There were no other churches.
God has answered my prayer to find other like minded Christians. I agree so much with this blog and Emergent Christianity in general. I was married to a man in the music business for 20 years and the article resonated with me even more because it spoke to something I know well.
Our new technology/facebook society is criticized so much, and I was as guilty as anyone, for creating virtual relationships instead of real ones. I’ve discovered this is not true. Through facebook I have been able to reach out to my ever-growing facebook community and speak my mind about my views of Christianity and all religion. Yes, the stereotypical right wing Christians, of whom many are wonderful friends, are stunned and shocked and horrified at some of the things I say, not just online, but in person.
Technology allows us to reach out and touch people, be touched by people we would never be able to otherwise; and in numbers we can help change Christianity back into what is is supposed to be. In short, Christianity can return to being all about a relationship with God and our savior Jesus. We will do the things that as Paul said in Phillipians, are good and just and praiseworthy. We can just “be”. Be Christians and worship the way God created us to worship.This tiny movement is gaining momentum and I look forward to seeing it grow and bring Christianity into the next phase.
Change does not come without controversy, but we can be rebels just as Jesus was when preaching those three years. We will grow
out of the political/commercial enterprise that has become religion. We will do this partly through an unlikely advocate; the internet.
Marcia Miller
Bend, OR
Insightful, trenchant analysis.
The Republican hegemony floundered because it could not adress the allocation issues apart from the old scarcity of resources context. The organized, denominationally affiliated (or, its mirror “non-denominational counterparts) are also floundering.
However, since as individuals we flounder, we need to seek the Spirit’s guidance in pursuing those forms of association that enable us to discover ourselves and our neighbors in the body of Christ. I must confess that I will be just fine with the news that that isn’t the Elizabeth Presbetery of NJ.
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I spent eight years working for a denominational body (and two working part-time for a related magazine) but lost the job three years ago. Since then I’ve continued to do pretty much the same work, just unpaid and on my own time. An online community has formed (quakerquaker.org) and we’ve got an active online magazine, blogs, videos, etc. We generate much more content than the official bodies and it feels more vital, personal and lived. The online organizing has spilled over into speaking engagements, workshops, books and other offline ministries. There’s still a divide over who consumes the new media but it’s shrinking and there will have to be adjustments made at the denominations sooner or later (the economy will probably be speeding up that process and I know a few spiritual nonprofits looking nervously at Fall board meetings).
At this point I’m assuming that we’re building the future online and figure this will be a safety net that keeps some of the ministry going as the denominational leadership gets grayer and the classic denominational model take a hit.