WeChurch: Real Time Feedback

The movement from THEChurch to McChurch to WeChurch has one basic outcome: Everything is conversation now.

Publishing has been the harbinger of every major conceptual world shift that we have stories to remember. Our time is no different. With the advent of individual and community blogs publishing is evolving away from a lecture mode and into a dialogical mode. Actually, it has always been a dialogue. You and I have simply been kept out of it until recently.

Journalism is now interactive. Not in mere post-production comments. Real, substantive collaboration or even "forced" coverage can and often does take place. Books are the same way. They are often exposed in their moment-by-moment development for critique and direction. The Cluetrain Manifesto is the canonical example of this. Eric Raymond is doing this with his latest, The Art Of Unix Programming. I have begun to dabble in this as well opening up Authority, Identity and the Other Kingdom for critique, content and directional thought.

Speaking of the Cluetrain, some institutions are finally getting this and beginning to recognize and encourage the healthy debate that already exists within their walls that, inevitably, gets pent up in the bureaucratic posturing and ladder climbing nightmare that is organizational existence. This dialogical trend, the intercast relationship vs. the broadcast relationship, was recently discussed in the context of media companies in a lecture give by Clay Shirky at the BBC.

But it boils down to something simple: our readers collectively know more than we do, and they don't have to settle for half-baked coverage when they can come into the kitchen themselves. This is not a threat. It is an opportunity. -Dan Gillmor on "We Media"

The Church is, in large measure, one of the hold-out institutions (with Government and Education--the Church being someplace between them). At bottom the belief that, "all of us are smarter than one of us," flies in the face of institutional values that privilege the alpha male, the tenured professional, cultural elitism and the like. An open conversational approach to knowledge, vision and direction is, for any organization from single-parent family to multi-national conglomerate, a more tenuous, more honest and more authentically human experience for the entire group. It is also messier, impossible to control, and demands the soul of a person not just their poker face.

WeChurch praxis can get in the way of an organization's "pursuit of excellence" and may even require the old cronies at the top of the pile to contribute in a manner that is transparent and useful or get out of the way. "This isn't worth the risk," is the functional answer many organizations live by. "We have a trust to keep, something to protect," they say with self-righteous vigor. When the trust that is kept is indistinguishable from the paycheck that is cut, the power that is held and the ego that is stroked the speaker is a case in point for the WeChurch critique.

Empowered centers of control are in the business of shoring up their influence not giving it away. China would love to have the Internet be nothing more than a party-friendly newspaper--and Cisco is helping them try to proxy their way to this end. The United States wants every person-to-person communication and business-to-consumer transaction using new technologies to be identified and traceable. Many in industry would love to see the Internet function solely as an interactive television that allows for ads and sales (one way communication) in the ruts of the well trod path of old media (AOLTM anyone?). Certain brands of Christianity would love to have new media function as a simple tool of evangelism--an interactive Chick Tract of sorts.

What none of these power centers can come to terms with is the disintermediating function of these technologies--the new social patterns and relational expectations, in part, engendered by these new capabilities. There is no hiding! The Wizard is the whole system of smoke, curtain, man and machine and if leaders of the Church try to walk in the way of Oscar Z. Phadrig Isaac Norman Hinkle Emmanuel Ambroise Diggs (the Wiz behind the Wizard) they will eventually be found out. There are no viable institutional secrets.

The primary activity that institutional "consumers" are engaging in through electronic mediums/media is talking to each other. Informational interaction is the core value of these new technologies from the perspective of us users. Information is systemic. Faith communities are not immune to the critique all communities and their leadership face after the advent of informationalism.

The old days of knowledge and communication bottlenecks in the secret pathways of professionalism and institutional old-boys clubs have passed. Those who once sat cowering unquestioningly under the authority of the CEO laying-off or selling-off as he is making-off with the loot or the religious leader delivering haughty and maniacal closed-loop systems of truth demanding that the laity live in unspoken subservience to the clergy are simply removing their finger from the dam of blind credulity and allowing the force of the blustering torrent pent up behind the wall to break through. The end of the institutional secret coupled with the perspectival nature of reality brings us back to where we started: conversation.

The view from the bottom of the opportunity-cost chasm says that our spiritual communities cannot remain silos of sameness dominated by a religious professionalism. The way of the other kingdom is a participatory enactment without a privileged elite.

Everything is conversation now.

Let the WeChurch arise.

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