Tag: community

Everything Must Change


Finished reading Everything Must Change today on the way into work.

Excellent. I think as several others have pointed out in our book club – Everything Must Change… but it must begin with ME.

“another world is possible, available now for all who believe.”

referring to those who would rise up against the common framing story we find ourselves currently surrounded by McLaren rights…

“they would seek to be the revolution they wished to see in the world… This kind of group would be the current expression of Jesus’ original band of disciples. It would be the church as Jesus intended. Groups like this wouldn’t need buildings, pipe organs, rock bands, layers of institutional structure, video projectors, parking lots, and so on… What they would need would be simple: a passion to understand Jesus and his message and a commitment to live out that understanding in a world in which everything must change.”

I’m teaching from this book now over the next several weeks for our community group. I’m basically putting together some “curriculum” as we go – I’d love to share it and get input from others who have read the book (or are reading it) but haven’t decided yet what format to use. Should I simply post a PDF of what I have or would others be interested in adding to it, making notes etc and make this a community effort using a Wiki of some sort?

re: Social networking and the church

the city

Found some more info on Mars Hill’s social network, The City:

The site is being built around physical communities not as much as around online communities.

One of the design principles of The City, which has guided virtually every decision we’ve made, is that the physical is more important than the virtual. This subtle but significant difference provides the foundation for understanding how this new thing is going to work…

On my Facebook page, I’ve got dozens of friends. Of those friends, I would imagine that about one third are actually in the Seattle area. The other two thirds are people literally all over the world. While there is a certain cool factor in having a virtual Rolodex of everyone I’ve ever known, is there anything more to it than that? Sure, if I’m planning a trip out to one of the areas where they will be, it’s rather convenient, and I get to find out that my college friend is eating a ham sandwich (a la Twitter), but that doesn’t change my life or their life for that matter. When you’re trying to build an intentional community, Facebook just doesn’t cut it. There are too many off topic, off mission sorts of diversions that the game aspect of the site dominates any mission it could try to carry.

Now, Facebook can be incredibly missional for the 1% that choose to use it as a mission field and network specifically with that in mind, but I’m trying to think along the lines of how you get the 80% to that level. The framework will either make a compelling community, or it will not. I don’t believe Facebook ever will do that for the 80%.

More specifically they’re building the site around physical neighborhoods.

Simply, your neighborhood is everyone that lives near you. Pretty basic eh? So why is this a cool concept? Let’s look at a concrete yet fictional example.

John is a community group leader in Ballard; he hosts his group just a little down the road from the public library off Market. He’s got a relatively new group with just five folks in regular attendance. He invites people to his group regularly, but they live all over the place! Ballard draws people from all over Seattle (and beyond), and finding the right people has been tough.

Jim is new to Mars Hill. He attended his first service, stopped by The City kiosk afterwards, and signed up to be “connected”, whatever that means. The volunteer that helped him was nice enough, but Jim doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do next. He lives near the old firehouse on Market, in fact, he works as a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu coach at the studio there. If only John knew Jim was in his backyard…

This is where the ‘neighborhood’ thing I checked into the code this morning comes into play. John would see in The City that a new guy showed up in his neighborhood (without having to dig for it), maybe The City would even say, “hey, you’re the closest community group!” and John could reach out to Jim with a couple of clicks.

Love it!

Social networking and the church

I’ve written about social networking (i.e. MySpace, Facebook, etc) here before. I’ve also written about the idea of churches getting behind these networks and putting them to use for marketing, announcements, building community, etc. etc.

I haven’t heard a lot of feedback other than on the techie side of things. I read recently about Mars Hill’s social networking strategy over at digital.leadnet.org.

Here’s an overview:

  • Pastor Mark Driscoll’s Facebook profile has 4000 friends
  • Less than 20% of these friends are from the Seattle area
  • He has apps to read in his blog, link to his books from Amazon, play videos from their Ask Anything sermon series, and read in Mars Hill RSS feeds
  • He gets 20 messages and wall posts a day
  • Mark Driscoll’s Myspace profile has 400 friends

In addition to this, Dustin told digital.leadnet about an internal project they’re working on – “Our IT department is currently developing our own social network, the City, that will be used for almost all communication within the church.” More info on their soon-to-launch social network here.

This is very cool in my book (of course Mars Hill apparently has a full IT team and their own blog). They’re building the site on Ruby on Rails. Not real familiar with that software or “programing language” but it looks cool. I’m looking at doing something with Elgg.org for now. But I’m seeing more folks using Ruby on Rails. Might be worth looking into.

So the techies are interested in all this and implementing it – but for me part of the thrill of implementing a social network for encounter or other churches is the challenge aspect of it. I wonder how enthused average users or church members would be in using it.

So I put together a quick survey over on the encounter blog. I’ve plugged it via our Twitter feed, our Facebook group, a MySpace bulletin and of course here. I’d encourage you to take a second and fill out the form, regardless of if you’re an active part of encounter or not. And I’d love for you to push the survey on your own blogs as well. The more input the better.

And yes – you can remain anonymous in filling out the form.

Community is more about who you are

It’s a buzz word. It’s often misunderstood. It’s central to the Christian faith and yet so absent from many churches. Community. It would be appropriate to launch into sociological reflection on the dearth of community in our culture, drawing from observations made by sociologists like Robert Putnam (Bowling Alone, Better Together) in order to demonstrate the human desire and decline of community, but I don’t have the time or expertise. Instead, I will address two main issues with our attempts to find community. First, defective Christian views of community are based on unbiblical notions of the Church. Second, true community is based not on what you do but who you are.

I still have to wonder and question why it seems like many in the church today are against this idea of “community.” They seem to think its some evil conspiracy of the purpose driven church.

Jonathan Dodson talks more about this in his recent article for Next-Wave Ezine:

The church is not just people; its God’s living room, his neighborhood.

But even with Jesus dying to remake people into better, worshiping, missional communities, the Church still remains defective. The family of God is dysfunctional. Why? Because at the center of community we too often have a set of rules, not the gospel.

Most communities fluctuate in their success based on how well people keep the rules of the community. For instance, if I join a book club my acceptance in the club will likely go up or down based on how well I understood the book, know the author, and can discuss his ideas. My sense of acceptance from the community is related to things I do, not who I am. The same is true for most community outlets in this world. If I am part of a Fantasy Football community, my sense of significance will ride upon how well I know my player stats and football trivia. Bottom line, the strength of a community is often determined by how well I perform, by what I do or don’t do, not who I am.

So what can we as a church body and a community of believers do to ensure that people feel significance based solely on who they are and not what they do?

All too often Christian communities have rules at their center, not the gospel. If you read the Bible, don’t drink beer, and “go to church,” you’re accepted. If you do the opposite, you are not accepted. This is religion, not the gospel. Religion says “I obey a set of rules and I am accepted,” but the message of Jesus was “You are accepted by my grace and as a result you obey and follow me.” As dysfunctional people we need something more than performance to bind us together. We need something that provides acceptance and forgiveness even when we fail one another. We also need something big enough to satisfy our infinite appetites for community, something divine. We need Jesus.

Jesus is sufficient for our failures and successes in community

The need for fellowship

A good friend of mine e-mailed me a question about fellowship in the church yesterday.

I wanted to ask you a question about church and Fellowship.

Is there debate about people who don’t attend or belong to a church,
but conduct Fellowship (by that I mean prayer and study) in their
home with other people, but without a reverend or priest or some sort
of Church leader present?

Some people go to Fellowship during the week with like minds and then
go to church on Sunday. But is it rare for Christians to not go to
church at all and just have Fellowship throughout the week?
Basically, what’s the role of Fellowship?

Here are my thoughts:

Not sure if by Fellowship you mean a specific program of some sort or not. My circle of friends refer to “fellowship” in a number of terms/ways/definitions but it mainly just simply means to “hang out together.” If we sit around at a coffee shop we’re fellowshipping. If we eat a meal with family or friends we’re fellowshipping. If we attend church together we’re fellowshipping.

There are those who are adamant that Christians be a part of a local church body. That definition can vary depending on who you talk to. Some may say being a part of a community group/small group meets the “requirement.” Some say a home church would work. While others think you must be a part of a particular church body that meets in a church building and you must be there every time the doors are open.

For me personally, I believe a person can be just as strong of a Christian by simply studying Scripture in their home alone as they can be by being a member of a mega-church like Prestonwood Baptist, or a small local church like Sardis Methodist.

But I do believe Jesus talked strongly about community and our need for community. I believe we are created to yearn for community, both with God and with our fellow man. I think that community is important on many levels. For one it helps encourage one another and two it gives us an opportunity to “work out our faith” (Philippians 2:12) with others. In other words by meeting with others in fellowship or community it helps us understand and “work out” what Scripture means when it talks about things like “going to church” or “tithing” or “sharing love” or “loving our neighbor as ourselves.”

Our church has a strong push towards community groups that meet throughout the week (full disclosure – I oversee them). Our leadership team has talked many times about the people involved in the groups.

Some see our community groups as an extension of the church – people come to the Sunday morning service, want to get more involved and know more people, so they go to a community group and build relationships there. Others see community groups as the entry point for people outside our church – i.e. people who aren’t coming on Sunday mornings, who aren’t involved in a church are invited by their friends to come and enjoy community/fellowship/Bible study at someone’s house, rather than feeling pressured to attend a large church service.

I think both views are vital and I’m thrilled to see both happening. I can think of 3 or 4 people/couples that are involved in a community group during the week and have never attended a Sunday morning service. That’s awesome to me! I’m glad they’ve found a place where they feel comfortable to share their thoughts on God and life.

I’m also thrilled to see those involved in church finding ways to share God’s love with those around them – whether they attend our church or not.

—
Any additions, subtractions or disagreements? What are your thoughts on fellowship and church attendance?

re: Hanging out with Jesus

my friend John shared his comments via e-mail on the recent Hanging out with Jesus post. He took issue with some of Kevin Hendricks comments:

“He’s not doing anything productive, he’s just hanging out.”

Jesus was intentional in the things he did. He had a purpose.

“Not doing anything productive?” I don’t think so.

Purposeless? I think not.

“Producing” disciples involves intentionality and an investment of time in their lives.

John