I’ve been trolling the internet for Clay Shirky ever since I stumbled on him in some random post somewhere. He’s informed, insightful, well spoken, bald, and entertaining, and listening to him helps me make sense of what’s going on in the world a bit more. My beautiful wife recently cashed in some Air Miles to get me a bookstore gift-card, and I’m thinking really hard about blowing it on his latest book.
This video is why I like him. He describes a power law for we non-statisticians, eloquently and graphically explaining the law behind that oft quoted stat: 20% of church members do 80% of the work. He also makes some great predictions for where we’re heading. Pointing to the rise of social networking and cheap communication, he argues that we’re at the beginning of a time of chaos, much like the one that followed the printing press, guesstimating that it will be 50 years before we really know what the new structures will look like. In the meantime, non-institutional groups willing to give away control and work for less or no profit will garner incredible cultural capital. The reason behind this is institutions’ inability to capture the contributions of the high percentage of single-contribution-participants in the power law, because single-contribution-participants are not cost-effective. Flickr is happy to have someone contribute a single photo, because it adds to their pool. Nobody wants an employee who contributes one idea (unless it’s really valuable), because they don’t carry their weight. Blogging, I’ll point out, is an example of this sort of phenomenon. Unfortunately for me, I make no profit without any real cultural capital. Blast! That’s alright. I notice that Clay turns to writing a book for institutional publishers and distributors when he wants to make a buck.
What’s this mean for disciples of Jesus? Others have already pointed out the structural (not ideological) similarity between missional church and terrorist networks. If we take this seriously, it means rethinking how and if we identify who’s in, and looking hard at networked groups of smaller churches as part of the way forward. As Clay so poignantly says, we’ve no idea where this is taking us, so we might as well get really good at it.
On the flip side, just because it’s the way things are going doesn’t mean that we should go blindly along with it. Is including and encouraging single-contribution-participants congruent with Jesus’ demands on our lives in His radical call to discipleship? Should we not call people to something higher?
Yes and no. Creating an environment where hundreds of people drift in and out of a church without ever being asked or expected to sacrifice, commit, or spend time with people they don’t automatically like is not the church Jesus founded, even if it’s done in the name of being seeker sensitive. On the other hand, networking Christian communities of various sizes in such a way that devoted followers of Jesus can make occasional contributions to shared projects and one another’s communities is incredibly cool. The first scenario flies in the face of Ephesians 3. The second sounds a lot like Paul’s offering for the Jerusalem church.
I’ll give you a quick example of what this looks like, and then I’ll stop typing before this gets out of hand. For our last day at the BSM club table, we had a friend spend several hours aggressively and effectively passing out flyers and signing people up for our club. Somehow she was able to yell at people, and have them like her for it. It’s a gift. She’s not a member of our club, or any other, as far as I know. Had we limited participation to committed members, we would have connected with far fewer students on Friday. She blessed us, and while she may not be committed to us, she is a regular in the chaplains centre, and, to all appearances, a devoted follower of Jesus.
The Kingdom of Heaven, as we learned at Tapestry Sunday morning in Matthew 13, is difficult to define, and surprising and mysterious in its workings. We try to take control, and in so doing, we lose it.
Tags: ecclesiology, missional church, network, technology
September 25, 2008 at 1:31 pm |
[...] here comes everybody Jonny Baker is blogging through Clay Shirkey’s new book. I think I’ll hold off and read the full review before I pick up my own copy. I posted video of his recently. [...]