This week I’m meeting up with a group of friends to begin an informal discussion on how we at St. Helen’s can use web technologies better as a church.
I decided to write up my current ideas on this and see what you thought.
If we define church as something like ‘a community of people being shaped by God through his word’ (that includes a missional element there), then it seems to me that the best way of using web 2.0 type things to help achieve that aim would be to build a community around a set of church blogs. I think this would be better than going for a purer community like Facebook or Ning or messing around with lifestreaming/sharing.
I see blogging as advantageous because:
- There is a platform for the Word to be taught. As opposed to Facebook profiles etc where we might often be speaking the truth in love, in a blogging network we can do that as well as have a community that is built on the Word.
- Authority is more present. There is a clear line between the author and the commentator, a line that I think is very biblical (though I am clearly in favour of the lay-person blogging!)
- They are better for engaging people from outside the community as all the content is open and obvious and more interesting to read than the Rector’s profile would be.
- Participating in the blog community is has a lower barrier to entry than joining a social network.
- Blogs are an established part of the internet, whereas Twitter and social bookmarking and to a lesser extent Facebook are not.
- Setting up a few blogs is an easy first step, technically and socially. Community type features to allow people to network could then be added on top when there is demand (e.g. using Disqus).
I should stress that the discussion we’re having is very early stage and informal, nothing official yet. But if you’d like to be involved, drop me a line in the comments.
What do you think? Are blogs the best building block?
Like this thought a lot!
Guess the question perhaps should be a step back… in what ways do we need to be better at “being a community shaped by God’s word” and then ‘does Web Technology aid those areas’ and if so, then how…
I don’t mean to move away from the core of the topic, as I think it’s helpful and we could be better at utilising WebTech for good! It’s just a thought… for example, in order to speak truth in love, we need to be building relationships to speak that truth into, lovingly; do blogs really enable cross-family ‘interaction’; if these are things that we need to be better at, at St Helens (not saying we do) then does some online technology enable that kind of thing… was just thinking about that, because, we (you+I) have been discussing briefly Tom’s post on blogs, and now this… and yet we have only met once face-to-face briefly, and even then, it was on a weekend away…
Hey Greg,
I skimmed over my reasoning for why we should think about using web 2.0 things as a church, but it’s simply: web 2.0 is all about communities, interactions, etc - which has a lot to do with what church is about (with the distinctive that we are community built around something: Christ).
So in theory there should be a lot of ways that churches can use web 2.0 technologies to help build better relationships with each other.
The challenge as I see it that those relationships need to be real and sacrificially loving, not just ‘poking’, and that our communities need to be vertical not just horizontal, hence my thought re blogging the word.
I think the question about whether blogs would promote enough community is a good one. Mars Hill have recently launched an online community called the City - I really like their approach to it: http://voxpopnetwork.com/codex/category/the-city/
Their focus is using the City to draw people into and strengthen offline, geographically focused relationships in small groups.
PS. I don’t remember meeting you!
but clearly next time we do meet our relationship will be stronger thanks to the internet.
Look forward to hearing what is discussed… worth thinking about how things like Facebook and the such are currently used by “St Helens” and if there is any foundation there to build upon or whether there is more work to be done on take up of WebTech in the first instance (as well as how diverse a community utilise it)…
I would still question your point “how we at St. Helen’s can use web technologies better as a church” with, ‘do we need to, and with what priority?’ just to help focus the root aim of this!
Look forward to hearing how this progresses!