Community vs. Collaboration
Recently finishing a book entitled, A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change.
I recommend it if you are interested.
One little gem in this book speaks of communities an collectives. Here is the section I find interesting (emphasis added):
A collective is very different from an ordinary community. Whereas communities can be passive (though no all of them are by any means) collectives cannot. In communities, people learn in order to belong. In a collective, people belong in order to learn. Communities derive their strength from creating a sense of belonging, while collectives derive theirs from participation.
This little distinction seems to capture the tension between what I can best describe as modern and post-modern leadership in the Church. Bot a community and a collective have their place, but it seems to me that more and more of my peers and those younger than me (post-moderns) long for collectives.
We live in a Facebook time in which we have a sense of "belonging" (even if it is superficial at times). I have belonging, but I do not have collective.
Each small group that I have been a part of that contains a critical mass of post-moderns builds itself as a community. This is what they have been taught, this is what their parents and their grand parents set up small groups communities. They are groups of people who come together in order to belong to one another. So social activities take precedence over spiritual formation or missional outreach.
And each small group with a critical mass of post-moderns eventually folds under lack of interest.
Could it be that the models of creating community are no longer effective in creating and building a Church?
Could it be that the models of creating collectives are more effective?
Could it be why wikipedia is so popular? It is a collective in which people belong in order to learn. Could it be that Churches who expect people to learn how to belong are building communities which no longer meet the need or address the world?
Could it be that Churches could lead the way in collective building?
It seems to me that Jesus had a collective of 12 and was rejected by his community.
Maybe Jesus was onto something.
I recommend it if you are interested.
One little gem in this book speaks of communities an collectives. Here is the section I find interesting (emphasis added):
A collective is very different from an ordinary community. Whereas communities can be passive (though no all of them are by any means) collectives cannot. In communities, people learn in order to belong. In a collective, people belong in order to learn. Communities derive their strength from creating a sense of belonging, while collectives derive theirs from participation.
We live in a Facebook time in which we have a sense of "belonging" (even if it is superficial at times). I have belonging, but I do not have collective.
Each small group that I have been a part of that contains a critical mass of post-moderns builds itself as a community. This is what they have been taught, this is what their parents and their grand parents set up small groups communities. They are groups of people who come together in order to belong to one another. So social activities take precedence over spiritual formation or missional outreach.
Could it be that the models of creating community are no longer effective in creating and building a Church?
Could it be that the models of creating collectives are more effective?
Could it be why wikipedia is so popular? It is a collective in which people belong in order to learn. Could it be that Churches who expect people to learn how to belong are building communities which no longer meet the need or address the world?
Could it be that Churches could lead the way in collective building?
It seems to me that Jesus had a collective of 12 and was rejected by his community.
Maybe Jesus was onto something.
Free and Cheap
A couple of weeks ago my senior minister made a comment in her sermon about grace being free but not cheap. For those theology students out there, you may recall this is not a new idea and was popularized by Bonhoeffer.
It got me thinking some about the difference in free and cheap, which I open to the larger wiser community.
This is where I have been musing...
Cheap things are cheap on both sides of the relationship. Things are cheap to make and thus become cheap to sell. Something that is "cheaply made" is "cheaply sold" and has little value to both the producer and the consumer. Cheap costs little for both parties.
Free things, however, cost a great deal to the provider and cost nothing to the recipient. For instance, hospitality is free. It costs a great deal for those who are providing the meal, the place, the entertainment, the conversation, the drink and on and on. But it is free for those who receive this hospitality. Make no mistake, hospitality is not cheap - but it is free.
Likewise, in the church we are called to share all things free.
But make no mistake free is not cheap.
Perhaps this is why the Church is in decline? We have made what is free cheap and thus it costs little to everyone involved.
How can we as a Church reclaim the idea of a free that costs and discard the idea of cheap?
It got me thinking some about the difference in free and cheap, which I open to the larger wiser community.
This is where I have been musing...
Cheap things are cheap on both sides of the relationship. Things are cheap to make and thus become cheap to sell. Something that is "cheaply made" is "cheaply sold" and has little value to both the producer and the consumer. Cheap costs little for both parties.
Free things, however, cost a great deal to the provider and cost nothing to the recipient. For instance, hospitality is free. It costs a great deal for those who are providing the meal, the place, the entertainment, the conversation, the drink and on and on. But it is free for those who receive this hospitality. Make no mistake, hospitality is not cheap - but it is free.
Likewise, in the church we are called to share all things free.
But make no mistake free is not cheap.
Perhaps this is why the Church is in decline? We have made what is free cheap and thus it costs little to everyone involved.
How can we as a Church reclaim the idea of a free that costs and discard the idea of cheap?
Shifting from stones to boomerangs
Having a 3 year old results in being invited to other children's birthday parties. After attending many of these recently, it has become apparent that parents of young kids do not know how to engage in conversations with other parents of young children. Here is the scene:
The kids are playing in some communal play area. Bounce houses are common. The adults stand around the communal play area most with a beverage while some are dealing with their kid who is "shy" (Jude is usually the shy type in this setting). Small talk consists of conversations from parents to their children to ensure they are not hurting some other kid. Other than that, most adults do not seem to want to or know how to engage in conversation with other adults. Going to the bathroom or getting something to eat or drink are common activities as a way to get a break from these socially silent adult groupings.
It is painful at times.
Estee and I are people who will ask others questions about who they are and what they do and what their interests are. This skill set, once thought as being natural to all human adults and as common as the skill set of shoe lace tying, is now a bit of an anomaly in these settings.
I had a 15 minute "conversation" with a guy who sold name tags for a living. When I say conversation I really just mean I am asking questions and the man replies with short terse responses. One would think he did not want to talk but he never got up to leave in the silent times. He just sat their telling me about the fantastic world of name tagging in tweet-like responses to questions.
It has been described to me that great conversation is like playing tennis. Someone serves, another returns it, then there is a back and fort that ensues. Only to reach a "point" then another serve is given. However, what is happening is that it is only one person doing the serving in these birthday conversations, and my shoulder hurts. Ultimately, these "conversations" are not fun, not memorable and energy draining.
And we perpetuate these conversations in Church.
Each Sunday morning worship, there is a moment in which everyone is invited to stand and greet those around you. As a friendly church, we all stand and share kind words and introduce ourselves to guests in our midst. However most of the time that moment feels like we are throwing out phrases which may or may not “land” on the minds of our neighbors.
“Hello I’m Jason, nice to meet you.” That is the end of my greeting to you. I threw the greeting our there, and it is now your job to remember it, because I threw it to you. Which explains why we feel guilty when we cannot remember the name of a person we have “known” for years; they already threw us their name, and like a stone being tossed in a lake, we cannot ask them to re-throw the stone!
.jpg/220px-Boomerang_(PSF).jpg) |
| Boomerang and Conversation |
Instead of throwing stones as a greeting, what if we threw boomerangs? What if we threw things that came back to us later? For instance, a boomerang greeting might be, ‘Hello I’m Jason and I love the music in worship, at the end of worship I would be curious to know what you found uplifting.”
A boomerang is thrown and will come back to you both after worship so we can develop further conversation with this person. Asking open ended questions during greeting time allows us to shift from stone to boomerang throwing. Boomerang comments allow for future relationship growth, and let’s face it boomerangs are much more interesting than stones.
Be the change by Jason Valendy is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.