Sean Boisen: Church

Blogos RSS Feed has Moved: Please Update Your Reader URL

Thu, 31 Aug 2006 11:49:44 GMT

I've moved to a new blogging platform (goodbye Radio Userland, hello WordPress).

But if you read through an RSS aggregator (this is really important, so pay attention):

This is the last post to the current RSS feed (http://www.semanticbible.com/blogos/rss.xml)
You must change your feed URL to keep reading Blogos: the new feed is http://semanticbible.com/blogos/feed/.
If you've only been subscribed to a specific channel (e.g. http://www.semanticbible.com/blogos/categories/semanticbible/rss.xml), those have moved as well: the new one for SemanticBible-only posts is http://semanticbible.com/blogos/category/semanticbible/feed/ (note 'categories' -> 'category'), and others are constructed in similar fashion

If you read directly from the website, everything will work as before at my preferred URL, http://www.semanticbible.com/blogos/. The new site includes several syndication buttons that make it easy to add Blogos to your Bloglines, MyYahoo!, or other readers.

If you have any problems with this, please send me (sean) an email at semanticbible daht com. I don't want to lose any readers in the transition (there aren't that many to start with!).

Connecting the Modern and the Classic

Wed, 01 Mar 2006 12:55:54 GMT

The Modern

Several in the blogosphere have commented on this diagram from Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo! about how social communities scale. Horowitz divides the community of value creators into three camps: creators (those who might start a thread), synthesizers (those who participate actively and comment), and consumers (lurkers who read or otherwise benefit from the content). He sees an order of magnitude relationship between the groups: 100% of the community benefits (consumers), though only 10% (synthesizers) are active participants in response to the actions of the 1% who actually create. His fundamental point: "social software sites don’t require 100% active participation to generate great value."

This kind of power law relationship is common to a lot of human activity, and there's a whole literature around Zipf's Law (including a few Blogos posts). As one example, churches are typically directed by a small handful (pastoral staff) with a vision and a full-time commitment to accomplishing it. Typically a significant cadre of committed personnel (the core) are required for public worship services, including music, facilities, etc. And then there's the congregation (or attenders) as a whole: the consumers. I've been in many churches that struggle with "how do we get more people involved in leadership?" (which usually means "helping run the organization"). But i think this is just the way groups behave: while it's a nice ideal, it's not realistic to expect 100% of your attenders to get actively involved, and it's not necessary for them to derive benefit.

The Classic

One of my Valentine's Day gifts to donna was an audio lecture series (42 CDs!) on Great Authors of the Western Literary Tradition. She listens to them as she's exercising, and i've been doing the same. It's a great academic overview and sampling of literary history, from the earliest (Epic of Gilgamesh, and the Old Testament) to William Faulkner.

In today's lecture on Aeschylus, the classic Greek tragedian, the speaker was describing the organization of a Greek play, and the relationship between the actors and the chorus. Typically there would only be three actors, and therefore each played a variety of roles, using masks to identify their different roles (and to hide the distraction of it being the same person each time). The chorus would be 15 or 18 people, often from the margins of society (the elderly, or slaves): their role was not to actively tell the story, but only to comment on the action, providing background information, or representing the opinion of the common person. And then of course, there was the audience, often numbered in the thousands, watching the play itself.

The old becomes new again ...

God on the Internet (FirstThings)

Sat, 04 Feb 2006 17:22:31 GMT

Courtesy of ThinkChristian, there's a pointer to a very lengthy piece at First Things about the state of Christianity on the Internet. It's mostly from a Catholic perspective (it took me several re-reads of the first paragraph about Pope Michael to figure out what was going on!), but has a nice survey of major sites, blogs, on-line worship, etc.

Making Disciples and the Lord's Prayer

Fri, 06 Jan 2006 12:52:03 GMT

"You should pray like this:

Our Father in heaven,
help us to honor your name.
Come and set up your kingdom,
so that everyone on earth will obey you,
as you are obeyed in heaven.
Give us our food for today.
Forgive us for doing wrong,
as we forgive others.
Keep us from being tempted
and protect us from evil.

(Pericope 073: Jesus teaches about prayer; Matt.6.9-13, CEV)

I take it as given that Jesus didn't provide this model prayer just for rote recitation Sunday mornings in church. Though conventionally known as the Lord's Prayer, it is really the Disciple's Prayer (which i'll call Our Prayer): a model from our Lord of how we should pray as his disciples. As a model, Our Prayer has implications both for how we think (cognitive aspects) and how we act (behavior). As disciples, our prayers are both requests of our Lord, but also expressions of what we believe and want to be true. We have so institutionalized Our Prayer that we easily miss what praying like this means for us.

The cognitive side of being a disciple includes at least two things: our view of reality and the world around us (our worldview), and our values. (By the way, if you've never read James Sire's Universe Next Door, go order it now and read it: i'm not kidding, it's that important!) Our values overlap with our worldview to some extent, but also include what we consider important. Another cognitive dimension of Our Prayer is adjusting our priorities: in our increasingly ADD, entertainment-addicted, data-smogged, multi-tasking society, what we pay attention to can be more important than what we say we believe (but ignore in practice).

The behavioral side includes both our attitudes and our (external) actions. Just because attitudes are internal doesn't mean they're not behavior: how we think about something is still a choice.

(Read the rest)

Faceted Browsing for Scripture

Thu, 05 Jan 2006 12:27:25 GMT

I've been reading some material at work on faceted browsing, a different paradigm for searching large information collections. Rather than trying to find just the right keywords to retrieve just the right documents, . You can see a nice demo of this at facetmap.com, where they show browing a collection of information about wines ("resources" in their parlance) via facets like type of wine, region of origin, and price (using a slider interface).

Faceted browsing has some significant advantages:

The continual exposure of the next level of detail helps you understand the nature of the data more than the sodastraw view of keyword retrieval. I don't need to figure out what subcategories of wine types are, or how they're named: i can see them and select them directly
Adding information about how many resources fit in particular facets reduces blind alleys
Even an enormous collection can quickly be reduced to just the items of interest through the intersection of several facets

I posted previously about a prototype browser for New Testament Names using Longwell from the Simile Project, a nice faceted browser that runs off RDF.

So now i'm thinking more about the Composite Gospel and what facets would enhance search. Once i finish NTN (alas, still a work in progress, and too slow progress at that), person and location names are two obvious facets that will then be easy to add. There are some obvious top-level categories as well:

historical periods in the life of Jesus (birth, ministry of John the Baptist, Holy Week, his Passion, etc.)
parables, other teachings
a collection of imperatives, that is, commands that Jesus gave, whether general or specific (another yet unfinished project). Once i've got an initial catalog, i'd like to organize these in an ontology: imperatives about prayer, about our relationships with others, about our attitidues, etc.

This really comes back to a deep and fundamental issue: why do we read Scripture? The basic factual tasks are to understand the history of God's interaction with people and his revelation in Jesus (as well as the history of the early church). But beyond this, it's really about change: learning a different cognitive framework or worldview, adopting new attitudes, and changing the way we behave. How do we structure this information in a way to make it easier and more transparent for disciples to grasp and internalize, resulting in their own transformation, and subsequent teaching and training of others? That's a cognitive and learning challenge behind the task of making disciples in the 21st century.

What's Your Church Really About?

Sat, 09 Apr 2005 23:42:31 GMT

Two interesting articles in Leadership Journal recently discussed how to determine your church's ethos, the normally unacknowledged culture that dominates what really gets done, and what the values are. Ethos is defined by the author, Angie Ward, as "a set of shared attitudes, values, and beliefs that define church and shape its practices". Of course, these things aren't usually written down anywhere, and in fact are often in direct conflict with "mission statements" or other explicit goals. As Ward points out, we can aspire to being a "seeker-sensitive" church, when in fact our practices are downright seeker-hostile.

The two articles are: Discerning Your Church's Hidden Core Values and a follow-up, 9 Clue to Secret Core Values.

Worshipping at Home

Thu, 17 Jun 2004 23:59:49 GMT

There's an interesting and engaging description of a house worship experience at theOoze, from a Methodist church planter.

The Two Things about Church

Wed, 16 Jun 2004 02:13:03 GMT

From Glen Whitman: the Two Things.

A few years ago, I was chatting with a stranger in a bar. When I told him I was an economist, he said, “Ah. So… what are the Two Things about economics?”

“Huh?” I cleverly replied.

“You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay, here are the Two Things about economics. One: Incentives matter. Two: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”

Ever since that evening, I’ve been playing the Two Things game. Whenever I meet someone who belongs to a different profession (i.e., a profession I haven’t played this game with), or who knows something about a subject I'm unfamiliar with, I pose the Two Things question. (read the rest, including a long list of Two Things for various professions ...)

I don't normally quote so extensively, but i love how the Two Things game gets to the heart of what a field is all about. Even if you're not as clever as Glen's contributors (i'm not), it can really help to think at this most basic level.

My contribution -- The Two Things about Church:

The purpose of the church is to express God's love to humanity (including members of the church itself)
The church is like a body, with Christ as the Head

The One Anothers in the New Testament

Mon, 31 May 2004 02:29:46 GMT

If you're seriously interested in house church, you might be interested in the National House Church Conference ...

Prowling the House2House website, i found this interesting list of the One Anothers in the New Testament ... one way to view what it means to be church.

A Lottery Ticket for Heaven

Mon, 31 May 2004 01:01:54 GMT

The Barna Research Group does a great service to the American church by trying to carefully and scientifically assess what the actual facts of Christian behavior are (which don't always line up with our preconceptions or hopes). A recent study looks at a variety of behavioral questions, segmented along faith lines (evangelical Christian, non-evangelical born again Christians, "notional" Christians, adherents of non-Christian faiths, and atheists/agnostics).

George Barna's summary statement bears repeating:

“The ultimate aim of belief in Jesus is not simply to possess divergent theological ideas but to become a transformed person. These statistics highlight the fact that millions of people who rely on Jesus Christ for their eternal destiny have problems translating their religious beliefs into action beyond Sunday mornings.”

One interesting factoid: those who fall into the Christian but not evangelical categories (non-evangelical and notional Christians) are more likely to purchase lottery tickets.

"Overall, 15% of born again and 23% of notional Christians purchased lottery tickets in a typical week, compared to just 10% of other-faith adherents and 12% of atheists/agnostics."

It doesn't say much about our faith if it isn't strong enough to transform our attitudes about money, particularly the desire to get rich (which Paul describes as a snare, 1 Timothy 6:9), and our trust in God rather than in riches.

Good Things Happen in Small Churches

Fri, 28 May 2004 02:03:29 GMT

Smaller churches do as well as larger churches in 7 or 8 "health" categories, according to a recent survey of 1000 churches reported on in Leadership Journal. The one area of shortfall is "inspiring worship services": not a big surprise, since it takes resources to stage these. And smaller churches outperform large ones in the percentage of people who practice their spiritual gifts.

The Participatory Church

Wed, 26 May 2004 01:56:32 GMT

This e-Church post on blogging and the participatory church got noticed by Dave Winer, which must be driving some new readers Tim's direction (and he deserves it). I agree with Tim's basic thesis: people should be participants, not spectators. Though blogging is one tool that can help, these days i'm wondering if the fundamental problem is a much broader, structural one: contemporary church organization, with professional leadership and a large group in attendance, can't help but make spectators out of most people.

Though i find the bombastic style of their site a little grating, Open Church Ministries makes some similar points in arguing for participation in worship as a key missing ingredient in contemporary church life. In our community group last week, we were talking about how nearly every mention in Paul's letters of the body of Christ includes injunctions to build up and grow: how can we do that, or the things listed below by Open Church, as part of a scheduled program in a big auditorium?

Provoke one another unto good works.
Confess your sins to one another.
Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another.
Bear one another's burdens.
Encourage one another and build each other up.
Respect those who work hard among you.
Warn those who are idle ... encourage the timid.
Pray for each other so that you may be healed.

I'm still trying to figure out the solution, but i suspect it happens in much smaller groups, where there's both openness and an expectation of all members participating actively.