April 2009

April 20, 2009

States vs Communities vs Individuals

One critical trend for the near and mid-term futures are the interactions between states, communities, and individuals. Each of these has important power in daily life, but it seems to me that Western Christians tend to think first of the state and only peripherally and later of the community. The state has a large amount of broad, shallow power. Most states have a few key standardized, massive  abilities: to regulate activity, to declare certain activities criminal and process them, to tax and distribute money, to protect, and to invest in certain key but expensive things. Government, in effect, does what [...]

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April 16, 2009

Are missionaries only about words?

Today Ted Esler wrote the first entry in a blog series about megachurches. Most of what he had to say seemed pretty good to me, but I had qualms with the final couple of paragraphs and decided this was a big enough issue to write about it here. In his post, Esler wrote: Missionary work is about getting people to change their worldview from a non-Christian view, to a Christian one The word “missions” means just about anything in the church today. For this discussion, I am going to agree with Rodney Stark’s view that missionaries are about getting people to [...]

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April 9, 2009

The Facebook Generation and Swarming

Gary Hamel (WSJ, http://bit.ly/TZlR) suggests 12 work-relevant characteristics of online life for the ‘Facebook Generation’; these are incredibly similar to our ideas about swarming: 1. All ideas compete on an equal footing 2. Contribution counts for more than credentials 3. Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed 4. Leaders serve rather than preside 5. Tasks are chosen, not assigned 6. Groups are self-defining and self-organizing 7. Resources get attracted, not allocated 8. Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed 9. Users can veto most policy decisions 10. Intrinsic rewards matter most 11. Hackers are heroes This perhaps one of the best, most concise [...]

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April 8, 2009

How to link your blog and social networking sites

Here’s a simple, step-by-step process for maximizing the social networking impact of your missions blog. The first step is to create a blog if you don’t have one. To do this, you need to have a fairly clear idea of what you want to achieve. Blogs that are rarely added to are like magazines that never publish. Other articles deal with the goal setting for blogs; here, I’m just going to focus on some of the technicals. There are a number of different services you can use to create a blog, but for our purposes one filter is important: you [...]

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