1/24/2009 UPDATE: I received another message from Steve Caton yesterday. So many people have been reading this post that it looks like I may be going to the Ministry Tech workshop with Steve in April!
ORIGINAL POST: Today I received an direct message via Twitter from my good friend Steve Caton, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Church Community Builder in Colorado Springs. Steve asked, "Mark, we are trying to define the criteria around a successful CCB implementation that supports the "Tribes" model. Need your input." There may be more, but I can think of three critical criteria for any church setting up CCB as an online profile for their church if they also desire to follow the Tribes model put forth by Seth Godin.
The first criteria, and this is an must, is a leadership that absolutely understands the new leadership principle that everyone is expected to lead. As Seth Godin points out in Tribes, most leaders are stuck on a top-down, corporate CEO model. Sadly this is true for most churches and most senior pastors. Does the guy sitting in the top spot really want communication that not only flows from the top down, but also from the bottom up, as well as side to side? Does the management team or elders or board or whatever the top leadership is named really want to see ownership of the church and its mission by everyone logged into their CCB account? These are the conversations that won't always be positive and won't always be affirming of everything going on with the top leaders. Or, at the very least, these are the conversations that will revolve around other ideas and concepts not espoused by top management. Yet from these conversations could come the next really bright idea that could take the church to the next level of reaching men and women for Christ. This requires a truly secure leader, who doesn't see leadership in terms of only top down. Sadly, these kind of leaders are the exception rather than the rule.
The second criteria, almost as critical as the first, is a congregation that wants to be actively engaged in the discussion of the mission of the church. This may be even more rare than the first criteria. Godin says on page 10 that "we're embracing a factory instead of a tribe." While he was not directly referring to churches, he certainly could have been. The mega-church phenomenon has created the concept of a seeker-friendly, consumer-oriented, staff administered congregation. While congregants are encouraged to be actively engaged in ministry, it's often only the ministries promoted by the leadership team. However, the Tribes concept speaks of a leadership where individual congregants are encouraged to think and discuss questions with one another that begin with, "Why don't we do... ?" While this might be threatening to some in leadership, it might also be totally out of the mindset of most congregants, who've never spent much time really thinking about ministry and their part in it.
The third criteria, and this is really the result of the first two, is a greater concern for connection and communication and a lesser concern for privacy and isolation. There is no such thing as greater connection without some loss of privacy. And many people I come into contact with still have the idea that there is just too much risk putting out information about oneself in a profile on the Internet, regardless of the fact that the online community is also a private community for church congregants only. "I have my friends already and they know how to get ahold of me if they need to." The fact that there might be a new friend they could know or a new need that they could meet does not usually trumpt the security of "keeping things the way they've always been."
Take these three criteria and throw them in the blender. What kind of CCB energy drink comes out? Here are the blended ingredients:
- Default settings for CCB congregants set for "listed." The person can still change to "unlisted," if they have an unusual need for privacy. This would be the exception rather than the rule in a Tribes oriented church.
- Default setting for full access, not limited access. The encouragement would be for new people to get connected to the congregation fully almost immediately.
- All leaders, especially the top leaders, set the example by a) making their contact information fully available, b) respond often in online conversations, and c) demonstrate their backing of the connected congregation with every teachable moment. The idea of the "CEO pastor" hidden behind layers of barriers will never work in a Tribes type of church. This doesn't mean that he can't have his own hidden away time - but it does mean that he works really hard to put himself out there.
- Easy access to new groups. In CCB terms this means administrative privileges are given out liberally to form new groups within the church. If everything has to go through one person or committee, then the group process is going to bog down. But if its easy to start up a group of three or four people who want to collaberate on a project together online, and if they are encouraged to do it, more people will use the system to create new ways of doing church. New ideas, and thus new leadership, would be the result.
Church Community Builder is an outstanding online community building tool. It has many controls built in to provide the safety and security that most leaders as well as their congregants are looking for. But it also has the tools to dial in the Tribes kind of leadership espoused by Seth Godin. There will be churches and church leaders who will not be afraid of the new leadership models and will actually embrace them. They know there will be risks and there will be problems and they will be messy from time to time. But there will also be the one new idea or concept that comes from a completely unexpected source, never possible under the factory model church.
Steve, I hope this helps. For what it's worth, I hope that Church Requel can one day be the kind of church where people surprise me with their innovation and their commitment to leadership. Maybe one other criteria should be mentioned here - at the risk of blending technology with theology. But maybe the confidence that the Holy Spirit will both protect and initiate His work within the church could also be a necessary criteria. We have built churches of the one hour a week service. But God through His Spirit could use a tool like CCB to get like minded congregants together to do God's will during the other 167 hours of the week. That's what I hope happens here at Church Requel.
