thejakers

A few years ago the concept of personal branding would have seemed silly. Sure there were people who could get away with it–the Donald Trumps and Bill Gates of the world. But that was only because they had worked hard to build a business in a traditional way that gained them notoriety.

Nowadays it seems like everyone is talking about personal brands–and everyone is trying to build one.

As a recent article by Tom Peters in Fast Company puts it:

You’re branded, branded, branded, branded.

It’s time for me — and you — to take a lesson from the big brands, a lesson that’s true for anyone who’s interested in what it takes to stand out and prosper in the new world of work.

Regardless of age, regardless of position, regardless of the business we happen to be in, all of us need to understand the importance of branding. We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc. To be in business today, our most important job is to be head marketer for the brand called You.

It’s that simple — and that hard. And that inescapable.

Peters is probably right. But as pastors and Christians, the concept of personal branding brings up some prickly problems. Here’s just one question I’ve thought of lately:

Would Paul have participated in self-branding?  Did Jesus self-brand?

I’ll argue the answer is unequivocally no. Both continually pointed to God the Father and sought to give him glory. Paul, after all, wrote this to the Corinthians:

1And I, when I came to you, brothers,^a did not come proclaiming to you the testimony^b of God with lofty speech or wisdom.2For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, 4and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God (I Corinthians 2:1-5).

The biblical admonition is to find your identity in Jesus and to count yourself as nothing. I’m guilty of falling into the trap of the personal brand (after all, my blog is named after me…). Are you? How do we reconcile the world’s continue pressure to self-brand with the Bible’s teachings? Or do we at all?

Great quote from Packer via Justin Taylor’s blog on the use of the Internet.

“I’m amazed at the amount of time people spend on the internet. I’m not against technology, but all tools should be used to their best advantage. We should be spending our time on things that have staying power, instead of on the latest thought of the latest blogger—and then moving on quickly to the next blogger. That makes us more superficial, not more thoughtful.”—J.I. Packer, in World Magazine

In case you missed it, I was privileged to do a series of guest posts on the topic of online church over at Rethinkmission.org, Jonathan McIntosh’s blog. If you don’t read Jon’s blog, you should. It’s an awesome blog filled with some great content.

My series was in response to Doug Estes recent blog tour to promote his new book, SimChurch: Being the Church in the Virtual World. In particular, I was responding to his post on Out of Ur. It’s probably no secret that I don’t support the notion of doing church purely online, though I do think the Internet is an invaluable tool for churches and ministry. I was disappointed that Doug seemed to be attacking straw men, rather than engaging in a fruitful debate on this topic. Thus, I wrote the following series linked below. Thanks again to Jonathan for letting me soap box on his digital lawn.

Rethinkmission.org Guest Posts:

In Defense of Physical Community – Part One

In Defense of Physical Community – Part Two

In Defense of Physical Community – Part Three

In Defense of Physical Community – Part Four

[Photon of church in Second Life by rafeejewell]

Justin Taylor shares a devastating quote from Peter Kreeft’s notes on Pascal’s Pensees:

“We want to complexify our lives. We don’t have to, we want to. We wanted to be harried and hassled and busy. Unconsciously, we want the very things we complain about. For if we had leisure, we would look at ourselves and listen to our hearts and see the great gaping hold in our hearts and be terrified, because that hole is so big that nothing but God can fill it.

So we run around like conscientious little bugs, scared rabbits, dancing attendance on our machines, our slaves, and making them our masters. We think we want peace and silence and freedom and leisure, but deep down we know that this would be unendurable to us, like a dark and empty room without distractions where we would be forced to confront ourselves. . .”

This is a theme I’ve been more and more interested in. I especially appreciate Kreeft’s connection to our business and our desire to avoid introspection.

I’m no Pascal, but I’ve mused on this in a more low-brow form here while reflecting on this quote from Paul Carr:

“And that’s when the real-time web – for all the attention it’s getting right now – starts to look less like a brave new world, and more like the path to a hideous dystopia. A world where our reaction to any event, no matter how serious, is influenced, not by what’s right, but by how it will play with our micro-audience. An audience that, thanks to Google and Microsoft’s wholehearted support of the real-time web, is about to get even bigger and more tempting.”

[Photo courtesy of cofano]

This is the third and final post in my series on ministry and the internet. You can catch up on the other posts here and here.

What is the Church?

Just what is the church? It seems to me that is the central question when we begin to think through the implications of digitalism. As Mark Driscoll stated in his talk at Advance 09, the digital age is forcing us to reexamine and redefine our ecclesiology.

In my study, I’ve come to believe that the church is defined by:

• The preaching/teaching/proclamation of the word
• The administration of the sacraments (in my view communion and baptism)
• And the fellowship of the saints

As seen in Acts 2:42, “And they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.”

I don’t think there are too many people who would argue with such a definition. The real debate comes when we start asking whether this type of community can be done in the digital world.

Can the sacraments, for instance, be rightly administered online? Some people think so, as evidenced by Flamingo Road’s internet baptism as posted on Church Crunch. How about communion? Can that be administered online and still embody the New Testament concept of “breaking bread together”?

The Purpose of the Church?

I’m not going to debate here the intricacies of the sacraments and their relevancy online (mostly because I haven’t studied much on it). I’ll save that for another time. But what I do know is that the sacraments are a sign of coming into Christ, and traditionally (and scripturally) a first-step in joining the body of Christ that is the Church. They are not the end-all.

In looking at the purpose of the Church, I believe that the it exists primarily to:

• Equip the saints for the work of the ministry (Ephesians 4:11-16)
• To make disciples (Matthew 28:16-20)

These commissions are best accomplished by preaching, teaching, and proclaiming the word and by doing the word. As James says, you cannot do one without the other, “But be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves.” And while some are called expressly to do the teaching and preaching (Ephesians 4:11-12), we are all called to proclaim the gospel and to do it.

When thinking of the purpose of the church in the context of Internet ministry, it’s easy to see how it is useful for proclamation – the preaching of the gospel. In that sense it is an excellent tool. It becomes harder to think of its usefulness in discipleship and in being a catalyst for bringing people beyond hearing the word to doing the word. This is because the Internet is an uncarnate environment that, as I’ve discussed in previous posts, is inherently geared towards engendering a people who consume rather than pour out. Yet, as a community of believers, we are called to do just the opposite – we are called to incarnate the gospel to the world.

The biggest challenge I see in the future of ministry is the pervasive acceptance of digital interaction as true community, replacing, not supplementing, physical community. Yet, in a Christian context, it is the daily interactions between believers that leads to discipleship. As Tim Chester and Steve Timmis write in their book, Total Church, “In becoming a Christian I am a disciple, but that is an identity, not an event. I never stop being a disciple, and I never reach a point where I no longer require daily discipleship by the gospel word in the gospel community.”

Event Driven Church vs. Rhythm Living

Ministries that are diving full force into the Internet by forming Internet campuses, doing online administrations of the sacraments, and more, are indicative to me of the more American expression of Christianity and church, which is an event driven model. For many people, church is just one of a many obligations or events that must be attended, consumed, and completed – an X on the calendar. It’s easy to say you go to church and believe you are part of a church in an online forum if you believe that church is about the Sunday event where you sing some songs and hear a sermon.

But that is not church. If anything that is evangelism, which to be clear is very important. But it is not true Christian community. It provides no true venue for discipleship, or the rhythms of Christian life that are depicted in the New Testament (eating together, praying together, serving together, etc.).

When you approach church as an event, it is easy to leave that church if the pastor says something that pisses you off. It’s even easier when all it takes is a click of a mouse, where no actual physical connection is severed. A rhythm centered approach to church where people are eating together in homes, giving to and taking care of those with need, discussing the scriptures in late night gatherings over coffee or a pint, serving arm in arm in doing the word and incarnating the gospel, and more creates bonds that are not easily broken – and ensures that if a fellow believer is straying, you have a real, valid, and tangible means to confront him or her in love.

Conclusion

Steve Knight, who was kind enough to reference this series on his blog, has written about the importance of reverse incarnation in the digital age. In that sense, the Internet is useful. But in reality, reverse incarnation is simply a fancy word for what we’ve already discussed is part and parcel with being the church – proclamation. We are to preach the word and proclaim the gospel in the digital world. But the digital world cannot replace the incarnate body of believers gathering together in community. You must have both.

I find it hard to understand how we can theologically justify Internet campuses as autonomous and fully functioning churches. Many will speak to their practicality, but we must be cautious when we move to speaking pragmatically without undergirding our pragmatism with theology.

In the end, the Internet is useful, but it can also lead to a disembodiment of the church that is not biblical. It is my prayer that as we move forward we don’t wholesale dive into new technologies because our culture demands it, but that we carefully, prayerfully, and with measure engage new technology in a way that continues the Church’s long and grand tradition of being in the world but not of it.

I invite your thoughts, beat downs, and undying adulation.

This is the second post in a series on doing ministry in a post-Christian, digital society. In the first post, I explored what I perceive to be a cultural shift from post-modernism to what I defined as digitalism. Here I want to lay the foundation to explore some of the ecclesiological implications of the Internet.

You Have No Idea

Seems you can’t go anywhere today without running into some conversation, blog post, or story about how such and such church is integrating the Internet into their ministry. The rise of social media and the popularity of such platforms like Facebook and Twitter, have heightened the sense within the Church at large that we must figure out what our online strategy is. Some people doing great pioneering work in this realm are John Saddington and his site Church Crunch, Kem Meyers, Tony Steward, the good folks over at Church Marketing Sucks, Drew Goodmanson, Church Communications Pro,  Tim Schraeder, and many more.

I say it’s pioneering work because, though it doesn’t seem like it, the Internet as a daily and vital component of our lives is really only about a decade old. And we really have NO IDEA what it’s doing to us, our society, our children, and our ministries. Yet, we’ve (society at large) embraced it wholeheartedly as not only a norm, but also as a great advancement in human society and interaction. Perhaps this is because, as I alluded to in my last post, it appeals to our ego in a way no other medium has.

I can think of no other major shift in human interaction and thought that has been so completely, quickly, and docilely embraced than the rise of the digital age.

I can think of no other major shift in human interaction and thought that has been so completely, quickly, and docilely embraced than the rise of the digital age.

I am Ego

As I sit in my office with my headphones on, having spent the last three hours staring at computer screen, I am completely isolated in my world and thoughts, yet I am also connected to more people than ever in my life through Twitter and Facebook – at the same time. But the important component is that I have the power to engage or not engage. I create the reality of my relationships and the context in which they are acceptable to me. And others do likewise.

Of course I don’t have this luxury when my fellow office mates tap me on the shoulder. In those moments I don’t have complete control – at least not without looking like a total jerk. The rules – the norms – of physical community dictate that I should interact with my community, even when I don’t feel like it. And it has been that way since the dawn of human society.

Not so anymore. As a digitalist, I can be a hermit and connected. Picking and choosing which interactions best suit my ego and my desires. It is pure, white-hot consumerism.

When Fools Rush In

My fear is that as the Church we are being swept up in this NEW cultural shift without engaging it correctly. Too often our online strategy is not a strategy at all but a blatant and often poor imitation of the way the world and businesses use the online medium – as a subjection of authority to the individual. Marketers often talk of this great shift from one-way interactions between businesses and corporations and their customers. A new day has dawned. Your customer is in charge, and you must engage them in conversation. The consumer has always dictated product in a sense, but only in so much as the producers made it available. Now it is the consumer that drives everything.

Our job as a church is to create disciples and equip the saints to do the work of the ministry. How do we do that effectively when we’ve never met our people face to face? Is it possible?

Consumerism is not a new problem for the church, especially in America. But I fear the rise of digitalism will make it much more so – and that we will gladly embrace it in the name of going where the people go, without ever actually going to them.

Here are hard and honest questions we should ask ourselves:

• Are we doing online ministry and online campuses because they further the Gospel or because people want them?
• Is our online strategy full of practical implications but lacking theological ones?
• Have we critically examined what implications for the shift to online community are for Gospel formed community?

My inclination is that you have answers to these questions, and I’m not the first to ask them. I’m interested in the answers you’ve come up with.

My next and last post in this series will deal with my thoughts on how we balance the Biblical conception of Christian community with the prevailing culture of the digitalists. Until then, I’d value your feedback on my thoughts here – and your ideas for a path forward.

In case you missed it, here is a great video released last week on the rise of the Internet, called “Did You Know 4.0″.

The statistics in the video are startling for sure. But they confirm what we intuitively already know – as a culture, we’re completely overloaded with information, especially the younger up-and-coming generation.

As the communications director at a church that has a average age of 26 or so, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the challenges that the Internet creates for us – and the Church at large – in terms of engaging people with the gospel. I’m going to be sharing here some of my thoughts on the subject over a few posts.

In this post I want to discuss why I think the Internet, and specifically social media, is ushering a fresh and new challenge for the church that I don’t think we’ve fully articulated, and that I’m not sure we are adequately prepared to engage. To be clear, I’m figuring out my thoughts on this as I go, and hope to open a healthy dialogue on this topic. Input from you will be much valued.

Post-Modernism is Dying

If you’re like me, much of your ministry training in terms of apologetics has been focused on contextualizing the Gospel for a post-modern mindset. And while this is important, I’ve got this sneaking suspicion that we’re fighting a battle that has already been lost in some respects. While we decry post-moderns, the reality is that the world has pretty much wholesale accepted this philosophy, which has been moving full force since the 1960’s. My concern is that as a church we may be fighting old battles and not seeing the new threats on the horizon.

I’ve been thinking that post-modernism is dying. It’s on it’s last legs. Taking its place is what I’ll call Digitalism. Whereas Post-Modernism (in simplified terms) was the subjection of truth to cultural context, Digitalism is the subjection of truth to personal context.

In a post-modern world, there was still some semblance of universal truth, granted it was solely within the realm of culture. But the reality was that you were still held accountable to the truth by those whom you interacted with within your culture. The reality of day-to-day interactions necessitated that people would call you on your crap and bring you in line with cultural truth. Why? Because whether you liked it or not, you were forced to be exposed to people of varying opinions, and more often than not, the majority opinion – public truth – was still upheld, and you were expected to adhere to it.

Whereas Post-Modernism was the subjection of truth to cultural context, Digitalism is the subjection of truth to personal context.

In the world of Digitalism, we are no longer forced to interact with those who disagree with us. Through our various Internet interactions, especially our social media platforms, we can easily delete friends from our lives who would dare to question our version of reality – our personal truth. For the Digitalists, the ego is supreme. Truth is derived completely from within, all reality is subjectified to personal taste, preference, and experience – and most importantly, only those who carry the same truth, or who are willing to not question that truth, are sought out to become part of community. Digitalists are creating worlds within worlds. Worlds that are not bounded geographically, but instead ideologically.

So my question is: How Does the Church Engage the Digitalists?

Part two of this series will explore some of my thoughts on what we are doing right and what I think we might do better to engage this cultural shift in its early stages. But in the meantime, I’d be very curious to hear your thoughts.

1. Do you believe that post-modernism is dying? If so, what are your thoughts on the concept of digitalism I’ve presented here?

2. What do you see as the important strategies we need to employ as the church to engage the Digitalists?