What Would Jesus Blog?

So, I’ve finally gotten around to a bit of reading this evening; at Tim’s recommendation, I’m ploughing through Culture Making in the hope that Crouch will come to some kind of point sometime soon. I’m 120 pages in, and I’m assured it’s coming in about 60 more! I’ve just read through some chapters that talk about the beginning and the end of the Bible story – from Eden to the new Jerusalem, and how in the middle, God constantly gives his created people enough space to be creative, to make mistakes, to turn away or to turn towards him.

Any time I think about the Biblical narrative as a single story I’m brought back to the idea that God’s big story for creation is like a Shakespeare play for which the fourth act has been mostly lost. We know the first three acts; we know how it all starts and we have stories that have developed our characters. We know the final act; we know how it ends. We know Shakespeare; we know what he’s like. Our role in the story is to act in a way that fits in with that fourth act; to draw on our experience and creativity to produce something that fits into the gap. It’s because of this that I’m convinced that narrative theology is so important – it’s possible to argue almost anything with the Bible, but if it doesn’t fit into the story of the Bible and what we know of God outside of Scripture, it’s probably wrong.

I find myself arguing against principles with this on a regular basis, even if the person I’m arguing with believes in the same end result as me. Let’s take a classic example; drug abuse. It’s possible to synthesise a great Biblical argument that drug abuse is wrong – Paul talks about personal responsibility with alcohol, the body is described as a temple, and so on; a nice, neat, logical argument. Unfortunately, I distrust nice, neat, logical arguments when they relate to God. They don’t fit. Throughout the Bible, doing theology seems to be the messiest affair possible; and I’m pretty sure it’s intentional. The least obvious people were chosen for the biggest jobs; Israel was a tiny nation that was constantly kept small but had to fend off rich, advanced empires from all angles; they had to rely on God in very public, very obvious, very pragmatic ways to make their faith work, and as a result they played a pivotal role. They kept on messing it up, and God kept on finding ways to make it right; they had to be creative to survive, but to learn to rely on God as well.

Rather than trying to synthesise an argument against drug abuse, I’ll make a much less coherent argument that draws from lots of sources. Scripture says the body is a temple, but it also talks about Jesus feeding guests at a wedding wine that was probably laced with THC and opiates. Well, there goes a British cultural norm for drug acceptability! Paul talks about not getting drunk, and I know from the experience of myself and others, that being drunk can lead to doing stupid things. So, I conclude, unsurprisingly, that it’s not a good idea. Is it wrong to abuse drugs? I have no idea; I don’t think it’s a case of ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ anywhere as much as we think it is. Is it a good idea? Does it fit with what I know of God? Definitely not.

Thinking about issues like this feels messy. And it feeling messy feels like it fits. Theology is messy!

A friend recently posed a common question on Facebook – ‘How do we live with integrity in a digital culture?’. ‘Ah ha!’, I thought, ‘I can contribute to this discussion!’. What I wrote surprised me, but rather than hijacking her Facebook wall with my ramblings, I’m going to blog instead. Incidentally, if you don’t follow her on Twitter, do – @revjoannecox.

My answer, slightly abridged, was “I’d have to ask for more clarity on what you mean by ‘a digital culture’. We live in cultures that use digitally mediated communications at various levels, and those that do not see digital communication as ‘special’ are those that I would consider to be ‘digital cultures’, but the same rules regarding integrity apply as to those cultures where digital comms aren’t prevalent. I often find it unhelpful to define a culture by its digital-ness, as that’s not usually its defining characteristic. IMHO.”

Let me give you some background. A lot of the current thinking on how the church should address such issues comes from the early writing on the subject (Carega – eMinistry, etc), when the way in which the Internet was seen was as another world, one entered through the portal of a computer, and interacted with and then left along. Although there’s been a lot of writing since, it’s largely been from a slightly adversarial position, as if these new ways of communicating were something a bit scary, something to be treated with suspicion, and with a greater impact in and of themselves than we’d give them credit for. To an extent, that’s true.

Empiricist technophiles will typically describe a communications medium as neutral – flashes of light going down a piece of glass (which is basically what fiber optic is!) aren’t intelligent enough to be good or evil, they’re just light. Those of a more philosophical bent will look at the technology as a cultural artefact – what does it mean for a technology to exist, how does its existence change the shape of the world? For me, it’s a question of people. How do people behave in a reality where this technology exists? What do they make from the world around them?

There’s nothing new about the changes that we’re seeing. They’re nothing scarier than what’s come before. So we live in a world where I can have a video chat with someone the other side of the world, commit fraud in the UK from Nigeria, and read the guy upstairs’ email because he doesn’t understand wireless security. What do we make of that? How does that change things? For one of the cultures that I’m part of, the Nottingham alternative scene, that means that our events can be organised and promoted with minimal financial cost, that the music we listen to in clubs can equally come from YouTube videos as the DJs CD collection, and we relate to each other as much over Facebook chat and SMS as we do going round to each others houses to drink. Is this a ‘digital culture’? Definitely. What does it mean to live with integrity (implicitly, I’m taking this to be in a Christian context) in this culture? It means investing in relationships – sometimes mediated through SMS or MSN, sometimes face-to-face. It’s different from a culture where Facebook didn’t exist, because I can find out things about someone ‘from them’ without ever actually interacting with them; but actually, being aware of that means that I realise that I’m equipped for this. I can do relationships, the digital bit is just another way to interact.

I’m up to my 600 words at which point even I stop reading. I’m sure I’ll think about this more.

I’ve been running tekton.ic, a ministry to the Notts alt scene, for about three months now, and although there’s been a lot of positive sounds from people involved, it’s felt like there’s been a certain lack of purpose and direction to the work that’s bugged me. On the one hand, I don’t want to be too prescriptive – I don’t want to rigidly come up with a master plan that must be followed, with aims and objectives and stages and numerical criteria by which I can assess my success. On the other hand, I don’t want to be so vague and undefined as to make my work nothing more than ‘a few people who go drinking occasionally’.

We have a principle at work – ‘talk to your teddy’. Sometimes it takes someone to just listen to you and occasionally point out the obvious, to make it clear where you’re going wrong. Of course tekton.ic is aimless – I’ve not defined an aim for it! In my desire to give it the freedom to be whatever it will be, I’ve not set any structure in place, or given it any tools.

And so, I turn to people who write books on the subject – in this case, Joseph Myers, and his excellent Organic Community. In the very first chapter, he talks about the dangers of a master plan, and encourages a mindset of organic community building. Instead of asking ‘where are we going?’, which requires an answer that’s some form of ‘There!”, an organic community asks “What are we hoping for?”, which lends itself to much more creative answers. Later on, he talks about descriptive rather than prescriptive language (“It looks like this” rather than “it will behave like that”) , and finally, moving from being a programmer to a creator of an environment.

I met with someone today who said very similar things, and whose wise words prompted me to pick up OC again. He suggested that I write down my overall vision for my ideal world looks like, the values that drive me towards that vision, and what I believe the next step is. With those in mind, I have something to show people that I talk to – and the process of creating them will in itself be instructive and encouraging.

I’m gonna go make a first attempt at those things now. Wish me luck!

It’s a fairly regular occurrence that I read about an exciting new ministry wanting to minister to people ‘where they’re at’. Aside from the terrible grammar, I broadly agree. I think it’s really important that we follow models of ministry that focus on going to where people are and minister to them in their own particular situations, rather than attempting to attract them to our own little world. Reading through the Gospels and the accounts of the early church I see very little imperative to extract people from their lives to follow Christ, but rather countless examples of ways in which people’s lives are transformed by following Christ – often it involves their situation changing, but that comes as a result of following, rather than as a prerequisite. I actually find it quite arrogant to try to attract people – there’s ways of following Christ that are as alien to me as my church would be to a lot of people, so I can’t for a second hold up how we do it as in any way particularly special. I also hear a lot about how people are spending more time online – it doesn’t take a huge leap of logic to say that people are online, the church should be where people are at, therefore we should set up ministries to this hoard of people online, right? I mean, just take Facebook – half a billion people all in one place, what else does an evangelist want?

The problem is, that to meet people ‘where they’re at’ requires them to be somewhere – to say that being logged into Facebook is being somewhere just doesn’t work. It’s a fallacy to mentally model websites on physical meeting places, however tempting it may be. Internet pioneers and early observers did just that – anyone remember the original GeoCities? It was organised into streets (topics), and you had an address on that street. It was fantastic, but how often did you actually ‘walk’ down the ‘street’, and how often did you just type what you wanted into Altavista or Lycos? Early journalism about the Internet talked about it being the final frontier, a realm to be discovered, and early mental models were of a physical realm entered through a computer rather than a means of transport. That’s changed so much now – computers and the Internet are rapidly becoming ubiquitous and the way that we view them has changed. The Internet isn’t a different world any more – it’s an increasingly integral part of our very local lives.

Where people ‘are at’ is in their homes and around their cities, connected to the Internet regularly, if not all the time. It’s a thread running through their lives and a part of their identity, so it should be the same for the churches that seek to minister to them. That’s scary because it means that online ministry isn’t something that ‘people who understand these things’ can do, it’s something that every church has to examine. Whether they choose to reject that online thread of their life as an act of protest, or informedly deem it irrelevant to their minister, or choose to embrace it and use it for God’s glory, ignoring it is no longer relevant.

As ever, ministries face opposition, and there’s a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainly and doubt) about online ministry. But, I’m up to way over 500 words; dispelling myths can wait!

Well, I guess it’s a new year so it’s time for an obligatory new year post. Got a lot of cool stuff happening – start my new job in a few days as a systems administrator for Heart Internet where I currently work in first-line support, got trips to Poland and Vienna confirmed with EMYC, and hopefully trips to Sweden and maybe even Tallin next year too.

I’ve started using flickr for my photos more – check out my photostream at http://www.flickr.com/photos/robredpath – and now that I’ve got a new camera I actually have faith in, I’m hoping to get out and shoot more.

Digital Saints is doing loads of work for http://inspire-network.org.uk at the moment, and a couple of other sites for European Methodist projects are ticking over nicely. I’d like to do more reading and research – I’ve started blogging my way through my thesis and it’d be good to keep up with the conversation about ministry to digital natives.

Fun times ahead!

Hi! I’m Rob, and I’m a digital native. Computers have been in every school since before I was born, and I’ve grown up around mobile phones, the Web and email. I pretty much can’t imagine life without them, and like digital natives around me, digital communications is an everyday part of life. Somehow, even though it’s used by almost everyone these days, I’ve always felt that older people just don’t ‘get’ technology – sure, they use it, but often they seem to use it as a replacement for something offline that came before, rather than as a natural part of life as my friends do. The same’s often true of the church – I’ve so often felt that they’ve come close but just missed the mark in understanding how I tick.

Technology is part of my identity at every level as a digital native. There’s not an ‘online’ me and an ‘offline’ me – most of what I do online I do under my own name or one of a handful of previous monikers, mostly conceived to protect my personal details as a teenager. In fact, most of my online activity relates to my offline relationships – texts to people who are too far away to see as much as I’d like to, online chat to people who might be busy with something else, or just arranging my social life. The photos from Friday night are up on Facebook – it’s nothing special, just how we share our memories. Sure, sometimes I engage in identity play – but that’s as much a part of growing up as the day I first touched hair gel. Hallvard Mavendorf in Second Life is a subset of Rob Redpath in Real Life – with a few tweaks to escape some of things I’d rather forget about myself.

I understand online dangers intuitively – while it’s important to teach kids online safety just like we were taught road safety, observers are often surprised at how younger generations have the same sixth sense about things online as they do about dangers offline. Incidentally, why do we teach kids about sex from Year 5, but not sexting? Or about stranger danger from the start, but not Facebook until the age of 13 because the TOC don’t allow under-13s to use it?

This, and many other, differences between digital natives and previous generations, have led to a lot of misunderstandings. Missiologist Michael Frost (from a previous generation) talks about people online in his book Exiles- he describes it as “another form of hyper-reality […] [in that] it looks like we’re meeting people via the Web, but really we’re meeting only the acceptable persona that they want displayed to the world”. He’s kinda got a point – but digital natives don’t buy it. Digital natives know that what someone puts online is what they want people to see – and they draw their conclusions about the real person from that. Someone’s Facebook profile is a creative work – the face they put on to go online, and digital natives know it.

A lot’s been said recently about ministering to people online – meeting people where they’re at is the buzzword, and where they’re at seems to be online. That’s kinda true – my generation spend ages online, and the Web provides an ideal medium for a lot of interaction and discovery of faith. But while offline-only church only scratches part of where I itch, so does online-only church. My mates are online and offline, and I’m convinced Jesus is. So why does the church allow the two to be so disconnected?

Further reading:-

Palfrey & Gasser – Born Digital
Exiles: Living Missionally in a Post-Christian Culture

This week at work, Craig and I were talking about authenticity, and how so much of what companies rely on is the feel of authenticity, rather than genuinely being authentic. How much do consumers realise it, and how much do they care? They rely on simulation – much of human endeavour does. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard explored this in his later life – in particular in Simulation & Simulacra. Incidentally, it’s the book Neo takes the minidisk out of in The Matrix in the scene before he notices the girl with the white rabbit tattoo – the concepts for that film are so based on S&S, I’m glad they payed homage!

Baudrillard describes three levels, or orders, of simulation. The first he describes as ‘natural, naturalistic simulacra: based on image, imitation and counterfeiting’ - a very healthy process of seeing what exists, and copying it for artistic effect or enhancement. Taking a photograph of something produces a likeness of that thing, but it doesn’t claim to be anything more than a photograph. No matter how much you want it to be case, you’ll never have Jeri Ryan on your bedroom wall, but you can have a damn fine poster that makes the room infinitely geekier. Just me then?

The second he describes in terms of the simulation obscuring the real, as a way in which the real can be hidden. The example he gives is the efforts that industrial operations go to in order to hide the level of exploitation inherent in production from the workers, and how a nations that relies on heavy industry might typically try to keep the workers’ dreams modest in order to avoid discontent. If workers could see how much they were being exploited, they would rebel – so the simulation is used to hide the reality, and although they can see that it’s a simulation, they cannot see what’s real to compare.

The third order, the hyper-reality, he describes as concerning ‘simulation simulacra: based on information, the model, cybernetic play’. The simulation replaces the real such that the real is no longer the source of the simulation but rather the product, or the replacement. What can be perceived is the simulation that claims to be reality – the shallow image of what exists has been detached from what exists to be a shallow image, which in and of itself, is all that can be seen. This is distinctly unhealthy, and is the greatest threat to authenticity in contemporary society as it is difficult to distinguish the simulation from the real, and often the simulation offers what appears to be all the benefits of the real without the inherent complexities.

What’s worrying is times when I see hints of third-order simulacra in everyday life – friendship defined by Facebook, relationships defined by the outward appearance rather than what’s beneath. My generation seem to be fairly adept at telling the difference – we see simulations for what they are, for the most part. The generations coming up behind us – well, that’s what another blog post is for

For anyone who’s interested, my MA thesis can be downloaded here: Digital Eucharist. Plan is to blog my way through the research I did for it in a slightly more accessible format than a 15k word PDF

It occurred to me recently that most people have no idea what my job is. ‘Technical Support’ is a term that most people understand but, by nature, most people don’t really know what I do. After all, it’s technical stuff that I’ve spent a lifetime learning about and three years (and £15 grand!) on learning to a professional level. This isn’t generally a problem – I couldn’t teach a classroom full of 5-year-olds, and my mother couldn’t analyse security risks in PHP code. Each to their own.

The problem that comes to mind is that of what would happen if I were to be accused of a crime committed online. I’d come before a jury of my peers in a court of law – a system that in principle I believe to be generally effective at dispensing justice (but that’s a whole different question). If I were accused of murder, the jury would know what the crime consisted of – they could imagine me committing it, perhaps understand my motivation, and when provided with evidence that although technical in nature, could be presented in an understandable way.

But what if i were accused of circumventing the access control systems to confidential information held on government computers of several different nations by the use of ghosting proxies, the construction of a botnet and orchestrated dDOS attacks? That’s several different crimes in several different jurisdictions – the extradition proceedings alone would cause a political incident! What about if I were accused of being an accessory to the distribution of child pornography because I had failed to properly patch a server and an attack against the server had succeeded?

When I came to trial, the jury would have very little idea of how I went about my supposed crime – stabbing someone is somewhat universally recognised, writing viruses is a rather less glamorous past-time. In the latter case, I wouldn’t actually have done anything and still managed to commit a crime that would disgust any jury – how is any jury not fully versed in server management supposed to make a call on that?

Equally, what’s the alternative? Trial by a jury of IT experts? There’s vested interest there if I ever saw it – I don’t know what the answer is, but the prospects scare me.

I’m currently looking for a job (if anyone needs a techie with an MA, within range of Manchester, get in touch!). It’s caused me to take a good look at what I’m good at, what I want to do, what I think God wants me to do, and where God appears to be working. Not much then!

Looking around the Christian jobs scene, a lot of places seem to want youth workers. I’m not a youth worker. A lot seem to want lay workers, a now-deprecated term that encompasses a whole range of ministries but mostly seem to involve families, vulnerable people, Fresh Expressions, that kind of thing. I think I could do that, I think I’d enjoy it and be good at it, but I don’t feel called to it. Doing this MA at Cliff has taught me loads about where the future of the church lies, and has changed the way I approach church forever, but it’s also taught me that being a techie is a good thing and that actually, it’s where my heart has always been. After my BSc I was disillusioned with IT (thank you Manchester School of Computer Science), but being at Cliff has brought my worlds together. I’m a rare breed of Christian techie – I’m a qualified one! I find myself frustrated at the way churches abuse technology – they either ignore it or elevate it to the position of second saviour, rather than embracing it cautiously as they should.

We live in a world shaped by technology, and that’s both a fantastic thing and a terrible thing. The same technology that brings people together across huge distances lends itself to shallow relationships and approximations of community. The way in which we understand our place in the world is changing – where we’re going isn’t necessarily bad, it’s just that any upheaval like this can be hard to adapt to. The projector at the front of the church isn’t going to bring the kids flooding in – likewise the church ignores Facebook at its peril.

I live in a world of God and technology – I know both, and I love both. That’s where my future lies. That’s what God’s set me up for. That’s where I’m going. I’ve come to realise that it doesn’t matter if I pay my way working in IT or in the church – I can do God’s work in either, and I’m happy to go with the flow (of the Holy Spirit, I hasten to add!). Exactly where God’s taking me, only He knows – but I guess I’ve just got to trust him. I want to work with churches, to show them how they can use technology to serve the world, to disciple their flocks, to reach out to others and to serve God more faithfully. For now I do that in my spare time, in the future I’d like to see it be a job but maybe that’s not where I’m best placed. Maybe those who need me most can’t pay for me, and those who would pay wouldn’t understand. All in God’s hands. All in God’s hands.

I also realised that I’m terrifically good at nothing in particular. I’ve looked at a few jobs and I tick all the boxes except the specialism of that particular job. I work well in any position in a team, I’ve got great IT skills, I can organise stuff, I can work with external partners, all that kind of stuff….but not in any particular context. Meh, I’ll get there!