Having spent the last 20 days writing my diploma thesis about knowledge work and social software, I thought a lot about the similarities of web 2.0 and emerging church. Today Andrew asks on his blog about these similarities. So I will try to answer this from my point of view and by this get some thoughts out of my head, which may help me in finishing my thesis.
For me it all starts with the emergence theory as the basis for both concepts. This theory is about the collective intelligence of an organisation, which is higher, then the plain sum of the individuals in that organisation. You all know about the ant and the ant colonies. The collective intelligence emerges from the interaction of the ants. An ant decides about its actions by how many other ants it meets and what they are doing. The sum of these interactions builds up the whole colony, a colony without a leader or someone in charge.
This is where the emerging churches got their name from (which they seem to forget a lot). They see the individual, his thoughts and beliefs and his interactions with others in the church as the basis. The sum of these beliefs, thoughts and interactions is the church. No one tells the individual what to belief and what to do. This is why emerging churches have so much focus on relationships, because they learn and develop out of the interactions of their members.
And this is the fundament of the web 2.0 concept which heavily builds on the user and his data. Like the blogosphere which is a web created out of trackbacks, ping, comments and links. These interactions create an intelligence of its own.
At the core of web 2.0 is the idea of the web as a platform meaning that anyone can build his services upon this and can use the APIs and feeds to much them up, have them interact even more.
I think what emerging churches do a lot is creating a platform for their members, too. By providing spaces in coffeehouses and pubs, by throwing parties and alt.worship-services, they make room for people to interact and exchange their “data” like thoughts, experiences, relationships and beliefs.
As Andrew has written, there are huge similarities in trying to define what the emerging church and what web 2.0 is. The reason for that is a new understanding of knowledge and truth. People who ask what the emerging church or what web 2.0 is want a clean, black and white, only the facts answer. And for both concepts this is plainly not possible. I always said that you have to start a journey to understand the concept of emerging churches. You have to meet people who have been on that journey for some time now. You have to talk a lot, ask a lot, pray a lot and drink a lot of cappuccino to get an understanding of what this is all about. You can’t just read a few books. You have to interact and by that become a part of the thing itself. Everything emerges out of relationships.
With it comes a new understanding of knowledge. Knowledge is not facts. It is facts plus relations plus experience plus individual opinion and if you want to grasp it, you have to try to get the whole picture.
Like Wikipedia. You’re using it wrong if you only read the article about an issue. To really “get a feeling” for the issue you have to read the discussion page, too. This is where you get the deeper look inside the controversies about the issue, the different opinions and the people who are behind the article. Reading the article gives you information but reading the article plus the discussion page and maybe contributing is what gets you knowledge.
So people who just want the facts will never really get what the emerging church or web 2.0 is really about or will be able to participate. It needs a paradigm shift in truth and knowledge.
The thing about Wikipedia is not that people do not trust it. The thing is that they trust the other sources too much. When Nature announced the results of their comparison between Wikipedia and the Encyclopaedia Britannica everybody wrote that Wikipedia was nearly as correct as the Britannica. In my opinion the results must be read as the Britannica has nearly as much errors as Wikipedia. We have to say goodbye to the belief that the encyclopaedias only have the facts and no opinions as it is with the news, the magazines, the TV stations etc. Everything we can read, hear, see or learn is facts plus opinion. We have to adapt to that and change our reception of information. We can’t trust single sources. To get knowledge about an issue we have to check different sources. Wikipedia is build on that principle.
The same in churches. We trust our pastors in everything he teaches. But that is very dangerous and has lead to a lot of hurting and has cost lives. To grasp the broader meaning of an issue we have to listen, ask and check our bibles a lot. When I look back at my life as a believer I can clearly say that I have learned the most and have grown the most out of interaction with friends and people in my church. And asking different people about issues has prevented me from going in wrong directions.
So I’m with Andrew in believing that there is a lot to learn from web 2.0. And I truly think that we have something to give to the web 2.0 people. I have tried to define web 2.0 and the underlying principles in the last weeks and my knowledge of the emerging church has really helped my to broaden the horizon and understand stuff like Wikipedia a bit better.
So hopefully these writings make some sense to you. They are only the starting point for me. There is a lot more to explore.
technorati tags: web 2.0, emerging church, wikipedia
