Emerging church: Builders & Doers vs. Whiners & Trolls
Sunday, July 2nd, 2006
As I have written before, I see a lot of parallels between the emerging church and the phenomenon called Web 2.0. Here’s another example. I read this wonderful article called ‘Builders & Doers and Whiners and Trolls’. It’s about two different type of people in the web industry.
On the one hand there are the builders and doers. They can be identified by certain behaviors and characteristics:
1. Constantly looking for opportunities
2. Confident but humble
3. Hard working
4. Willing to take risks
On the other hand you have the whiners and trolls (and I might add talkers). They also have certain characteristics:
1. Focus on problems
2. Talk a lot, but act very little
3. Insecure about their abilities
4. Trolls (makes negative comments) on blogs
5. Afraid of taking risks
Wow, this looks strangely familiar when I look at what is going on in this so called emerging church thing. I’m lacking a good overview of the percentages in Web 2.0 but for the emerging church I would guess that 98% of the audible voices belong to the talkers and only 2% I would call doers. And by doing I don’t mean writing a book.
There seem to be an awful lot of middle aged white guys out there who travel around the world, speak at conferences and never leave their small group of worldwide peers. They write books, engage in endless blog comments discussions and enjoy being the poster boys of the latest hype in church.
On the other hand you have people like Ken whom I met in London. He runs this little coffeehouse church in Houston that sounds wonderful familiar and strikingly similar to Kubik. The best part about it is that I have never heard of it before. It seems that they are too busy running their local community to promote their fancy church to the global emerging church subculture. They have no time to talk because they are so occupied in doing.
This was one of the reason why it took me some time to engage in the London meeting because I wanted to be at home in Karlsruhe working and living with my community.
We have done the conference/discussions/teaching-part and we’re pretty tired of it because it takes energy away from the actual work. The minute you start teaching about what you do in your community, you slow down engaging with it. And if you have done the traveling, writing and whatever part for some time there is nothing left to talk about. This is what I have seen with so many church models. It seems like success is the biggest temptation for a church. Because if a model has success at once everybody is jumping on it. The pastor becomes more involved in writing books and speaking around the world then in leading his church. The whole merchandise starts, worship-cds, a bigger building etc. Take the Brownsville, Pensecola revival for example. At the end of the 90s it was the role model for a modern revival. I know tons of people who travelled there, bought the books and cds and so on. All that is left of this revival is a church with 400 members and a couple millions of debt.
We felt that we had to decide between to choices. The first one was to promote Kubik and the model, speak at conferences, travel around, write books, create fancy websites etc. And to be honest, this option is very tempting for me. The other option was to stop all these activities and become completely engaged in our community again. Have our focus on our families, friends and our city again. Live the life not just the church.
I have decided to take the second option although I can’t help writing these rants so don’t take it too seriously.
