Tonight, Peter Bowden and I went in to Boston to check out the Emergent Church service in downtown Boston (more about that in a later post). On the way back, we stopped in at Diesel Cafe in Davis Square to have a cup of coffee and talk about how we could radically rebuild Unitarian Universalist congregations.<\/p>\n
“You’ve heard of Web 2.0?” I said. Web 2.0 is a vague term which includes things like social networking Web sites, blogs, YouTube, wikis, and so on. “Well, I want to do Church 2.0.”<\/p>\n
Peter liked that term. “Yeah, if we even say ‘Church 2.0’ that immediately implies that all other ways of doing church are just a little bit outdated.”<\/p>\n
So then we started brainstorming what Church 2.0 might be like. <\/p>\n
First principle is simple: Church 2.0 is relational. It depends on building decentralized connections between people. But Church 2.0 uses a variety of modalities to build connections between people, and not just traditional Church 1.0 modalities such as Sunday morning worship services and committee meetings. It also uses new technologies to help people connect, including:<\/p>\n
Not everyone is going to have good Web access (although Church 2.0 will have computers with Internet access available during social hour), and not everyone is going to want to use all the different modalities. That’s fine. The real point is that Church 2.0 doesn’t exist in just one modality — it’s not just Sunday morning worship and social hour, delivered to a relatively passive congregation by a small group of lay and professional leaders. Church 2.0 exists in a decentralized web of interactions. And the different modalities each deliver slightly different content. For example…<\/p>\n
…all of which relate to Sunday morning worship, but each of which addresses the topic of Sunday morning worship slightly differently.<\/p>\n
We also brainstormed a little on how Church 2.0 will help congregations meet the needs of church members after peak oil. The Web site of Church 2.0 would have a map of the surrounding region, showing where church members live (click to send email, though you don’t see the email address), and where regional small groups meet (click to get contact info).<\/p>\n
That’s about as far as our brainstorming got. Some of the ideas we came up with are crazy or impractical, no doubt about it. Some are just stupid. At this point, we’re just brainstorming. But both of us feel pretty strongly that we need to be looking at radical change in the way we do church — and that we don’t have much time to make that change happen.<\/p>\n