church times column - worship 2.0, an architecture of participation

i write a monthly column for the church times on worship for the greenbelt page. the church times web site has recently had an overhaul and the column is now in a subscriber only section. previous columns i have wriutten an linked to here are now broken links so i'll get round to posting them here at some point.  however they kindly said i could post the column here the week after publication. so here is last week's inspired by the piece in the guardian on web 2.0

Embracing Worship 2.0 – an Architecture of Participation

We've developed a tradition for Advent at Grace, an alternative worship community in Ealing – Nine. It's a very simple idea for a service (feel free to use it). We take the traditional nine lessons and carols framework and give it our own twist. We find nine volunteers willing to take part who are given one of the readings. They then have to choose a piece of music and do something to reflect/relate to the reading - this might be a piece of art, a ritual, a meditation, a thought, an audio-visual piece. At the service the nine readings are read from the bible and after each one the person does their piece and play their chosen piece of music. Followed of course by mulled wine and mince pies. It’s highly participative and creative. People produce amazing things. On reflection I think it might be an example of Worship 2.0 …?

There have been a spate of articles recently on the new revolution in the internet which has become known as Web 2.0. The Guardian Weekend magazine ran a 15 page feature called the Bigger Bang that interviewed several of the entrepreneurs behind these startups. In it John Lancaster said "What all these new kind of sites share is an approach to creating things: "user-created content", in the jargon. The internet is no longer about corporations telling you what to do, think or buy; it's about things people create."

So Wikipedia is an encyclopedia where the information is provided and edited by anyone rather than experts. It is constantly being added to and evolving and is astonishingly rich in information. Flickr, Youtube, and Myspace  are online photo, video and music sharing sites respectively. People create and upload and give feedback on media content and then build social networks around that, some of which is virtual and some with people they already know. Technorati, Digg and Del.icio.us all work with the publishing revolution in blogging to help people collate, track, identify and share the content that is good, useful and interesting.

Whilst these sites may or may not be of interest in themselves what is significant about them is the values or ethos that is emerging. Whereas Web 1.0 was characterised by being an information source, some of the values associated with Web 2.0 are that it has an architecture of participation where community is the content, knowledge is open source and it is based around decentralized authority that values the wisdom of the crowds who are self publishing content with an incredible amount of creativity.

Steve Collins definition of alternative worship on the web site www.smallfire.org is "Alternative worship is what happens when people create worship for themselves, in a way that fully reflects who they are as people and the culture that they live their everyday lives in." A generation are growing up for whom the ethos of Web 2.0 is their world. So we should expect and celebrate Worship 2.0 – creative, highly participative, valuing community as the content, open source, low control where the expert worship leader is replaced by teams self publishing creative content.

Let me conclude by reworking John Lancaster’s quote above…
"What all these new kinds of worship share is an approach to creating things: "user-created content", in the jargon. The church is no longer about institutions telling you what to do, think or sing; it's about things people create."

Comments

[Martin Montgomery]

"the expert worship leader is replaced by teams self publishing creative content."

I love that idea, the expert anything does my nut - I know there is place for leadership in Christianity, but in my experience it can be more disempowering than anything. It only focuses me on what I can't do, so the idea that I would create for myself is a brilliant and encouraging thing!

[Martin Montgomery]

"the expert worship leader is replaced by teams self publishing creative content."

I love that idea, the expert anything does my nut - I know there is place for leadership in Christianity, but in my experience it can be more disempowering than anything. It only focuses me on what I can't do, so the idea that I would create for myself is a brilliant and encouraging thing!

[Ayres no graces]

That's a really helpful article, jonny.

A few weeks ago Wikipedia was vandalised; someone edited pages to destroy the content. Wikipedia responded by locking down much of their content while they worked out how to be more secure without stifling their participative ethos.
Worship 2.0 might not have to worry about vandalism, but similar issues might be raised by behaviour or theology that pushes at the boundaries of what other members of the group are comfortable with. When this happens, we have a human tendency to lock things down and hold to old certainties. But the architecture of participation requires that we do the opposite, and open ourselves to new thinking and deep listening to divergent views. Such an architecture can probably only be called genuine when it’s been tested to the limit. Anyone can claim to be participative if they allow other people to do the things that they would do anyway; participation is only genuine when it involves a real transfer of power, and we do things that we would really rather not. I wonder which emerging communities have faced this kind of experience already?

The tension between participation and control becomes more fraught when you consider the place of emerging communities in a hierarchical church. The Mission-Shaped Church report gave a lot of permission to groups not to worry about hierarchical structures, but the CofE isn’t declaring ‘anything goes’ for alternative worship groups, especially after NOS. The current CofE is a hierarchical organisation which adheres to certain centrally defined (some would say biblical?) theological norms. Any creative, participative group is likely to run close to those norms, and risk being reined in at any time. That’s what happened to the liberation theology base communities that crossed the line drawn by the Vatican. For this to change, the church will need to take seriously Pete Rollins’ challenge to find unity in the event of revelation, rather than preserving an interpretation its content.

[steve collins]

when i first got involved in alt worship, i used to get asked how we'd deal with participants 'vandalising' our open forum. but it's never really happened [although the guy who danced in very short shorts came close, and mike would mention belinda carlisle... ;) ]

in hindsight it tells me more about the fears of people in hierarchical churches as to what their flocks would get up to if not carefully shepherded...