Thursday, April 05, 2012

A Reformation of Christian Education, Pt. 5: Networked Advocacy & PA General Assistance

Just as a recap, this series of blog posts was written as an assignment for a Technology and Adult Education Seminar led by Pastor Keith Anderson at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia.  So far, over four posts I've introduced the series, explained the old "broadcasting church" system of communications, shed some light on the emerging "networked church" system, and critiqued to #Kony2012 movement in light of the tenets of networked communication.  In this final post, I intend to take what I've learned from the seminar, the book Tweet If You <3 Jesus by Elizabeth Drescher and my own writing process to help cultivate a community around advocating against Gov. Tom Corbett's planned removal of the General Assistance program from this year's Pennsylvania state budget.  As I am currently in the final months of my time as a field intern for Lutheran Advocacy Ministries of Pennsylvania, this is also exploring the use of social-networking technology in my own ministry context.

Photo: Neal Santos/City Paper
The PA General Assistance fund is a program of last resort for the state's 68,000 most needy residents, providing a maximum of $205.00 each month in most counties to folks like battered women fleeing abusive households, children living with unrelated adults, adults in intensive drug and alcohol treatment programs and those waiting to receive long-term disability benefits from the federal government.  Many citizens receiving benefits from PA General Assistance only can do so for up to nine months, so its essentially serves as a transition program that helps folks on the road to recovery.  Whether or not you agree with supporting PA General Assistance from a moral perspective, from a financial perspective it makes sense as well.  While the Corbett administration would argue that cutting the program could save the state $150 million a year, as this calculator from PA Cares for All shows, the program would result in many more individuals landing in homeless shelters, mental hospitals, foster care and prisons, resulting in a net loss of millions for Pennsylvania.  For instance, folks like Anthony Grasso (pictured above), who runs Next Stop Recovery house in Philly's Frankford neighborhood, runs his program largely on PA General Assistance funds... without the program, he would likely have to close his doors to addicts seeking recovery.

There is current coalition website PA Cares for All supported by over religious and social justice organizations, and they've already done a great deal to foster community around supporting PA General Assistance by following the tenets of networked communication.  Their website already features many stories of folks who have received help from the program (including some pictures).  There is also a great media section that compiles editorals, radio broadcasts and the like from local media on the subject.  PA Cares For All also operates a pretty decent Facebook page that provides links to many of the same stories the website does.  Finally, the website makes direct advocacy fairly easy by helping you sign-up for alerts to email Gov. Corbett.

That said, there's a lot folks can do (especially ordinary citizens... the folks running the program are already really swamped, I imagine) to further cultivate community around supporting the PA General Assistance program.  First, after a number of searches on Twitter it seems like there is very little conversation on the subject.  Folks should be encouraged to use a specific hashtag, lets say #KeepPAGA, to help develop an affinity group around the subject online.  Second, Governor Corbett's Twitter username, @GovernorCorbett seems to used fairly frequently... advocacy messages that are publicly visible could be directed there as well.  Third, you can't underestimate the power of narrative and video in the networked communications era... instead of just writing quick tweets to the governor, folks could be encouraged to tweet links to YouTube videos they post of either stories about how they have benefited from general assistance or their reasons for why the PA General Assistance program should be maintained.  Finally, those running PA Cares for All could encourage people to make sure all those tweets and videos were also posted on the group Facebook page.  They could also continue to encourage real-life meetups on the subject across the state.

As Elizabeth Drescher in Tweet If You <3 Jesus states, "... as the online encyclopedia Wikipedia testifies, the relatively small efforts of a very large number of people aggregate in support of a very small number of people who provide the larger commitment necessary to make things happen."  While there will only be a small number of professional advocates running the #KeepPAGA campaign, those folks can cultivate and attend to wider advocacy community around the subject through practicing the tenets of networked communication.  Finally, please feel free to post additional ideas about ways to cultivate a #KeepPAGA community here or any questions about the program you might have.  Happy advocating!

God's peace,
Dustin

Dustin is a Masters of Divinity candidate in his second year of study at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. While seeking ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, his focus is on the intersection between worship, service and justice building in de-centralized faith communities unencumbered by a traditional church building. In his free time, Dustin really likes playing frisbee, hiking and pretending to know how to sing.

Women Rule the Internet!

Chart from the Pinterest article at TechCrunch linked to in this post.
Just got a petition email in my inbox from Ultraviolet that I thought was definitely worth sharing.  Essentially, it's asking that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg make sure that women are represented on the company's board of directors once it goes public.  If you want to sign onto the petition, you can do so here.  Equally interesting however was the statistics that email brought to bear.  I had no idea that almost across the board, women are far more active online than men.  For instance, 62% of sharing that happens on Facebook is done by women.  More women use Twitter than men.  The most overwhelming statistic however, is that 97% of Pinterest users in America are female.  A majority of e-commerce transactions at sites like Amazon are conducted by women as well.  Check out this article from TechCrunch for more information: "Why Women Rule the Internet."

As a male involved in a lot of online advocacy and formation of worship communities, I found these statistics to be extremely helpful.  When organizing and attending to an online advocacy or faith-community, it seems like making sure I take into account the perspectives and input of females is more important than ever.  Please share your thoughts on the subject in the comments section, and as always, thanks for reading!

God's peace,
Dustin 

Dustin is a Masters of Divinity candidate in his second year of study at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. While seeking ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, his focus is on the intersection between worship, service and justice building in de-centralized faith communities unencumbered by a traditional church building. In his free time, Dustin really likes playing frisbee, hiking and pretending to know how to sing.

Tuesday, April 03, 2012

A Reformation of Christian Education, Pt. 4: #Kony2012 As An Advocacy Model

Sure, say what you will about the #Kony2012 movement... it may oversimplify the issue, it may do a bit of the "great white savior" thing and it may encourage unnecessary militarization in central Africa, but whether you think its important or not, you now know who Joseph Kony is... Jason Russell and the rest of the folks at Invisible Children have already succeeded in making Kony famous, no matter what folks decide to do on April 20th.  Essentially then, no matter what you think about the aims of the #Kony2012 campaign, it's pretty fair to say that it can provide folks involved in advocacy ministries with a really powerful model to conduct their own social justice campaigns.  Following the pattern of our emerging system of networked meaning-making, what did #Kony2012 do right?  Furthermore, how could folks involved with advocacy improve upon that model in their own ministries?

Before doing so, if you haven't already seen the #Kony2012 film, here it is:


So #Kony2012 definitely picked up on the meme of web-based activism and ran with it.  Time's 2011 Person of the Year, after all was the The Protestor, a new type of activist largely propelled by social networking technology... think #Occupy and the Arab Spring.  Furthermore, #Kony2012 also took very seriously the idea of teaching through personal narratives... the promise Jason makes to Jacob early in the film and the conversation with little Gavin are both extremely powerful.  Part of their success was also one of their greatest weaknesses... they were able to boil down a very complex issue into an extremely simple one... "Joseph Kony is the worst," and he must be stopped.  They also made contacting policy makers very easy, and specifically by listed folk's Twitter names, they made those advocacy actions publicly visible to other Twitter users: "Engage Your Policy Makers."

Finally, despite very strong push back, Kony2012 was able to engage their critics in conversation, at least somewhat through their #AskICAnything tag and responses on YouTube.  Here's an example:


Unfortunately, many of #Kony2012's weaknesses come from its use of broadcast era communication strategies in the emerging era of networked communications.  Essentially, most of the campaign's communications were largely one-directional... they came up with a great film, have a great website and a pretty decent Facebook Page, but they haven't spent much time attending to the folks involved in the movement.  If you look carefully at their Facebook Page for instance, it's made of "announcements" from Invisible Children, but folk's comments are never really responded to.  Perhaps this wasn't always the case, but at this point comments on their YouTube page are entirely turned off and its the same thing on their blog.  While the #Kony2012 video argues that a "bunch of littles could make a big difference," all they ask of folks in the video is to 1) sign a pledge, 2) buy a kit and wear a bracelet,  3) donate money and 4) share the video.  There's no invitation to learn more through conversation, share personal stories and create content.  Why not supply folks with an image to make their own stickers and posters with?  Why not help folks to design their own posters?  Why not ask people to tell stories of their own activism through YouTube and communal blogging?

Let me be clear... except for the "great white savior" thing, I really appreciate what #Kony2012 is trying to do, and overall, they created a very powerful model for web-based advocacy.  I'm interested to see a second video they're publishing this Thursday, and excited to see what happens on April 20th.  As they say at the beginning of the first video, their movement was an "experiment" at the beginning of the networked communications age, and it was largely successful.  Still, even for folks as smart and creative as the ones at Invisible Children, letting go of all our broadcast-age habits can prove pretty difficult.

God's peace,
Dustin

Dustin is a Masters of Divinity candidate in his second year of study at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. While seeking ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, his focus is on the intersection between worship, service and justice building in de-centralized faith communities unencumbered by a traditional church building. In his free time, Dustin really likes playing frisbee, hiking and pretending to know how to sing.

Monday, April 02, 2012

A Reformation of Christian Education, Pt. 3: The Networked Church

As I wrote about in my previous post, sometime between the mid-1990s and mid-2000s, we reached the peak of the “broadcasting age” of communication, an era marked by top-down, one-to-many, and creator-to-consumer processes of information sharing and meaning making. On December 25th, 2006 however an event took place that heralded in the rising of a new era of communication. While the Internet had been around as early as 1982, and social networking sites like Facebook, YouTube and Myspace had already been in use for a couple of years, it wasn’t until roughly 2006 that the idea of technology-assisted social networking hit mainstream culture. The idea of social networking became a “meme” or a culture wide narrative that year, a fact reflected on December 25th when Time’s 2006 Person of the Year was announced as not a famous politician, celebrity or athlete, but as simply… you!  Here are two of the most compelling things the traditional meaning-makers of culture at Time wrote in that article about what they were calling "Web 2.0":
… look at 2006 through a different lens and you'll see another story, one that isn't about conflict or great men... It's a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes. 
This is an opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding, not politician to politician, great man to great man, but citizen to citizen, person to person. It's a chance for people to look at a computer screen and really, genuinely wonder who's out there looking back at them.
Wow… now six years later, it’s fair to say the folks at Time were right in recognizing the rising of a new system of meaning-making over the old broadcasting model… the era of networked communication is indeed upon us, and it has huge ramifications for the future of the Church.

In the networked communication model, it’s not all about reaching the most numbers of folks or creating the largest community, but rather attending deeply to the connections one holds in community.It’s important to underscore here that at its best, the networked church is incarnational, meaning it enhances rather than entirely replaces in-person ministry. And it’s also not just the broadcasting church on steroids… it’s not simply sending out a Tweet each day or posting a sermon on your blog and hoping for responses, but rather listening, attending and connecting with folks wherever they might be. In some instances, that might mean spending more time in a coffee shop rather than your church office. In other instances, that might mean leading worship in a public park rather than your sanctuary. Basically, the networked church is about finding folks in their “third places,” wherever they are, and going out to meet them there.Third place” is a term coined by Ray Oldenburg to mean a place where folks spend their time when they’re not either at home or at work… in The Great Place, the Good Place Oldenburg argues that third places serve as anchors of community life and therefore places of meaning making. At it’s best, the networked church recognizes that more and more individuals identify social media sites like Facebook, Twitter or YouTube as some (although not all) of their third places. Following the Great Commission then it simply makes sense to go out where folks are, including online… wish folks happy birthday on Facebook, watch their YouTube videos, read and comment on their blogs. Only once we know what folks are talking about does it make sense to engage them in conversation with relevant additional information.  And as my own pastor, Pastor Scott Cady reminded me in response to the first post in this series, make that conversation as wide as possible. While online ministry may seem entirely new and scary, part of it is paying reverence to the great theologians who have come before us, and bringing them in as conversation partners when appropriate as well.

God's peace,
Dustin

Dustin is a Masters of Divinity candidate in his second year of study at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. While seeking ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, his focus is on the intersection between worship, service and justice building in de-centralized faith communities unencumbered by a traditional church building. In his free time, Dustin really likes playing frisbee, hiking and pretending to know how to sing.

Sunday, April 01, 2012

A Reformation of Christian Education, Pt. 2: The Broadcasting Church

Why is ‘reformation’ such a great word for describing how church communities are changing in the ways they learn and relate with one another? One reason is that the era of church communication (and in fact communication in general) we’re leaving, the “Broadcasting Church,” shares its roots with the Protestant Reformation. As many have argued, without the quick dissemination of written material that Gutenberg’s printing press provided, the very public theological arguments and rapid spread of ideas that led to the reformation could never have happened. As Elizabeth Drescher points out in Tweet If You <3 Jesus however:

…while printing did open the book of knowledge, as it were, to many people who would not previously have had access to the world of religious and academic ideas, it also closed the book on certain modes of relational communication that were a central mechanism not only for the sharing of knowledge in the ancient and medieval world, but for the nurturing of relationships within and across social categories (Drescher 62).
Before the printing press when books, scrolls and the like were rare and handmade, reading was a social rather than individual event, and readers contributed to books by writing in the margins or adding pages. In churches without pews, congregants would shuffle around and socialize during formal church services as well. Through this process, a type of “communal meaning-making” took place over time.

Once one fast-forwards to the popularization of radio and television in the twentieth century, the era of broadcasting communication dramatically picks up pace. Communication became a largely one-directional, one-to-many process, where creators of media sent out information to be received by largely passive consumers (Drescher 71). Sure, there were some exceptions… you might make a comment to your pastor after an either really good or really bad sermon, or you might phone-in a “shout-out” to Total Request Live as a young middle-schooler in the late nineties (note my bias), but as a whole, communication was a top-down affair, and many relationships, including those in many mainline denominations, began to suffer. The peak of the broadcasting era seemed to take place in the mid-1990s to mid-2000s, a time when twenty-four hour coverage of cable news channels began to saturate the airwaves and mainline denominations that traditionally emphasized a communal sharing of authority were in stark decline...

God's peace,
Dustin

Dustin is a Masters of Divinity candidate in his second year of study at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. While seeking ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, his focus is on the intersection between worship, service and justice building in de-centralized faith communities unencumbered by a traditional church building. In his free time, Dustin really likes playing frisbee, hiking and pretending to know how to sing.

A Reformation of Christian Education, Pt. 1: Intro

One thing I’ve spent a great deal of time reflecting on is that social networking technology is not only changing the nature of Christian education in the congregation, but the nature of Christian education in the seminary as well. If social networking technology is reforming education from being a more “teacher-centered” to “learner-centered” enterprise, shouldn’t some of our academic papers reflect that fact? In a learner-centered environment where knowledge is formed through conversation in community rather than found in the bowels of a library and where authority is constantly negotiated, perhaps seminarians could contribute to the conversation by beginning to write blog posts rather than papers that stay locked in the towers of academia? From a practical standpoint, as we begin to read and write seminary assignments more on tablets or smartphones and less on paper, enriching our assignments through sound, video and links seems to make sense and can best be achieved through the blogposts medium.

What I propose then is writing my Technology and Adult Education paper not in the form of five pages but instead in the form of five blogposts, including this one. While this process would have ideally taken place over the span of a few weeks, its unfortunately only going to take place over the span of a single Sunday, in order to get my assignment in on time. Ideally, as I live-blog each consecutive post, I’ll pay attention to the responses and comments it garners (please comment friends and thanks for reading), and then include those comments in the next post of my assignment if possible. So here’s what I’m thinking for each of my four remaining posts:

1) A summary of the “Broadcasting Church” era we are now leaving, including its best and worst practices.

2) A summary of the Networked Church era now emerging, with a focus on how it differs from the Broadcasting Church.

3) As my current ministry setting is with Lutheran Advocacy Ministries of PA, I am looking for ways to educate our ministry partners about proposed cuts to the state of Pennsylvania’s General Assistance Fund, which would double Philadelphia’s homeless population.  I’ll begin doing so by critiquing the well-known Kony 2012 model in light of what I’ve learned about the Networked Church.

4) I’ll conclude with ways I could modify the Kony 2012 model to raise awareness about cuts to the PA General Assistance Fund predominately by contributing and attending the ongoing conversation about the issue, as best practices of the Networked Church indicate.

While writing each post, I’ll rely on Rev. Keith Anderson’s March 2nd, 2012 lecture on the Art of Digital Formation at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, Tweet If You <3 Jesus by Elizabeth Drescher and the responses I garner from my post readers. Thanks so much!

God's peace,
Dustin

Dustin is a Masters of Divinity candidate in his second year of study at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia. While seeking ordination in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, his focus is on the intersection between worship, service and justice building in de-centralized faith communities unencumbered by a traditional church building. In his free time, Dustin really likes playing frisbee, hiking and pretending to know how to sing.