I’m not worried about the Church navigating these waters. Like with any major shift in society, some will do well and others won’t. The key thing to remember is that we need both because there are people in society who will navigate changes well and others who won’t. The key is, we have a responsibility to reach both.

A defensive attitude is the biggest threat to the church. When we feel that we have to defend our expression of church or our ministry, we will eventually fail. Defensiveness stops us from working together and keeps us on the “Can we….?” questions rather than the “How will we…?” questions.

Thanks for stopping by.
-Paul.

Quite literally the world is approaching the point of being able to hear with one ear, and see with one eye. How can the Church navigate these currents and not only survive but thrive?

I don’t know about the Chicago example specifically. I have heard of lots of individual churches being planted. My question is, “How many of those churches have in turn planted churches that planted churches?” I was looking specifically at church planting movement activity within an urban setting.

I actually think urban church planting is an example against your argument. There is urban church planting going on but it is not coordinated or strategic. It is tenuous, small and scattered but much stronger on the whole than usually observed. I had a friend that did a study of Boston in the 1990s. The assumption was that Boston had one of the lowest church populations in its history and the city was being lost. When they studied they found that there were tons of small, minority and other language churches in Boston and that more people were in church than any other time in Boston history. But it wasn’t the white upper class people that were in church. So most denomination church planters (that are white and upper or middle class) assumed that there wasn’t anything going on. Because it wasn’t a part of their community. Like urban church planting, on-line church planting is going to be scattered with lots of people trying to reach a small segment. Does this mean that there won’t be a overall strategy? YES. There will not be an overall strategy outside the understanding of the Spirit. If the Spirit is planning then there does not need to be an overall strategy. This does not mean that we as Christians shouldn’t work together, or make plans or try to strategically reach people groups. Only that, no matter what are level of planning or strategy it is not big enough to reach everyone. There is always someone that is unreached. But there is someone that the Spirit is prompting to reach those people. What we need to do is encourage others to reach out in their way, using their strategies, and their passion.

Biological
Geographical
Sociological
Philosophical
Psychological
Anthropological
Business/Marketing

The above domains can all be found on/in Twitter. Twitter, as a domain in itself, is like a city or nation, and therefore broadly defined as a geographical community. Within geographical communities, all other communities reside.

I know some would like to argue that Twitter is not a geographical domain, but by the fact that there is Twitter-space and we are on Twitter or in Twitter demonstrates that it is geographical. It is a geographic community where other kinds of communities can meet or be facilitated to meet.

The only category or domain that may be difficult to apply to Twitter is the biological one. No one physically relies on Twitter for their physical well being.

So, bottom line is that everyone is right depending on the domain from which they are defining community. Domains matter, and words often have different, but related, meanings depending on the perspective of the user.

I hesitate to use the word “domain” in a computer forum, simply because it has a fixed meaning for many who work in the computer field. In this response I have used the sociological meaning of the word “domain”.

Blessings!

David Watson

I have met new people on Twitter, and have even started “communities” from them. So I guess it’s a decent launching pad. Twitter doesn’t even have groups yet, which would be key to turning it into more of a community. We use Facebook groups all of the time with two communities I have started. The question to me is, could the community exist without these tools. Yes.

If we stepped back and realized how much chaos goes on with Twitter I think we’d be shocked. The amount of friends we don’t interact with much far outweighs the amount we do. To me, a community needs consistency and direction. Twitter is great as a quick email replacement or shorter blog tool, but I’ve missed too many discussions to think of it as a community.