Dan Miller points to a piece that Jordon Cooper wrote more than two years ago about churches and blogging. It’s the kind of reason I arranged for him to come talk to us at Seabury; the fact that only three or four people showed up underlines the point of Jordon’s retrospective reflections on churches and web-based communication.
Quoth Jordon, “The answer. . . most often given for not using technologies is lack of time, which is another way of saying it is a too low priority to be done. For many, the time spent on learning and integrating new technologies is not worth the time or the risk to use them.” But the churches devote vast amounts of hot air to the importance of young adults, flies bigwigs around to momentous commitee meetings, spends a lot on clueless brochure-driven websites, and simultaneously ignores a silver-platter, low-overhead, highly-effective means of reaching out to the young adults whom the churches supposedly want to attract.
It’s one of those days I wish I could draw cartoon, figures, even Tom-Tomorrow-style, so I could show a pointy-haired ecclesiastic saying, “It’s too low a priority. I don’t understand it, and I don’t want to listen to the people who do understand it. I know; we’ll recreate one of the least effective means of communication, and when it costs too much and doesn’t make a difference, we’ll shrug and blame the medium.”
I don’t know where Jordon and his colleagues go to let off steam, but I hope they’ll pull over a chair for me if I’m ever in the neighborhood.
Posted by AKMA at July 2, 2004 04:45 PM | TrackBackWow. I missed that the first time around. I'm just thinking it might be good for church sites to blogroll member bloggers. This would, I'm sure, lead to some of the heavy thinking about Christian communication standards for online writing that I've been hoping would get done. A church could create certain standards for weblogs in order to get listed, and would obviously be in a position to edit people out (from the blogroll)if they violated these standards.
I think I need to forward some of this to our church tech committee. I find it very odd that in a highly technical and literate and large church that my wife and I are the only bloggers I know of to date.
Posted by: Paul Baxter at July 3, 2004 11:02 AM