Community

Community -- Definitions from Free Online Dictionary
1. a. A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government.
b. The district or locality in which such a group lives.

2. a. A group of people having common interests: the scientific community; the international
business community.
b. A group viewed as forming a distinct segment of society: the gay community; the
community of color.

3. a. Similarity or identity: a community of interests.
b. Sharing, participation, and fellowship.

I was re-watching the Michael Wesch video "An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube." In it, Wesch says that YouTube is really "a story about new forms of expression and new forms of community and new forms of identity." This got me thinking about how 'community' is changing -- not just within YouTube, but in the world today.

I found this definition of community on Free Online Dictionary. Feel free to look it up yourself, if you want to. The first definition (and usually the most common one) is:

1. a. A group of people living in the same locality and under the same government.
b. The district or locality in which such a group lives.

To be honest, this only applies to a very small group of people who are directly involved in my life. Sure, there are quite a few people who live in my town and even in my county, but there are so many more people who affect my life on a daily basis who live outside of that area.

The second definition is:

2. a. A group of people having common interests: the scientific community; the international
business community.
b. A group viewed as forming a distinct segment of society: the gay community; the
community of color.

Again, some of the people in my world would fit into this category. All the students and faculty and alumni at Luther are part of the Luther Community. And I do hang out with a bunch of Lutherans so that would be an over-arching community in my life. But it doesn't truly describe most of the people who love and care about my life.

Finally, the third definition is:

3. a. Similarity or identity: a community of interests.
b. Sharing, participation, and fellowship.

Again, 3a doesn't truly define my most significant community. So we turn to the very last definition which I think should be the new first definition. This is the new way we view community.

I am an online seminarian with classmates all over the United States. We have diffierent interests and different family and work situations, and we definitely do not live in the same district or locality. But with these classmates, the most important part of our community is our sharing, our participation with each other and our fellowship.

From Michael Wesch's video about YouTube, I am seeing that my classmates and I are not alone in this thought. There are random groups of people all over the internet who share, participate and have fellowship through this incredible medium.

So what does this mean for our churches when community is not even defined the way it was 10 or 15 years ago? It changes us. It changes what it means when we read the Bible. For example in the gospel lesson for July 11, the lawyer asks Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Good question. Who is our neighbor? If our community can be worldwide at the touch of a button, who is our neighbor?

I love what I am learning about technology in this class, but it is sure making me think about things differently!

Common Ground

My parents are techy for their age. My mom is on Facebook. They can e-mail, and they have an iPod touch for checking weather, sports scores and newspaper stories. My in-laws just got their first computer. Even thought they are from the same generation, there was a big gap between them. When I would leave for classes at seminary, I would have to type up the schedule for my kids and print it out for my father-in-law since he's my backup kid-runner. Now that he has a computer, I just e-mail him the schedule and he has it. I posted a video of my son at his last guitar jam, and I was able to share it with all the grandparents. We all now have that common media language and can talk on common ground.

This summer I am taking three classes -- Christology, Aging in Ministry and this Media in Christian Education class. This cartoon made them all come together. As I was reading for my Aging final paper, the article was talking about how quickly the world is changing now. Only 100 years ago, each generation could generally understand the previous generation and what they had lived through. Today, however, life changes so fast that the gap from generation to generation is larger than ever. Seeing the gap between my fairly-techy parents and my newly-techy in-laws makes me think that with technology the gap between the old and the young could be even wider than ever.

Given these fast-growing gaps, where do we find the common ground to allow us to be a Christian community? How can we understand each other when the gaps are so large? In Mary Hess's book Engaging Technology in Theological Education, she reminds us that when working with technology, we need to ask "How is God revealing Godself within this medium, and how are we opening ourselves up to that revelation or blinding ourselves to its possibility?" (p. 31)

I also think these same questions can be asked to help us bridge the gaps in our Christian communities. We can ask these questions about anyone who is on the other side of the gap from us. How is God revealing Godself within that person? How are we opening ourselves up to that revelation or are we blinding ourselves to its possibility? By finding how God is working on the other side of the gap, we can find that common ground and strengthen our Christian community.

My learning goal for this class is to explore some ways that media and technology can be used to encourage learning communities. This fits under goal 1e familiar with a variety of ways of supporting, facilitating and trouble-shooting learning communities.

This past year, my partner pastor and I led a group on a Walk Through the New Testament where we had a group of people reading New Testament texts daily from January through the end of May. If they followed the plan, they would have read the entire New Testament in that timeframe. As we led the class, we found that we needed several ways of including people in the process. As a result, we had a Facebook page, we put the handouts on the church webpage, we met face-to-face every other week for question-and-answer, and we participated in the online webcast of Dr. Matthew Skinner’s Walk Through the New Testament class. Different members took part in the different learning communities, and some members chose to just follow the plan on their own without any outside support from us.

I would like to explore the how technology can open up new ways for the members to engage in learning communities in the church.

Cool blogs!

Hey, class!

Here are a couple of blogs that I read that are pretty cool. The first is for those of us who are visual learners called Visual Theology.

The other is for those who like writers who are a little different called Unorthodoxology.

Enjoy!

Broken Fall

We can go through this life in many ways. Some of us are more cautious -- watching and observing and checking things out before jumping in. Some of us jump first and then check things out later. Some of us are somewhere on a scale that ranges from one end to the other. But no matter what, we're all trying to figure our way through without the benefit of previous experience. There are no "do overs." It's just this one life that we are falling through. Maybe a little like Alice in Wonderland when she falls into the hole under the big tree. We don't really know what's coming at us or when we might land or where. For me, that fall is sometimes scary, sometimes exciting, sometimes confusing, and sometimes painful. The only thing that can break my fall is God. God's saving grace is what breaks my fall through this otherwise crazy world, and keeps me from crashing. God is always at work in my life, but often I don't remember to look for it.