I’ve made a few mentions of The Cluetrain Manifesto and allusions to The Cathedral and the Bazaar around here in the past, and my ears perk up whenever someone else mentions these in connection to lessons the church could learn.
Today I found The Cathedral the Bazaar and the Emerging Church and Open Source Church junk which pick up on these themes as well… and as previously noticed, Andrew Jones mentions Fred Peatross’ recent “Take-a-Clue” Mod Church Manifesto.
The other day we hired a new guy in our office, started him to work yesterday. He’d been pouring over our corporate website and gleaning what he could, and as a result — today I found him at lunchtime with The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual and when I suggested he also look at The Cathedral & the Bazaar, he said he had it at home and was reading it. Eeexcelleeennntt…. (Monty Burns style, of course).
Sorta cool how this seems to be popping up more often these days… and more and more people are connecting insights from these two books with the way we practice church. Which is as it should be…. the connecting, I mean.
You’d also find “Joy at Work” (by Dennis Bakke) to fit along those lines, I believe. Shortly after reading it, I realized it was time to pursue something different in regards to church. Although Bakke is writing for business, he is a Christian and does include a section on church. I found his concepts of how the church often has a hierarchy of ministry embedded in it (at the top missionaries, then pastors, a little further down is lay ministry in the church but anything you do outside the church is seen as having little value for the kingdom) to be right on the money, and it made me think about how to start valuing getting out in the world instead of always having to come back to the church building.
I started reading “Cluetrain” yesterday. My own thoughts have been about how to apply this to government – the final frontier, I think.