Month: September 2010

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Opening up the church


I’ve talked previously about how we are trying to do for churches what facebook is trying to do for the world. One idea I want to investigate into is how we can open up the church in the same way. The important words that I want to investigate into here is that I want to dilute the control of the church whilst maintain authority. Like everything else, we want to do this through experimentation and case studies so that this view is encouraged and not forced.

Here is an example of how the church can possibly benefit from this using technology and a fairly controversial example – Homosexuality.

The story

I attended a church that was more conservative on the issue of homosexuality. They believe that the biblical text suggests that homosexuality is a sinful act that ought not be practised. Regardless of your personal opinion on the matter I think this is a clear example of where authority is important. The pulpit is not supposed to be a place for random arbitrary opinions, it is not like the comments section of a newspaper. Authority is not about control but it is about trust. If someone is in a position of authority in the church they can be challenged in the same way that the Apostle Peter was challenged by Paul over the issue of eating with gentiles. However, someone in authority is trusted to treat their position with respect and know that people trust them. So in this conservative church, whenever someone in authority preached about homosexuality and the bible, it tended to be negative. I think this is right. I think you can disagree with that whole church and suggest reasons why homosexuality is o.k. But for the church that has made its stance it makes sense for the preachers to “tow the party line”.

However, one person from the church told me that they were proud that they had never let a gay person in their house. Now this person wasn’t particularly horrible and with all the controversy and media attention I personally think it understandable how this person reached their position. Unfortunately, this is not the position the church would want to encourage (this is important, what is interesting here is not that I agree or disagree, or really what you the reader thinks, it is interesting because even this church would not agree with their attitude). But isn’t this to be expected if homosexuality is talked about in a negative light all the time? Even saying “They are sinners but we should love them” isn’t a positive attitude to have to an actual person (It can be but isn’t inherently in that sentence).

Also at this church was someone who worked in the fashion industry. Many of this guy’s colleagues were gay. In a conservative church environment it was interesting hearing this guy’s opinion on the topic of homosexuality. It was essentially that he quite liked his gay colleagues and specifically it was much easier being a Christian in this work environment compared to say a London banking job heavily involved with alcohol and macho-ism. What is interesting here is by speaking to this friend I could get an insight into his attitude towards a bunch of people. His statements were neither agreeing nor disagreeing with all the controversial issues of homosexuality. They weren’t statements of doctrine on gay bishops nor attitudes towards policy regarding gay marriages. They were simply one human being’s attitude towards another and I think these attitudes are invaluable. (Both of them, the more homophobic christian brother and the more accepting, they are both part of the church here).

Now, if you disagree with the authority in this case. (The doctrine of homosexuality this church excepts) then this story won’t go far.  You would still have to go through the normal channels of arguing about doctrine, campaigning in church communities, writing articles, etc. However, this story highlights something I think is important. The reality is that you can leave authority exactly where it is. Good Doctrine will help but it will not ultimately change your attitude. Understanding that Racism is wrong and that all people are created in God’s eyes will not fully stop you crossing the road when you see a hooded black teenager. The reality is you need to interact with people, you need to spend time with gay people or black people to truly influence your attitude to them.

Authority can stay where it is. We need something more, we need something from the Christians who aren’t necessarily in authority. This is what impacts the church today anyway and will continue to. We need to encourage this and help people connect with it and in doing so we will open up control. If I am able to connect with more people in the church on an issue such as racism or homosexuality, then the person in the pulpit will still have authority, but now less control over exactly what I think. Fortunately for us the church already has a method of this, anglicans like to call it “the peace”.

On-line testimonies – blogs

Now the important thing about this company is that we are not creating new churches. We are merely facilitating and encouraging the good things that are already there. In the church life we already have something that moves complete control from the leaders of the church but allows the leader authority – that is testimony. If at a baptism someone stands up and explains their testimony and they tell you something scripture told them, it is normal in the church to enjoy this whilst not believing this person to be an authority on the subject. Similarly when Christian books are read about people’s lives they are read in a different manner to a book of theology or doctrine. In fact one way of wording “testimonies” is just “getting to know the impact of God on the lives of Christians around you” and probably the church would have benefited from the two people in my story just sitting down and chatting about their lives. This is great.

However, how do you personally meet up and get to know about the lives of everyone? Even if your church only has 50-100 people let alone 900 it gets difficult. Some churches have tried having “testimony” sections in the service for maybe 10 minutes where christians in the church just tell stories about what God has done in their lives that week. This is quite cool but is also daunting and sometimes there are particular stories you just don’t care about.

So a simple way to do this is to use blogs! If we could get a church of say 100 people and manage to get every person to blog maybe once a year. That is 100 awesome testimonies about their lives and God that I would have access to. Secondly, I had a friend who wanted to go into fashion design and another who wanted to become a model. How cool would it have been if they had known there was an old, experienced Christian working in that industry in their own church they could have spoken to? So here are some conclusions from this:

  • Fellowship. We can all read blogs of well-written Christians online and using wordpress.com! The tribes on-line is about connecting the thoughts and eventually the people within the church to each other.
  • Accesibility – We need to develop ways to make it incredibly easy for anyone to blog. We could try a bunch of things, intergrating blogs with e-mail, automatically giving blogs to everyone who signs up, have pieces of paper that people can write out and submit like they might do anyway if they were going to give their testimony during a service.  We don’t need an army of regular bloggers, but we want as many individual people blogging. Its not the number of articles but the number of people that provide diversity.
  • Relevance – We then need to develop clever methods of making it really easy to connect people. WordPress.com does this tremendously well. Depending on my categories and tags I can sometimes get total strangers reading this, we need to find out how to do this within the church. Maybe my fashion friend would have tagged his post? Then maybe other modelling friends would have tagged their profile with being interested in fashion and things would have popped up?
  • Importance – We need to test and investigate this with case studies. We need to find real life solutions to real life problems and examples of them rather then the more theoretical post I’ve written today. Once we have these stories of how the web actually did connect the fashion designers to those in the industry and how that went, then we will be able to show the church why blogging just once or twice in your life time is worthwhile.
  • Same Authority – diluted control – These blogs will never be the authoritative opinion of the leadership in the church. This does not dilute authority. But the blogs will remove some control. The leader of the church will have less control over the total image of the church because the blogs will represent the genuine thoughts of the individuals that make up that church. Some will be scared of this. Well with our software if you’re scared you just turn off “multiple blogs” and it is fine! But hopefully once our wiki gets going we will have a lot of stories of why it is worth the risk.
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Remember the artilleryman


In the book by HG Wells, War of the Worlds, the world is conquered by Martians with superior scientific technology that then proceed to eat humans. The protagonist, whilst wandering around fairly aimlessly stumbles across an artilleryman who he had met earlier. This man is full of hope and vision and explains his solution to the Martians. He is going to get a few people to dig a tunnel that will then extend to a series of caverns where humans could live. He talks about how families could move down there to repopulate humankind, how they would have cities and then conduct research to build their own heat rays and in the future rise up against the Martians.

However, it turns out that in a week of digging this artilleryman had dug a hole that would have taken the protagonist less than a day to dig. The man is so happy with his work he starts drinking and playing cards. This guy is a visionary. He is also an idiot with no sense of what it takes to carry out the vision. I am the artilleryman!

I like ideas and I like talking about all the fantastic ways the church can move to better itself and the world. I’m usually quite good at telling other people about my ideas and getting them briefly excited and sometimes I’m even right about these things. However, it is important to realise my limitations. I’m a dreamer and I live in the clouds, I need to surround myself with people who live on planet earth.

This means 2 things. Firstly, it means it is incredibly important that I look to my peers, Andrew and Rob. Unfortunately, Rob is a bit of a dreamer too, just a slightly more grounded dreamer. Andrew Belcher on the other hand is a very practical person. Secondly it means that we as a team of people need to look to the wider community. Dreamers don’t last long in the open source community. These communities are described as “Do-ocracies” where people who DO things have power and therefore the projects that succeed, succeed because someone has taken the time to actually write code. It doesn’t matter how wonderful the idea sounds nor how much support it has. If no one does anything nothing is done! This is one reason why I am trying to talk my idea down a bit. I’m blogging about it but not announcing it in the real world until we have something of substance to talk about.

A dream of the future church

There is an area where my skills are important. The reality is that we are going to be working with “the church” as in the whole global entity and the church is simply not perfect. In fact there are many Christians who lament about how it is sometimes harder to work with other Christians then non-Christians. Personally I have found it at times difficult to navigate the labyrinth of politics and culture in the church and sometimes I leave with a sour taste in my mouth.

The important thing, I think, is this. This company’s aim is not just to create a product and certainly not just to make money or just to save the church money. It is to influence the church. I believe that, in the same way Facebook and Google are trying to encourage a more open society and attacking some aspects of privacy. I believe the church will benefit from being more open. Sometimes we may be right about these things and sometimes we may be wrong. What is important is that although we are trying to influence the church for the better (and ultimately serve the church). We will NOT be making the church “Good”. That is not our job, the guy who has the job (God) is on it and we know he WILL succeed. This means that throughout our involvement with the church some of it will be difficult, some people in the church might not be very nice and sometimes we might get hurt or burnt out.

But this is just what the Gospel is all about! The beauty is that God uses terrible people to make the world awesome with it. The beauty of that is that it means I can take part in God’s plan for the world. When we do work with the tribes online, it might be sad that the church isn’t perfect. But how awesome will it be if God uses even the 3 of us to be a tiny part of his plan to totally complete his church?

The vision and the dream is that our interactions with the church will be joyful!

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The different phases of the tribes online


After a conversation with Rob Mumford, I thought I’d post a kind of action plan of how our company will grow. This is just a rough plan of attack at the different areas of the church world we’ll go for. I’ll organise this into Phases and see if my words stick! In an interview with the creator of Drupal, Dries at Drupal Radar talked about the purpose of Content Management Systems like Drupal is to eradicate the need for web developers. There used to be a time when a web developer needed to hand-code everything in HTML, Drupal means for many websites you don’t need a developer. With Drupal Gardens they aim to remove the need of a designer! We’re following in this theme and so this is our plan to eradicate the need for church website developers! (sort of!)

  • Phase 1 – Aim for individual churches – In order to end them we have to join them. We’ll spend some time acting like a normal (ish) church website developer. In this phase, we will target a few individual churches and build a website for them in a much more intimate manner. We’re looking for churches who want a website that is either free or low cost but where they will spend quite a bit of time working with us. During this phase we will work with experimental ideas to solve problems and test it with members of that church and we’ll build case studies and train them in using the website. Finally we’ll build the website using the software that we will eventually release and support. By the end we’ll have a Drupal distribution for Churches, with documentation of how to use the website technically and practically (church models) and the tools for others to help.
  • Phase 2- Aim for Church Website Developers – To eradicate the need for church website developers we will need church website developers to help us! Once we have a basic Church install profile to work on and release we’ll try and advertise to others to get people using and maybe even developing for it. We’ll try and attract the more geeky members of the Church community to help us. This phase will mainly take place on Drupal.org. Dropcrm.org is an example of how we’d do this. We’ll have a website with a small forum and some pages detailing our aims but actually all of this will point to a project page and group on drupal.org. We’ll work with all of Drupal’s issues queues, File repositories and discussion tools. At this stage there will hopefully be no difference between the tribes online people and just random developers.
  • Phase 3- Aim for the Church Innovators – On our website we’ll build a wiki as I’ve said before. The hope is to build a website to bring innovators from the church to us. These innovators just need to have ideas, they won’t need technical skills but will just have things about the church they want changed and the ideas of how to change it. This phase can only happen when the wiki is built and there are a pool of developers to implement their ideas. One big thing we’ll need from these people is a set of case studies of problems in communication in their church. Eventually this work will be used to collaboratively produce books and resources.
  • Phase 4 – The masses – This is the phase that brings in money! Once we have software that churches are actually using, once problems are actually being solved and once we have the software to host hundreds if not thousands of websites similarly to http://www.drupalgardens.com, we’ll release the company side of things. We’ll start advertising at places such as the Christian Resource Exhibition and attract loads of churches to host on our servers. Here, the aim is to make it so a church can sign up on our site, and be up and running with almost no involvement with us (The church website developers will be ending here) so that each extra church doesn’t cost much extra to host. The aim is to cover our huge fixed costs. We’ll probably need about 300 churches before we can even begin to be sustainable.
  • Phase 5- We aim for rival church hosting companies and the world! – At this stage our tasks can be complete. Our software will be so open anyone could steal it. If our main company makes enough money to fund at least 4 full-time developers, it will be successful.  Our hope is the invisible hand of the market will not let us continue making money for long, eventually others will want some! So if we get good enough, if our software is as awesome as it needs to be. We’ll attract rival church website hosting companies to download and use all our software totally for free! However, it will be in their best interest to keep the software alive if we’re around or maybe keep us (the individual people) alive if they use our talent! So although we’ll compete in the market of church website hosting, we’ll collaborate on the software as we’ll all benefit from making the software great. At this point we can take over the world! (At least the church website world). The church will have a piece of software that allows them to make website whilst giving them the extra dynamic features for free and a huge number of people to support them.

I’ve written stuff like this before and probably I’ll continue. My hope is to build a company structure that people other then myself can understand. (Work away from me rob and andrew phoning each other all the time… even if its fun to hear about Andrew’s olive woes)

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What I am to! [update] and church website hosting


Things have totally changed again. I have now applied to do a Masters of Enterprise in Business at the Manchester school of business. The online material is not that great at describing it. It is a research Masters where Masters of Enterprise is the prefix, MEnt (similar to Mphys or Bsc). The degree itself is a generic business degree so the core modules will help me learn things such as marketing, setting up a business and dealing with finance. I then get to pick courses in my “Subject Area” which will be something vaguely IT based that I pick. I have to produce 2 dissertations, one of them focuses on the business side of my idea and the other on the subject side of my idea. I don’t exactly know what this means! However I think it will be something like a report on the marketability of the idea whilst the subject dissertation outlines some area of research into the idea itself.

The hope is then once I have finished this degree I’ll be able to bring back the knowledge into The Tribes Online. We’re working on things to some degree this year but it means when Rob is out of university we can start building things properly! Also I hope to meet lots of interesting people on this course to help me get connected to Entrepreneurs in Manchester. Unfortunately this also means I’m dropping back to work at Heidmar throughout the holidays.

Aegir and our hosting plans

We’ve been playing around with a development server in my house. For the less technically minded readers you may not find this interesting but I think its well cool! I’ve spent about 6 months getting this set up (and failing) due to my lack of understanding how linux works but we’ve finally set up a box with Aegir installed. It is an incredibly cool piece of software that allows us to host loads of drupal sites using one interface. If I want to set up a new church website, instead of going through all the normal drupal settings I just click “create new site” enter a few settings and everything is set up automatically. So here are some things I’m excited about:

  • Our business model will require us to have a huge number of customers (over 300) before we make enough money to sustain us at all, let alone grow. Therefore we need to make sure all our variable costs are as low as possible. We need to make sure that the process of Church is interest => Church site set up and money paid is as small as possible. This will allow us to divert our resources into building the fantastic fixed cost that is the free product.
  • Drupal Gardens is an awesome example of a company doing what we want to do for churches. (However, the creator of Drupal works for this company so its not something we’ll be able to do easily alone! They are giving away free sites during beta so you can get a free one now and try it out. Its very easy).
  • Drush – Aegir works with drush. This allows us to administer drupal sites through a Command Line Interface (CLI). Hopefully it means we won’t need to administer any ftp accounts. All modules and install profiles can be downloaded using drush and using SSH to remotely access the command line.
  • Drupal Projects- If we sign up for a Drupal project on drupal.org we’ll be able to do pretty much all of our development on that website. They offer everything we need, issue queues, groups to discuss ideas, a file repository so people can work on things remotely and submit patches. This means our development process will probably be able to happen entirely online. As a company we’ll discuss most our things on the issue queue and all the code will be submitted to a repository, and then automatically pulled from the repository to our server where our customers will benefit from it.

Why is this cool?

This means we can work with an entirely open development workflow. Yes, we will be a software company aiming to make money but even the bleeding edge stuff we’ll be working on will be downloadable. All our servers that make us money will use that code using tools that are available to everyone, we are literally just pulling an install profile from an online server. Anyone could do this. This means it will be almost as easy for another church to get involved in the development of our software as it is for us to get involved! (also it will be easy to steal everything we do :P).

What is stopping us?

In order for this to work, me andrew and rob need to stop using our mouths. Unfortunately the voice and the brain is a very inefficient collaboration tool. Every conversation I memorise is locked in the minds of the original people who had it and cannot easily be shared. Every time we meet up, skype or talk over the phone we are dis-empowering future collaborators. The thing is, we like talking, its really fun. Recently I found out that Andrew was sad because his olives went mouldy. Things like that are what bring people together and we as a company need also be friends for it to work. But things that make us friends hurt us as a open-source company because they make it harder for others to get involved.

This will just have to be something we work on and try to do well. I do not plan to have this problem solved right away. But in a years time I hope we are part of the way and in 2 years time if we are still deciding software issues over the phone I will have failed.