By Len Hjalmarson

“WEBLOGGING is an inconclusive act – which is different from having no conclusions or firm conclusions,” wrote Jay Rosen in October of 2003.

He continued: “Doc Searls said something important in his weblog the other day. He spoke of three approaches:

“One is the ‘cool’ approach of traditional journalism . . . Another is the ‘hot’ approach of talk radio, which has since expanded to TV sports networks and now Fox TV.

“The third is the engaged approach of weblogging. What we’re doing here may be partisan in many cases, but it is also inconclusive.”

Rosen comments that the best webloggers are animated by their opinions, but not automated by them. They manage this not because they are smarter or cooler than others, but because they’re using a nimble modern tool, the weblog, the way it wants to be used. Bloggers favour a style of expression which is interactive with other weblogs and other things on the web.

Engaged with opinion

Searls calls it the engaged approach. It incorporates a sophisticated system of checks and balances via interactive links and quotes, an online ‘show and tell.’

So while a good weblogger is constantly engaged with opinion, he doesn’t set his views in concrete – because the next comment or link could not only change his mind, it could add wiring, add memory.

This can force a blogger to restate her views, to see if they survive the new understanding. For the writers, and for the readers, “blogging is about making and changing minds.”

Rosen writes that, “weblogs are good for making statements, big and small. But they also force re-statement. Yes, they’re opinion forming. But they are equally good at unforming opinion, breaking it down, stretching it out, re-building it around new stuff. Come to some conclusions? Put them in your weblog, man – but just remember: it doesn’t want to conclude.”

By inviting others into conversation, blogging is conversational and more: it can become a communal exploration. It can become a process of shared listening, and shared discovery, a communal journey to unknown places, an invitation into the borders around mystery. If the journey lasts long enough, the conversation partners become friends, and find themselves in an emerging story.

Granted, that story may be around golden retrievers, 308 rifles, or 28–foot sailboats. But it may equally likely be around God’s kingdom, postmodern leadership, and missional living.

One fascinating aspect of blogging is that it has become for me, and for others, another venue for spiritual formation.

Spiritual journey

Blogging is an enormously powerful venue for sharing a spiritual journey. I have included images, video, music, text and a variety of combinations of these things on my blog. I have shared stories, feelings, ideas, dreams – and even some pain and frustration. Blogging is one of the incarnational efforts I have made in my spiritual life. To me, it is sacramental, a pointing beyond the text to an unseen world.

It is profoundly, as Rosen argues, an inconclusive act – and distinctly so, in comparison to something like a sermon. That is perhaps both the strength and the weakness of blogging.

It is a strength, in that an unfinished story is invitational. No one wants to join a conversation whose conclusion is already known. Genuine conversation always includes an element of serendipity; it is a shared pilgrimage.

As Lao Tzu writes, “a good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.” The destination is mutually shaped by the participants as they travel together.

In this there is a resonance with all faith journeys. Abraham went out, “not knowing where he was going.” For the sake of a city they had not seen, the heroes of faith surrendered their lives to the God of creation. Certitude, it turns out, is not only a condition of modernity, but also highly overrated.

At the same time, writing is a powerful tool for continuing conversion. As Augustine wrote, “I am the sort of a man who writes because he has made progress, and who makes progress by writing.” (Epistle 143:2-3) Elsewhere, Vinson Synan said: “Experience is important, but it’s what you write down that affects future generations.”

Discernment

Blogging, where it continues around a particular theme over an extended period of time, can become more than merely ‘inconclusive.’ It can become a communal hermeneutic, an act of shared discernment. Scholars discovered long ago that participation in a journalistic community was a good method for advancing understanding.

Both books and journals have been tools for a learning conversation. One writer states a thesis and makes his argument, and other thinkers respond, whether in academic journals or in print.

Bloggers have taken this tool to new heights (and sometimes lows), and invited others along for the ride. The result has often been dramatic, and journal articles and books have been a spinoff.

But what interests me more fundamentally is the Reformation dynamic present in blogging. The Reformation heralded a new understanding of the priesthood of believers. While the mainline Reformers taught this truth, the Radical Reformers practiced it.

The first Reformation was empowered by new media. The new Reformation is similarly empowered, and more highly participatory than any theologian could have anticipated. The impact on current theology and ecclesial practice is only beginning to be felt. There are many fundamental loci for that impact. One of them is our understanding of authority, and the second is our conception of leadership.

Text is a wonderful invention, but it has profound limitations. Walter Ong comments that written words are residue: “When an often told story is not actually being told, all that exists of it is the potential in certain human beings to tell it.”  

Continue article >>

Word and event

The Hebrew word for ‘word’ is dabar; it means both word and event. Only what unites mind and heart, word and spirit, is incarnational. What is born of the Spirit among God’s people in the Holy Imagination may then take flesh.

It comforts us to believe we are in control, with the truth in our hands. Increasingly, we are recognizing the finitude and contingency of our knowledge.

Thankfully, we are embracing other means of knowing, something closer to a biblical idea – where aletheia, the Greek word for truth, indicates a covenant relationship, the ‘unveiling’ of a bride before her groom.

Carl Raschke boldly calls us to repentance: “Back to the Word – not as a logical construct, but as the living power and presence, as the testament of the One who gave his life for us!”  

One of the insights of postmodernity is that when we use certain lenses to view reality, the lenses themselves become part of our seeing. Rose coloured glasses add a certain tint to every vista. The philosophical discourse of propositions is a rose coloured glass which distorts and objectifies God and his gospel.

We need to move from a view of scripture as objective or propositional truth to scripture as vocative: it is the story of God’s self-revelation in history, the story of his covenant faithfulness, and his voice to us, calling for a faithful response.

Subversive

Blogging has other subversive tendencies. Until recently we all knelt at the altar of the professional leader. In the modern world, knowledge was power. The man behind the podium with the amplified voice was its ultimate expression.

With the fall of the idols of science, we no longer slavishly trust the expert. Authority is increasingly tied to relationship: conversation, exchange, service and time.

But if blogging and content creation subvert traditional views of authority, then we are all experts.

Giving people a voice is a dangerous thing. Eventually they come to see their opinions are as valid as everyone else’s.

Thankfully, they’re mostly right; when they’re not, they quickly discover it.

When we can find solid research online, which contradicts the preacher, we have gained a new level of freedom. When we can discuss our discoveries with a group of other seekers, ‘authority’ has shifted to an interpretive community.

Or has it? If I, the individual knower, am making a choice from a number of options as to what I believe, aren’t I dangerously close to solipsism? Isn’t this the ultimate in individual subjectivity? It could be.

But in practice, it doesn’t seem to work that way. Instead, we make sense of what we believe through a variety of conversations in a community – ‘real’ or virtual – of pilgrims on a similar journey.  

We have a need to belong. That need, and a call from the Spirit, should connect us covenantally with others on this journey. The ‘virtual’ world opens new possibilities for connection. That is good, because whole persons are only formed in community.

Leadership

Could it be leadership is less about making decisions or setting direction than about participating in a communal process? Could it be leadership is less about individual knowers and actors than about communal discernment? In his view of leadership as process, Dwight Friesen observed:  

“Leadership has less to do with the clarity of vision, and much more do to with the quality of conversation. How one fosters conversation is everything: bringing self to the table, creating open space . . . surrendering the need to be right, etc. Hidden agendas, unstated vision, passive/aggressive needs to control, and rigid categories are just a few of the many ills ready to subvert [a learning] conversation.”

If, as Niklas Lehman asserts, “community is a network of conversations,” and if leadership is about conversation, then leadership is a communal process which is lodged in converging conversations. Leadership is about change.

In our post-Industrial and rapidly shifting Western contexts, this requires a range of players with a variety of skills. The key players in the process are labeled ‘boundary crossers,’ those who can initiate and sustain partnerships across traditional boundaries. Those partnerships are sustained, of course, by conversation and shared purpose.

We desperately need to recover an understanding of leadership as a fundamentally spiritual vocation. We need to move beyond command and control, and hierarchical conceptions, to theories and practice which embrace models of distributed knowledge and the complexity of adaptive systems.

Failure to make this shift will only prolong the pain of transition in our communities.

But the shift itself is unlikely to happen apart from the creation of environments where life itself is understood as a spiritual vocation: that is, the recovery of faithful communities of Jesus apprentices.

In their thinking about communal transformation and the process of leadership, Senge, Jaworski, Flowers and Scharmer write in Presence that a new way forward will emerge from building several integrated capacities:

“A new capacity for observing that no longer fragments the observer from what is observed; a new capacity for stillness that no longer fragments who we really are from what’s emerging; a new capacity for creating alternative realities that no longer fragments the wisdom of the head, heart and hand; a new capacity for cooperation that harnesses the intelligence and spirit of all people, at all levels.”

Len Hjalmarson is a Kelowna writer and software developer. More of his writings can be found at: NextReformation.com.

February 2008