My posts on Church 2.0 have already brought some interesting responses. Nick Arauz gave me permission to post his email query about Church 2.0, and my response:

Hi Dan,

I’m a UU in Brooklyn. I’m just starting work on a web strategy for the UU church here, and I stumbled upon your recent blog posting about church 2.0.

I’ve got a background in innovation strategy and design, with a heavy emphasis on integral business practice, social media, and participation-driven, co-authored brand development, and naturally I’m quite interested in social change and political action as well. I’m hoping to bring a lot of my experience into the new web site we are developing for the UU church here, and I’m curious if you’ve started on any of the things you mention in your post.

I’ve been looking for examples of spiritually-oriented websites that do a good job with this. I’ve found a lot of Unitarian Blogs, but not so many churches that really put it all together ( “Church 2.0” to use your phrase). I’ve been very interested in using the best of web 2.0 (RSS, Blogs, Podcasts, Vlogs, mobile, etc) to make the UU experience a more natural fit with the way many younger UU’s communicate and use all the other media in their life.

I’d love to connect with you sometime and discuss it a bit. Perhaps there are resources or insights we can share to make this more than a local happening.

best regards,

Nick A

To which I responded:

Dear Nick,

The only congregational Web site I know of that is actually doing a little of this is that of the Church of the Larger Fellowship (CLF) [whose Web site appears to be down this weekend], but CLF is an online- and mail-based church to begin with — they have to do this kind of thing. And even they don’t do nearly as much as they should (I used to be on their board, and was their interim religious educator in 2002-2003, and I feel that only now are they doing some of what they should have been doing back then). The young adult branch of CLF, Church of the Younger Fellowship (CYF), does a lot more.

A few of the larger Unitarian Universalist congregations have good podcasts, etc. — but so far the ones I know do it as a lower-priority adjunct to their face-to-face church. They are not seeing the Web as another entry point to their churches, nor are they working towards user-generated content such as comments, nor are they allowing user-organized content. Several UU ministers and some DREs are doing Web 2.0 via blogging, but as far as I know no minister’s or DRE’s blog is officially recognized (let alone sanctioned) by their congregation.

Prairie Star District has based their district Web site on a wiki platform. All district leadership get passwords, and can contribute. That’s getting closer to what I’m interested in.

The UU institutions that are making use of the Web in the most interesting ways are not typical face-to-face congregations. Face-to-face congregations don’t yet see what’s in it for them, and often the leadership cadre of face-to-face congregations is dominated by people who don’t even know how to use Web 2.0, let alone apply that same model to church. On top of all this, our face-to-face congregations are notoriously conservative in their institutional methodology.

I think part of the problem here is that we are entering uncharted territory. I haven’t found many spiritually-oriented Web sites that do any of this well. What I think has to happen is that some of us simply have to begin experimenting with Church 2.0 without asking for permission and without looking for deminational support, working outside and around existing leadership structures and their methodological conservatism. Church 2.0 is going to have to be D-I-Y “open-source church,” not limited to proprietary, strictly controlled, old-fashioned institutional architectures. That doesn’t mean we won’t have structure to what we do — we will — but it will be based on a different kind of architecture.

So what we need to do right now is to simply start doing Church 2.0, or whatever you want to call it, and exchange indeas and information with others who are doing it.

Here’s what I’m doing right now:

• My blog, obviously. My blog is really my own personal project, but I do find that people in my congregation, and quite a few visitors, read it. It’s impacting my congregation already.
• Working on the logistics of distributing audio recordings of sermons. Distribution is never as simple as just doing podcasts — for us, distribution is going to have to include podcasting, standard downloads, and audio CDs.
• Maintaining and constantly revising our church Web site with careful reference to Web stats; i.e., making sure we’re giving visitors to our Web site what they want. (By the way, traffic at our church Web site has quadrupled in the past 16 months.)
• Training committee chairs and event planners to use our online church calendar more effectively (a big part of Church 2.0 is going to be training existing membership in new techniques).

Near term projects will probably include a church leadership blog, where Board and committees can post meetings notes, and get comments.

Long term projects may include live audio and/or video streaming of worship services; interactive study sessions where the minister asks for input into the sermon (these could happen online and/or face-to-face); a church governance and history wiki that could help orient newcomers; some kind of online social networking.

What are you planning, or already implementing?

Oh, and can I put your email message on my blog, along with this response? — the more we keep this an open conversation, the better.

Cheers,
Dan

Rev. Dan Harper
First Unitarian in New Bedford, Mass.
www.uunewbedford.org

(After I wrote the above reply, I went back and took another look at the Church of the Younger Fellowship Web site. I hadn’t checked it out since it first opened, and it has come a long way. They are already doing Church 2.0 in many ways — I especially like the member map — but like their parent organization, CLF, they lack much connection to face-to-face churches. In my vision, Church 2.0 operates more like MeetUp.com and craigslist.com — online, but place-based, too — whereas CYF and CLF are place-independent.)

So let’s open up the conversation. If there’s enough interest, maybe we can set up a Church 2.0 wiki to allow freer sharing of ideas (conceptual ideas, and proven ideas).

Participate in the Church 2.0 discussion on the Church 2.0 wiki! Update: Church 2.0 Wiki was taken down after a year — it never quite got critical mass of contributors.