At our last cluster meeting before the summer break it was my turn to present and so I facilitated a discussion in our cluster about what they want from CRHM and the denomination. What would be helpful? What would the dream regional ministry team/CRHM look like to them. It was a good conversation I thought.

Part of what I heard that was significant from them were a few complaints or unfulfilled wishes:

1. “I feel like there are resources up there that could be useful but I can’t find them
2. I that there may be help but I don’t even know about it until its too late.”

Now I know these guys and I know that networks take people on both sides to be active and that part of the lack they are voicing is because we all really want everything we want or need to plunk into our laps before we even know we need it, but to me it highlights the catch 22 of our information age. When information is omni-available (which it nearly is) most information failures are really filter failures. Information isn’t really just stuff and we need more of it (like we think about money), we need the right stuff at the right time and we ourselves need to be in a position to hear (let him who has ears to hear…).

Dominant in the industrial age has been the metaphor of the warehouse. A warehouse accumulates assets, puts them on shelves or in cubicles in some arrangement that facilitates the curation of those assets. Libraries are warehouses of books that hold information and all of the accouterments of libraries are supposed to help the seeker find what they are looking for which is what they think they need for a particular thing.

As Google makes all words searchable increasingly people are realizing that the problem is no longer really a situation of access, it is in ourselves. We don’t know what to look for. We don’t even really know what we need. What we discover is the difference between information and wisdom. Machines can now puke information into screens, tablets, phones and paper, but wisdom is needed to make things happen.

If you look at a tool like Twitter, or the re-working of a tool like Digg, you begin to see that the tech folks have figured out some of the limits of information management and that only people are capable of wisdom. You follow someone on Twitter, you don’t subscribe to or follow Google, you couldn’t.

Why do I value my CRC kin? A denomination is really an extended filter. There are many smart church guys out there writing lots of things that can be read for profit, but there is something about my kin that is shaped like me and therefore adds value to the filter. Every family in a sense has its own language because they have their own shared history which is what gives words their meaning and their resonance and their power.

The whole “resourcing” model I think is predicated more on a warehouse metaphor than a network metaphor and for that reason I think increasingly loses value in a diverse environment. We need better networks not bigger warehouses. I think denominations have in a way misunderstood their role. We are a tribe whose shared history is itself the valued filter that creates the value for the task of journeying together into the future. Because the change cycle is so fast networks need to move more quickly and filters more unobtrusively and denominations can do that. What denominations afford is a context for generative conversation because I am not simply a generic consumer seeking to access a box of a think called information from a shelf, but I have a part of the story of how we’ve gotten here, and my vocabulary has been shaped by all of the conversations that have gone on before, and a person can be known and know like no warehouse ever could.

The key thing CRHM offers to this larger ecosystem is setting the tables, creating the connections and space for the conversations, helping not the blank exchange of data but the exchange of life and stories in the far larger narrative of Jesus sharing not a bit of discrete information with us but rather is actual life.  Perhaps rather than imagining the agency as a warehouse that dispenses (I heard that metaphor plenty at the Network conversation a few summers ago, thankfully their cyber incarnation is less warehouse and more of an attempt at social network) better to imagine it as a church within its meeting house. There are large sessions going on in the main sanctuary, conversations happening in the alcoves, break out groups going on that are both planned and ad hoc, community being built as children are cared for and coffee made in the pots. The value is created in the shared living, not gathered in boxes or jugs and fed-exed to others.

The challenge is to multiply the connections, or possible connections without over taxing the participants. That too requires wisdom.

The moral of the story is, more network/family, less warehouse, dispensary.