Friday, April 20, 2007

Blogging and Ministry

I love Wired magazine. It is a great combination of culture and technology. This past issue had a good article about transparency, blogging and business. You can read it here.
Here is a blurb:

Radical forms of transparency are now the norm at startups - and even some Fortune 500 companies. It is a strange and abrupt reversal of corporate values. Not long ago, the only public statements a company ever made were professionally written press releases and the rare, stage-managed speech by the CEO. Now firms spill information in torrents, posting internal memos and strategy goals, letting everyone from the top dog to shop-floor workers blog publicly about what their firm is doing right - and wrong. Jonathan Schwartz, the CEO of Sun Microsystems, dishes company dirt and apologizes to startups he's accidentally screwed. Venture capitalists now demand that CEOs be fluent in blogspeak. In February, after JetBlue trapped passengers for hours in its storm-grounded planes and canceled 1,100 flights, CEO David Neeleman tried to deflect the blast of bad publicity by using YouTube to air his own blunt mea culpa. Microsoft, once a paragon of buttoned-down control, now posts uncensored internal videos - and encourages its engineers to blog freely about their projects (see page 140). The very process of developing ideas, products, and messages is changing - from musing about it in a room with your top people to throwing it out on the Web and asking the global smartmob for a little help. That's how this article was written: I've been blogging about it since I started, and some of the reader input I received is reproduced on these pages.

So I started thinking about ministry and transparency. Should churches be this transparent? Should pastors? Would this level of transparency hurt a church or help it?
Tell me what you think?

4 comments:

Reyes-Chow said...

David - Hey man, I too posted on this article. Not sure if it is THE same way, but clearly we have to be more transparent than we have in the past. Check out http://www.reyes-chow.com/2007/04/3_rules_of_the_.html

Unknown said...

Dave!

I just found out you have a blog this morning, how cool! Hope all is well.

My wife says you and Leslie talked to her last night, I think she's a bit bummed she's not out there with you guys. Hope you're having fun at PTS. Send my greetings to Shawn for me.

Jim

W. David Winner said...

thanks reyes-chow. I will check out your site.

I agree, we have to be more transparents, but in slight different way. As we say at my church "it's like the same but different."

W. David Winner said...

Jim

Thanks for posting on the site. We do miss Lori and you here at Princeton. It is not the same.

Small world to know that you know Shawn also. I will tell him you say hi.