Welcome to God’s Hackathon
Put on your hoodies, friends. We’re gonna rewrite that old DOS code that’s been running the Church for too long.
By Keith Anderson
NOVEMBER 6, 2014 | Hackers have been in the news lately for all the wrong reasons. Although hacking is often associated with breaking into digital accounts or websites to do various nefarious things—steal data, redirect money, post your nekkid photos all over Facebook, it can also refer to the way software programmers experiment and innovate. Programmers build better software platforms and new functionalities by participating in freewheeling “hackathons”— a mashup term for hack marathons, all nighters where their programmers are encouraged to try something new and innovate.
One of the world’s most famous hackers, of course, is Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook. If you’ve seen the not-a-documentary-movie, “The Social Network,” you might recall the tequila-fueled hackthons Zuckerberg sponsored to develop the platform and recruit emploees. Whether that depiction is entirely accurate or not, the company still holds regular hackathons. One of the few rules of the hackathon is that they are not allowed to do the same thing as their day job. They have to work on something entirely different and new. These hackathons have led to the development some of the most iconic elements on Facebook such as the like button, video, chat, and more.
Zuckerberg described Facebook’s hacker ethos in a letter accompanying Facebook’s IPO in 2012.
“The Hacker Way is an approach to building that involves continuous improvement and iteration. Hackers believe that something can always be better, and that nothing is ever complete. They just have to go fix it — often in the face of people who say it’s impossible or are content with the status quo. … Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works.” Zuckerberg has also described hacking as “being unafraid to break things, in order to make them better.”
Instead of debating for days whether a new idea is possible or what the best way to build something is, hackers would rather just prototype something and see what works.
The church today is in the midst of its own sort of hackathon—whether or not it wishes to be. Many of the programs and structures that served the church well in the post-World War II period have lost their resonance and impact. The old ministry hymnbook that worked so well in the mid-20th century, seems profoundly dissonant at the outset of the 21st. Ministry leaders are furiously rewriting their ministry scripts, hacking away at roles and responsibilities, liturgies and committees, and the sites and structures of worship. It reminds me of a painting by Paris Bordone of the child Jesus teaching in the Temple. As he holds forth, the elders and scribes around him are tearing up their old scrolls and recording Jesus’ new message, like so many hackers throwing out old code, making room for the new. Except now Jesus is wearing a hoodie and Keds.
Today’s ministry leaders, if they are not already, must view themselves as hackers, iterating, and in some case breaking things, in order to help the church move forward.
A Synod of Experimentation
Bishop Jim Hazelwood of the New England Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is pushing his 150+ congregations to become hackers. Earlier this year at their annual Synod Assembly, he stood before voting members from congregations across the synod in a white lab coat to explain how they needed to become a “synod of experimentation.” The assembly voted to approve a resolution that congregations should apportion 20% of their time and resources to experimentation, to trying something new. Hazelwood says,
“The idea behind this is we need to try things. Not everything is going to work. In fact, most everything won’t work. But we need to experiment with new ways of embodying the Gospel of being the Church of Christ in this world. As we all know, the culture has rapidly changed around us…. We cannot sit back and simply say, ‘Well, we’re going to do things the way we used to do them, the way we’ve always done them, and if they want to come, they can.’ Hello! That won’t work anymore.”
No doubt, more than one church body resolution has fallen by the wayside into obscurity, but this emphasis looks to have legs. Hazelwood himself is a creative and innovate pastor and now bishop, and is consistent and focused on his message for the need for experimentation. Among other things they have done to sustain this movement has been to create an active Facebook group where people can share how they are experimenting in their local context and learn from each other. The converation is happening. It’s generating movement.
The hack is on.
Lines That Are Meant to be Crossed
Long before the rise of digital social media, the French sociologist and theologian, Michel de Certeau, described this kind of ecclesiastical hacking in his 1973 essay entitled “How is Christianity Thinkable Today?”
Certeau reflects on the decline of the church, and he asks how can we imagine a vital, living, church today. He wonders where that vitality and life arises in a very different lived reality.
This is his answer: He says that one function of the church is to create a sense of place—what we experience as a sense of home—a building, a community, a sacred space with its own language and rituals. Like any “place” it has boundaries. Like the walls and doors of our building, our community has certain activities, certain behaviors, and members. It has limits.
But Certeau insists that the other function of the church is to transgress the very boundaries and sense of place that it creates, to transcend the limits that it sets, to cross the line the church itself has established.
In the simplest terms, the work of the Church is to draw lines that are made to be crossed.
Certeau says that there is “a coordination between necessary grounding points (languages, theories, institutions) and critical divergences (inventions, ‘prophetic’ actions, or displacements hidden within each Christian experience). But both these functions are equally necessary.”
Consider early church leaders, Peter and Paul. Peter was the grounding point —the chief disciple, based in Jerusalem, rooted where Jesus died and rose again, leading the original movement of Christianity within Judaism.
Paul was the critical divergence. Paul and his helpers took that same Gospel beyond the Holy Land, into the rest of the known world. Both Peter and Paul were necessary for the church to grow. But it’s not like that happened without considerable tension.
Certeau writes,
“The Christian movement is always the recognizing of a particular situation—and the necessity of a new step forward. There is always a necessary risk in being different. It requires simultaneously a place and a ‘further,’ a ‘now’ and an ‘afterwards,’ a ‘here’ and an ‘elsewhere.’”
The church sets limits and the church transgresses the very limits it sets, for the sake of its life, its vitality, the vitality of its people, and for the sake of the Gospel.
Certeau puts it this way: “Boundaries are the place of Christian work, and their displacements are the result of this work.”
These two works of creating place and transgressing its boundaries are usually seen in the church as being in conflict with one another. But in fact, they are complementary. They are both necessary. They are both rooted in the Gospel. They are the core of the hacking mentality upon which, I would argue, the Church depends.
Food Truck Church
A new ministry in St. Paul, Minnesota called Shobi’s Table, has been garnering attention for the way it is hacking church. Shobi’s Table is a food truck church, named after a little-known character in the book of second Samuel, Shobi, who provides food and shelter to King David’s men. Every Sunday volunteers cook food in a church kitchen, fill the truck, and then drive out into the communities where people are physically and spiritually hungry. They serve food from the truck and people are welcome to stay for a sidewalk worship service. Some people stay and some don’t. Pastor Margaret Kelly, who founded Shobi’s Table, says “I’m not bothered if people just want to eat and run and don’t want any religion. It’s a gift from Christ, but it’s not staring you in the face. This is a free lunch because Jesus is free.”
Though Shobi’s is a radically different way of doing and being church, it is deeply incarnation and profoundly eucharistic. It makes sense given they started this ministry on Maundy Thursday, the day the church commemorates Jesus’ Last Supper with the disciples. The Rev. Paul Erickson says of the productive contradiction at the heart of Shobi’s Table, “It’s not a traditional church. It doesn’t have a building. It will never have a building. But it will be a church in a traditional sense of the word.”
Shobi’s Table holds Certeau’s the sense of place — albeit one on wheels — and drives across the boundaries between church and the world, the well fed and the hungry.
This food truck church and other ministries like it—“Sacred Cocktails” in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood or “Holy Hikes” through the mid-Michigan woodlands—happen in both new and traditional contexts. These are places where Christianity and the church are “thinkable” in new ways—where the church is the most alive and dynamic. Though we might not be called or have the skills to load up a food truck, we can and must, in our own ministry contexts, experiement and innovate to meet the needs of the 21st century.
Welcome to God’s hackathon.
The Rev. Keith Anderson is co-editor of The Narthex and a pastor at Upper Dublin Lutheran Church in Ambler, PA, co-author with Elizabeth Drescher of Click2Save: The Digital Ministry Bible (Morehouse, 2012) and author of the forthcoming book The Digital Cathedral: Networked Ministry in a Wireless World (Morehouse, 2015). He hangs out on his blog, on Facebook, and on Twitter.
Cover photo: Alexandre Dulaunoy, “Everybody Needs a Hacker,” 2013. CC 2.0 license.
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