The Reverend Clint Schnekloth
ELCA Youth Extravaganza
New Orleans, February 2012
Through good game design we can leverage
deeper and deeper learning as a form of pleasure in people’s lives without any
hint of school or schooling.
"In my view video games are a new
art form. We have no idea yet how people 'read' video games, what meanings they
make from them. Still less do we know how they will 'read' them in the future.
Video games are at the very beginning of their potential--'we ain't see nothin'
yet.'" James Paul Gee
At
the beginning of our time together, I invite you to enter an imaginative space
with me. Consider this possibility, that participation in the Extravaganza, and
in this workshop, in fact even participation in the ELCA Youth Ministry
Network, is a form of gaming. Consider.
First,
the network itself is an example of “crowdsourcing.” Crowdsourcing is inviting
a large group of people to cooperatively tackle a big project… outsourcing a
job to a crowd. The network has as its goal to empower and strengthen adult
youth ministry leaders in service to Christ. It does this through networking
youth ministry leaders serving and supporting each other. As one example, I’m
here of my own free will, non-stipendiary, to conduct this workshop. All the
other workshop leaders have also been crowdsourced. As have a majority of the
youth leaders who plan the Extravaganza and serve in various volunteer
capacities with the ELCA Youth Ministry Network.
Second,
and this is more a psychological theory, when you came to this Extravaganza,
you came as an avatar. You are in all likelihood not exactly the same person
you are in other contexts—with your youth, in your church, in your family. Here
at the Extravaganza, you are the avatar you have selected to represent yourself
in this socially constructed environment, in New Orleans, at a conference with
other youth leaders. Some of our avatars are quite a bit like the avatars we
put on in other places. Some others of us “present” quite a bit differently
here than elsewhere.
Third,
our whole system of workshops is itself a complicated form of gaming. You had a
map, and a schedule, and you are finding your way around this hotel seeking out
workshop experiences that will gain you experience points you hope will level
you up to new levels of ministry when you return home. Attend the right
workshop, and you’ll go from being a level 12 youth leader to level 14. Level
14 comes with a brand new cross bow and extra healing spells.
Within
this particular workshop, we are gaming according to certain rules. Some
workshops have an open, Minecraft-like feel (build whatever you want,
wherever). This particular workshop is more directed. You have some imaginative
freedom, but I’ve selected a lecture format to walk us through some new
territory that, Myst-like, might be difficult to navigate if certain puzzles or
wayposts are not navigated correctly.
The
Extravaganza is a good game world. It attracts a large number of participants
because of the play area (New Orleans), the various collaborative and
networking possibilities, and its existence as a kind of “built environment”
with lectures, worship, meals, and workshops. The E also has good game
mechanics, with variety and flow and open space to roam and explore and chill.
Aspects of the E allow for great control over the environment, such as the
early Intensives on offer. The mechanics could be improved if there were some
kind of real pay-off for attendance, like earning academic credit hours… but
perhaps that is available and its simply a part of the game mechanics I haven’t
discovered yet. Finally, the E has (and this is its greatest selling point)
great game community. There’s plenty of space for positive social interaction
and a meaningful context for collective effort.
Before
we continue, let’s pause for a minute and consider any other ways in which
participation in the E is like a gaming world.
--
Early
drafts of this lecture began with arguments for why youth workers and church
leaders should game. I thought winsome and compelling narratives of the
difference gaming makes might draw you into the gaming world. I assumed, “Youth
workers are missionaries. They’re up for being sent into new cultural contexts
and venues.” In addition, my early lecture plans included the goal of
disabusing hearers of their patronizing and ill-informed judgments against
virtual worlds and the gaming culture. Think of this as a dual strategy of
invitation and attack.
Then
I started inviting people to participate with me in daily prayer on Second
Life. To date, the only
person I’ve successfully convinced to create an avatar and meet me at St.
Matthew’s-by-the-Sea for Compline is my brother, who I think, though in some
ways curious, participated under a bit of filial duress. Over time, I’ve
learned that very, very few pastors and church leaders inhabit digital virtual
worlds, and in fact most pastors and church leaders have some rather obdurate
and steadfast reasons for not inhabiting those worlds (not enough time,
boundary issues, not tech savvy, not a high priority, just don’t get it, that’s
silly, it’s not real community, and so on). Douglas Estes in his fascinating
little book Simchurch
observes something similar to what I have experienced in having conversations
on this topic around our church: “If we want to reach people in the virtual
world, we have to reach avatars, even though the whole avatar thing gives a lot
of church people the willies.”
Nevermind that the “Christian church is engaging far less than 1 percent of the
seventy million people who are active in the virtual world [many of whom are
teens]. This means the virtual world is by far the largest unreached people
group on planet Earth.”
All
of this forced me to reconsider my opening gambit. Since I am convinced,
radically convinced, that ministry in digital virtual contexts is an essential
next step in pastoral and youth ministry, I had to find some way both to
attract participants to a workshop on the topic, and keep you here and
interested for an hour. Even more radically, I’d like to build a cohort of ELCA
youth leaders who would entertain the possibility of doing cooperative ministry
in some of these virtual frontiers.
Hence
the World of Workshop
imaginative meditation I made use of at the beginning… If the likelihood of
convincing you to travel to virtual digital worlds is slim, the next best
inception I could accomplish is to come game in your real world and make you
doubt, at least a bit, whether your reality is as real as you think—even
better, to convince you that you are gaming all the time, whether you recognize
it or not. You inhabit an avatar, you inhabit various avatars, you put on
different skins for different virtual worlds, and then you play in that world
and with that character. I’m not taking you to the game. I’m bringing the game
to you.
If
I can convince you of at least this much, then I have brought virtual community
out of its cave and into the every day, and perhaps that will mean by the end
of this lecture you might entertain the (admittedly still foreign notion) that
digital virtual worlds are not nearly as far away and strange as they seem, and
they are much more every day than we might think. I will also have equipped us
with greater proficiency at appropriating some of the core strengths of the
virtual world that can “play” in real life ministry contexts.
--
Here’s
how we will proceed. I am going to walk us through two popular and accessible
games, and after describing the game briefly, I will draw out one or two key
insights into the new culture of learning indicated by these games. Both games
are digital, virtual worlds. There are so many games out there that I had to
limit this survey, so I followed the rule that I was aiming for massively multiplayer
environments that are played by a wide variety of players, games I am
personally familiar with, and games people I know personally play. I will walk
through games in approximately the order of age group that plays them. World of
Warcraft is more a high school and college age phenomenon (although not
exclusively so). Second Life is especially a world of young adults
transitioning into middle age.
As
a busy youth leader, you would be right to be asking at this point, before we
jump in, what the pay off is for you. Why does this matter? Two short quotes
that convinced me of the profound significance of exploring this topic. First,
danah boyd, an ethnographer in the area of teen networked publics had this to
say in her recent book: today’s teens are “the first
generation to have to publicly articulate itself, to have to write itself into
being as a precondition of social participation.”
In other words, in addition to what you see teens doing daily in school and
church—writing themselves into being through their clothes, music choices,
friendship patterns, and so on—they are also doing so in the digital world, and
in fact in their digital networking patterns, that is the only way to be there, by writing yourself into being.
The other insight came from Pete Ward, in his book Liquid
Church. “Liquid church expresses the way that
ecclesial being is extended and made fluid through mediation. The liquid Church
moves beyond the traditional boundaries of congregation and denomination
through the use of communication and information technologies.”
How the church is mediated as new technologies arise is itself a missiological
topic. “A central missiological issue for the Western Church relates to how it
chooses to react to the mediation of the spiritual in popular culture.”
Although my profession is as a Lead Pastor of an ELCA congregation, my tribal
identities are deeply tied to youth ministry and mission work. Boyd and others
have convinced me that the digital world is increasingly where teens will be,
and Ward has convinced me that new mediated forms of pop culture present us
with a new missiological challenge.
Finally,
a few statistics (because really, you’re going to trust me more if I offer some
summary of statistical research, right?). All of this is from a 2008 Pew
Internet and American Life study on Teens, Video Games, and Civics:
1. Almost all teens play games. Fully
97% of teens ages 12-17 play computer, web, portable, or console games.
2. Youth play many different kinds of video games. 80% of teens play five or more different game genres, and
40% play eight or more types of games. Anecdotally, although at the time of the
Pew study Madden was the top played game, with Halo a close second, many youth
workers I know now report the top games youth play are Call of Duty and World
of Warcraft.
3.
Gaming is often a social experience for teens. For most teens, gaming is a
social activity and a major component of their overall social experience.
4. Playing games with others in person was related to
increased civic and political engagement, but playing with others online was
not.
World of Warcraft
Perhaps
10% of the high schoolers of my congregation I know primarily through Facebook.
Complex family situations preclude them from attending church with any
regularity. I receive regular messages, questions, and comments from them, and
I would say, without a doubt, that in some cases we know each other well. The
ambient intimacy of Facebook as a networked public augments our face-to-face
relationships, and in at least a few cases, is the primary relationship itself.
In
a couple of particular cases, I have come to know these youth primarily because
of their interest in gaming. Some are struggling with various emotional issues.
Face-to-face with people, they often feel uncomfortable, even unsafe. Chat on
Facebook, or chat on World of Warcraft, is easier. They are literally more open
and themselves. For better or worse, increasingly this is true for some youth.
Sherry Turkle, in her important nearly fifteen year exploration of our lives in
the digital terrain, recently published as Alone Together, writes that many people prefer texting
or chat because in a phone call “’there is a lot less boundness to a person.’ In a call we can learn too
much or say too much, and things could get ‘out of control.’ A call has
insufficient boundaries… when texting, [we] feel a reassuring distance. If
things start to go in a direction [we don’t] like, we can easily redirect the
conversation—or cut it off.”
So
an admission: although I don’t like texting that much because it is a less
native medium for me than e-mail or chat, I totally get this impulse. I like
control and I bet you do too, even if we feel some guilt admitting that fact.
And in fact past forms of media allowed for similar control over the pattern of
communication, letter writing being until recently the pre-eminent example.
Back
to these high school youth—our shared interest, and a good part of why we are
in relationship in the first place, has to do with WoW. They play regularly,
and noticed that I had been exploring World of Warcraft and posting about my
discoveries on Facebook. One evening, very very late at night (yes, I was on
Facebook and playing WoW after midnight) we began messaging back and forth
about why they play, lots of conversation about game mechanics, and preferences
for either solo or social gaming. Interestingly, they observed that their
communal game play had reduced at the same time as some of their RL communality
had also decreased. Messaging with the pastor was one step back into greater
levels of game sociality and real life sociality.
Generally
speaking, as we noted in statistics on game play from the Pew study, teens play
games with others. This is not necessarily, or even primarily, by playing with
others on-line, but can include playing with others in the same room. With
increased band-width and improved game functionality, more and more gamers are
playing games on-line with others (very popular games in addition to WoW that
function in this way include Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, Halo, and Star Wars:
The Old Republic). Regardless of whether they play remotely on-line or together
in the same room sharing equipment and consoles, gaming is social.
James
Paul Gee, professor of Literary Studies at Arizona State University and author
of What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, points out the way in which many adults
might miss this point via a short story:
Let me tell you a little story about the social nature of
gaming. I don’t, in general, encourage baby boomers to rush off and play video
games, since the games are often quite hard and can be frustrating for people
not willing to confront their own, perhaps rigidified, learning muscles in a
new setting. Nonetheless, some older people do run off to play for the first
time when they hear me talk (and, indeed, there are a growing number of older
gamers these days). One older adult who tried a video game after hearing one of
my talks did, indeed, become seriously frustrated. Then his 21-year-old gamer
stepson came into the room and asked him, “What are you doing?” The man said,
“Trying to learn to play this damn video game.” The son said “For heaven’s
sake, why would you do that alone?” Ah, so, here is one good learning principle
built into gamers, not just games.
This, I would add, would be a good learning principle to
build into church-goers and youth ministers as well. Why do we try to learn the
hard stuff alone? [pause here to ponder this before continuing]
So
I started exploring some of the ways in which games like WoW are themselves
intrinsically formative. In the case of WoW, a signature of the game is that
players can join together into guilds. In fact, to really succeed in the gaming
world and accomplish some of the most complicated quests, and to earn more XP
as a result, the game prefers you work in guilds, sometimes even requires it.
Many guilds organize raids with a raiding party of 25 players (from around the
world) who go on a 6-8 hour quest to accomplish their goal. In order to succeed
at the quest, players also need to extensive research on the WoW Wikia, or use
analytic tools to confirm which spells and other items will be most helpful at
succeeding. Ultimately, there is also a kind of intrinsic discovery, the group
learns together (and sometimes surprises itself) with its success. This raiding
culture is deeply and profoundly communal in ways rare even in real world
environments.
A
friend who is professor of New Testament at the University of Aberdeen in
England, and an avid gamer, took some time to describe to me what he has
learned participating in a long-standing guild in WoW. He writes:
Relative to your specific thesis, I wonder whether there
isn't a comparison to be made between the catechumenate and the process of
enculturating new members into a MMORPG guild. I mention this because of my
experience as a guild admin and class lead (priest, of course) in the very
long-standing Warcraft guild We Know whose guild master is Joi Ito, recently
named head of the MIT Media Lab. Joi has lots of published presentations and
interviews on how leading and organising a guild taught him about corporate
management, and he would probably talk with you if you asked nicely. But I was
at work on the backend, so to speak, trying to help cultivate customs for
positive social interaction. Our guild didn't allow racist, sexist, offensive
language in /guild chat, and regulated group behaviour in a way as grown-up as
we could possibly achieve. You may be a gamer yourself, or may know about games
— that they tend to bring out the early-adolescent male child in players — and
we early on had a lot of trouble with overexcited members saying they were
going to fuckin' rape some Horde, or someone else shouldn't be such a girl, or
that such-and-such an item was gay, or that their group leader was a retard. We
had to pull people aside, gently and persistently, to say that we just don't
talk that way in We Know; that we have members who are gay, who are women, who
have children with Down syndrome, who have survived rape. Some people quit the
guild, some people groused a lot about "free speech", but by the time
I retired two years ago, we hadn't had to rebuke anyone in longer than I can
remember. If you joined We Know, you signed up for our way. The longevity,
popularity, and success of the guild suggest that something is going right.
Notice
that AKMA focuses on the development of communal norms in a community that is
on “a way.” There is both sensitivity to the real life situations of those who
play the game, but also a sense of what can maintain continuity and commitment
in the game itself. This is such a different Christian reaction to the gaming
context than is typical in places where leaders are focused around boundaries
for game play itself rather than seeing boundaries in game as being in the
service of gaming virtual community.
James
Paul Gee a concise list of what we can learn from gaming and implement in our
own teaching and leadership of youth ministry:
1)
Good video games offer players strong identities. You aren’t simply a number or statistic
in a confirmation classroom—instead, you are lead hunter, or the priest
2)
They make players think like scientists. Trial and error are a big part of gaming. Again, this is a
non-scientific observation, but I wonder if we allow the same kind of trial and
error in our faith formation practices in youth ministry.
3)
They let players be producers, not just consumers. In a game like Minecraft, for example,
the environment is built by the players. In a game like WoW, there is an entire
community around the game producing Wikia content and other resources (see
also, for example, the whole phenomenon of “Halo Nation”; http://www.wowwiki.com/Portal:Main).
4)
They lower the consequences of failure. If your avatar dies, you can resurrect it, and continue the
game from that point. Do we let youth fail, and build a gaming culture in our
churches where the consequences of failure are lowered?
5)
They allow players to customize the game to fit their learning and playing
styles. I don’t even
think most youth in our churches think they are allowed to customize the church
game, even though the regularly customize other domains in which they are
participants, and often at an incredibly high level of proficiency.
6)
Because of all the preceding, they feel a real sense of agency, ownership,
and control. It’s their game.
This last insight bears special attention. When I talk with
gamers, they clearly feel mastery within their domain. They don’t need special
advice from experts, or permission to navigate the world. They are
self-engaged, self-directed, and often incredibly skilled. I am learning from
them, not the other way around.
This
happens because there are systems built into the game itself that build this
kind of mastery and confidence. Youth ministries and churches would do well to
learn from this. “Good games offer players a set of challenging problems and
then let them practice these until they have routinized their mastery. Then the
game throws a new class of problem at the player (sometimes this is called a
‘boss’), requiring them to rethink their taken-for-granted mastery. In turn,
this new mastery is consolidated through repetition (with variation), only to
be challenged again. This cycle of consolidation and challenge is the basis of
the development of expertise in any domain.”
The
power of these learning strategies in game is that they make use of a different
kind of rhetoric from church rhetoric, an intrinsic process for learning rather
than the typical extrinsic learning strategies so popular in word or
information based systems. They engage in what is sometimes called procedural
rhetoric. “Procedural rhetoric encompasses any medium that accomplishes its
inscription via processes.”
You learn the game by playing the game. You learn what the game has to teach by
participating in the gaming world rather than reading something about it. You
can’t really even comprehend what Wow, or Second Life is, until you actually
inhabit that gaming world for a while, because it accomplishes its inscription
via processes. “We must recognize the persuasive power and expressive power of
procedurality. Processes influence us. They seed changes in our attitudes,
which in turn, and over time, change our culture. As players of videogrames and
other computational artifacts, we should recognize procedural rhetoric as a new
way to interrogate our world, to comment on it, to disrupt and challenge it. As
creators and players of videogames, we must be conscious of the procedural
claims we make, why we make them, and what kind of social fabric we hope to
cultivate through the processes we unleash on the world.”
[pause]
Second Life
I
inhabit Second Life primarily as a monastic. My avatar, Miroslav Tweedy
(Miroslav is one of my favorite Slavic names, and Tweedy is the last name of
Jeff, lead singer for Wilco) wears an attractive Roman style cassock that is a
case of completely over dressing for mid-week worship. For the early days after
my rez date on SL I wandered the world a bit in order to explore (and in those
days dressed like Neo from The Matrix—are you seeing a trend?), but more
recently have really focused my time there simply praying Compline in Christian
community, especially with the St. Matthew’s-by-the-Sea (http://stmattsinsl.wordpress.com/)
community, an Episcopal chapel of peace for all people built in memory of
Matthew Shepard and all LGBT victims of violence. I have also participated
somewhat regularly in a bible study hosted by an ELCA pastor (John Stiles) on
Thursday evenings, and visited worship at the Anglican Cathedral in Second Life
and a few other worshipping communities.
“Second
Life players are engaged in nothing less than the collaborative produsage of
the virtual world itself; ‘virtually every object, terrain, and animation is
the creative work of its membership.”
In some ways, this makes SL less a game, and more a multi-user environment.
Like the real world, this means SL varies widely from locale to locale, because
every place is built out of the creativity and input of users. Here’s a list of
just a few of the possible destinations in Second Life: churches, dance clubs,
historical reconstructions of particular eras then available for role playing
and game play (Westerns, Steampunk, etc.), built environments that replicate RL
(the Sistine Chapel, downtown Moscow), futuristic universes (Star Wars),
reproductions of fictional worlds, universities and businesses that offer
classes, advertising, etc. in world, shops where avatars can purchase clothing,
furniture, carpets, and much more.
Second
Life is the preeminent virtual world for exploring the concept of produsage,
because at the same time that folks in world are consumers of the Second Life
products, and purchase linden dollars to make use of their, they are intimately
also the producers of the environment on every possible level. Second Life as a
virtual world is what it is because of produsage.
Core principles of produsage:
1) Open to user participation: In many ways it is
dramatically open in ways most real life context have trouble imagining.
2) Communal evaluation: I have sat after worship some
evenings while the worship leader asks us how we should rebuild the chapel. The
community gets to evaluate the built space and give input into what everything
should look like.
3) Fluid heterarchies: People come and go from the environment,
sometimes they are deeply involved, later they take a lesser leadership role,
and there is a fluidity to who is in charge and who is participating that is
dramatic. Recently, I have seen an increase in this same pattern in real life
congregations.
4) Permanently unfinished: Prodused environments are never
“done.” That is one of their great strengths. Ponder how this would work in a
church setting.
These
core principles of produsage are absolutely the kind of patterns we would do
well to creatively appropriate for ministry contexts, or even figure out how to
participate in as ministry itself.
I
will admit that my own participation in Second Life is probably enabled by my
long-standing participation in what I might call sci-fi geek culture. However,
there is more to the whole geek thing than first meets the eye, and it is this
point with which I’d like to conclude. I’m sure you know geeks. Perhaps you are
a geek yourself. Increasingly, educational theorists have been recognizing the
extent to which the path to geekdom is itself a profound learning culture.
Here
is how it works. Most people who end up geeks start out just hanging around in
the world in which they eventually geek out. They rez in Second Life and go
where people are clubbing or dancing, just to meet and try out things. Youth in
school, even adults here at the E, do this as well. The central question is:
What is my relationship to others?
Eventually,
some of those who are hanging out start to mess around. In addition to
attending to relationships in the environment, messing around includes
beginning to pay attention to the environment itself. For me in SL, this
happened when I bought my first clothes for my avatar rather than going around
in the free clothes provided when you first rez in world. I started to
research, at least a little bit, how to buy land and build things. This
openness to the environment asks the question, “What am I able to explore?”
Finally, when you explore, and go more and more deeply embodied into the world,
eventually one day you wake up and realize you are geeking out. “Geeking out
involves learning to navigate esoteric domains of knowledge and practice and
participating in communities that traffic in these forms of experience.”
The geek question is, “How can I utilize the available resources, both social
and technological, for deep exploration?”
I
might conclude by simply inviting us to ask what is perhaps the intriguing, challenging, and essential
question: How can we invite our young people on a journey that results in them
becoming church geeks?” Since geeking out is so engaging, so playful, and so
joyous, it is for this reason above all others that we need to learn from the
virtual worlds culture, collectives, and varieties of play.
Play
is a disposition, not just engaging with a game. It is an essential strategy
for embracing change, rather than a way for growing out of it. Even while
developmental psychologists are routinely coming to the conclusion that
play-based learning has inarguable benefits compared to other approaches to
learning, our culture struggles to actually embrace play.
This
is unfortunate, because as we might intuit if we sit with the concept of play
for a while, openness to play as a way of embracing the world is not dissimilar
to ritual and senses of the sacred. By delegitimizing play, or by classifying
it as something done only under certain occasions (to relax, to begin a
learning session, to do when we are little but not grown up) we fail to embrace
it as a disposition. Consequently, we miss out on it as an important resource
for faith. “Play provides the opportunity to leap, experiment, fail, and
continue to play with different outcomes—in other words to riddle one’s way
through a mystery.”
Similarly, by discouraging play in social contexts, we are at risk of killing
rather than harnessing the power of collectives. “Any effort to define or
direct collectives would destroy the very thing that is unique and innovative
about them.”
Inasmuch
as we have not encouraged children to play with faith itself, to toy with the
divine mysteries, and to do so collectively, with each other and their family
and friends, we have ill-equipped them to dwell in mystery and paradox. No
wonder so many wander away from the faith when they begin to encounter
challenges and aporia. We have offered them no playful equipment to gain an
epiphany by way of playing with the aporia. We can learn so much from the new
culture of gaming. Are we courageous enough to do so?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Games Mentioned in this Lecture
Minecraft. http://www.minecraft.net A quirky low-res
environment that seems almost like an exact mashup of Second Life and Legos.
The building process is like Legos, the gaming is like the openness of Second
Life. Like a big digital sandbox (with a bit of World of Warcraft tossed in)
Second Life. http://secondlife.com
(accessed January 16, 2012). A completely open virtual world created by its
users. Not exactly a game, it is an actual virtual world. Always free to play,
but you need to purchase Linden dollars if you want to own real estate, etc.
World of Warcraft. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/ (accessed
January 31, 2012). Still the largest MMORPG on the web, a vast gaming universe
with over 12,000,000 active subscribers (who pay a monthly fee of about $15 to
play the game on-line). Free to play to level 20, with some limitations.
Sermon for the first Sunday of Lent, "God's Got Your Back." Trying to offer some critical tools on how to think theologically about PPT, and then make the "bow in the sky" imagery of Genesis a bit more polysemous, and specifically, more Christological.
Do you ever have a great idea, but then agonize over the execution? Some clergy I admire offer public ashing in their communities--on street corners, in front of movie theaters, on university campuses, in abandoned places of empire. My idea was to go and do likewise. I typically have a little bit of free time combined with nervous energy on the Wednesday afternoon of Ash Wednesday. Plus the whole idea sounds kind of liturgico-missional, right up my alley.
Then, I started pondering where properly our "parish" is situated, and whether it would be proper to offer ashes outside the boundaries of that parish. So, for example, although there is a lot of foot traffic on Dickson Street downtown, there are plenty of churches on Dickson, whereas we actually sit geographically in a residential neighborhood of NE Fayetteville. Would our presence on Dickson implicate other churches in something they hadn't planned themselves? Should I call the pastors and check to confirm they would be okay with what we were doing? If I did offer ashes in our neighborhood where there is less foot traffic, would anyone actually stop by?
After a while, we decided to walk over into the strip mall parking lot, eventually landing at the corner across from the movie theater. Still, no takers. We looked pretty cool as a group, young friendly kid faces, three of us approximately 40, one wearing an episcopal collar and dressed in black, all with ashes on our foreheads.
4) We especially start ministries that serve the marginalized. Again, the Ferguson's are great at this. Late in the book they mention that their goal is to reach the percentage of the population that has not encountered the Christ of faith, and also to walk alongside the 20% of the world's population that lives in abject poverty. Our own congregation has this kind of social ministry commitment, and I think we could strengthen it by learning from the principles in this book, many of which if modeled well could initiate ministries like Community Emergency Outreach, a significant ministry in Fayetteville that was birthed out of conversations initiated by pastors and other leaders of our congregation.
I
might conclude by simply inviting us to ask what is perhaps the intriguing, challenging, and essential
question: How can we invite our young people on a journey that results in them
becoming church geeks?” Since geeking out is so engaging, so playful, and so
joyous, it is for this reason above all others that we need to learn from the
virtual worlds culture, collectives, and varieties of play. 