COLLECTIVE COLLABORATION

I was talking with my father-in-law last night about the changes taking place in the world of Christianity and global ministries, with the main players in our discussion being the Church, Mission Agencies, Christian Relief and Development Organizations and Bible Colleges. As the mindset of churches in North America becomes more individualistic resulting in wanting more ownership and direct involvement in global ministries, a number of potential questions arise. Such as:

- Wouldn’t having churches doing their own thing around the world cause inefficient duplication as churches attempt to do address and respond to the same issues?
- Wouldn’t the result of a lot of different groups working in an area cause confusion among the communities of people they’re working with?
- How do you measure success when so many groups are working in the same areas?
- How do you form any kind of best practice procedures with so many different groups involved doing the work?
- How would any kind of accountability be established between the different church groups in order to minimize damage?

My father-in-law being a physician, who has served in a medical capacity on a number of short term missions asked, “ Why would a church respond to a need in a country independently when there might already be an organization who is already responding to the issue in that country?” These are exactly the kinds of connections that need to be made . . . but often when a church connects with an organization that has ‘experts’ and is ‘professionally’ responding to a need/issue, the organization doesn’t want the direct involvement of the church other than taking their money to continue the work they are already doing. This is ultimately to the detriment of both the organization and the church.

I propose a no-governed, self regulated system that works like a wiki, or a collective collaboration of Churches, Mission Agencies, Christian Relief and Development Organizations and Bible Colleges. Before this can happen, many silos need to come down, and people need to give up their self-perceived positions of power and expertise. It can turn into an issue of trust and respect (which one would think should work quite well within the Christian framework of which these values should be held in high regard).

With the beginning of Wikipedia, this comment was made: Critics of open-source wiki systems argue that these systems could be easily tampered with; while proponents argue that the community of users can catch malicious content and correct it. Lars Aronsson, a data systems specialist, summarizes the controversy as follows:

“Most people, when they first learn about the wiki concept, assume that a website that can be edited by anybody would soon be rendered useless by destructive input. It sounds like offering free spray cans next to a grey concrete wall. The only likely outcome would be ugly graffiti and simple tagging, and many artistic efforts would not be long lived. Still, it seems to work very well.”

People within the Christian community are just as afraid that by letting the churches get directly involved in global ministry, it’s going mess everything up that they have worked and developed specialties in over many years.

This entry is getting too long and I’ll write more about this later – but I propose that a collective collaboration is formed with open respect for one another, and I think the result could be quite spectacular. Organizations like the Viva Network (with the focus of working with children) are already starting it, but I think it could be much more widespread, involving many more entities.