Notes and reflections on my Unleash soapbox

I’m new to speaking gigs. Kinda funny really, given that I’ve always liked to be outspoken.

It was a huge privilege to have the attention of about 50 to 100 folks for 5 minutes during Unleash, NewSpring’s balling church conference, on the subject of “How to Build Community.”

It was fun to have a box to stand on in the middle of the Anderson Campus courtyard with a bullhorn in my hands. And nerve wracking too.

Here are my notes, with a few more lines of explanation that I never got to give to my live audience. You can compare that with the video of the soapbox and tell me if it translated. (And you can be honest with me. Jesus would want that.)

My Challenge to the church: Build Community!
Everyone else is doing it
Jesus wants it (Matt. 5:14)
People crave it

What is community?
It isn’t affiliation. It is participation (1 Cor. 12) Community as a “goodness engine”

Three things you need for community (and one if you want to call it a success.)
1. Identity/Culture
Tell stories, encourage conversations; establish membership value to self, others
2. Interdependency
Create transparency about member resources; offer mechanism to exchange social value (Acts. 2/4)
3. Purposefulness
Leverage resources through collaboration, crowdsourcing (Ex. 25); embrace innovation
4. Legacy
Transfer value to succeeding generations; across different social spheres. (Matt 28)

For Church to be the hope of the world:
Message and people=open, attractive
Praxis=dynamic, integrative
Results=duplicatable

My take-away message in three paragraphs:

1. We have the will of God, the power of the Holy Spirit, the best news anyone could ever receive and all the social technology imaginable to build powerful community everywhere that creates disciples of Jesus. So let’s do it!

2. It happens by the massive, web-enabled network effects of gathering the people of God and sharing their knowledge, resources and time with the world to create attractive, unimaginable, unbelievable social value. We can’t let the church sit on the sidelines while the world manufactures fake community for distraction, entertainment or financial gain.

3. The church cannot be afraid to harness the tools in its own way for its own people and its own purpose because it worries that we will create a subculture. Christians have always been a subculture. The difference is whether that subculture hides from the world or aggressively pursues the transformation of the culture. Doing community well will always add to our number daily from the lost, the oppressed and the dispossessed in our culture.

Do I hear an amen?