sharing faith digitally in the 21st century

festival of homiletics12 may 2015denver, co

slideshare.net/maryhess1

a few caveats…

• situatedness

• limited focus

• slides available online (slideshare.net/maryhess1)

“Get you up to a high mountain, O Zion, herald of good tidings; lift up your voice with strength, O Jerusalem, herald of good tidings, lift it up, do not fear; say to the cities of Judah, “Here is your God!”

big idea in faith sharing in digital cultures: TRUST GOD

but how? and why?

it’s all about story…

“dances up the ladder from information to knowledge to wisdom”

“a great story invites an expansion of understanding, a self transcendence…”

“more than that, it plants a seed which makes it impossible to do anything but grow in

understanding…”

there are stories all around us…

competition? or apprenticeship?

wonder with me about story spaces that are digital

a paradox exists:

the public performance of hatred and an unprecedented opportunity to experience freedom

are both present in digital cultures

Michael Wesch

self enclosed stories?

expansive, connected stories?

how might we climb up the ladder, and help to practice knowledge that might lead to wisdom in our

stories?

where are we doing that already?

five practices for living in the tragic gap

• an understanding that we are all in this together

• an appreciation of the value of otherness

• an ability to hold tension in life-giving ways

• a sense of personal voice and agency

• a capacity to create community

Parker Palmer

take the example of games…

four dynamics we’re learning from games

• urgent optimism

• weaving a tight social fabric

• blissful productivity (optimized to do hard meaningful work)

• epic meaning

Jane McGonigal

do you see the common resonances? and what about our faith in the midst?

what’s theological about games? EVERYTHING!

urgent optimism

• God “knit me together in my mother’s womb?” (Ps 139)

• “Notice how the flowers grow. They do not toil or spin. But I tell you not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of them.” (Luke 12:27)

• we understand that death is not final, that we are baptized into death precisely because we are thus drawn deeply into life everlasting

tight social fabric

• how tight is a community which values the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the child?

• how tight a social fabric is woven when we understand that those who mourn, those who are weak, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness — are blessed?

• Hannah’s song, Mary’s song — “God has thrown down the rulers from their thrones, but lifted up the lowly. The hungry he has filled with good things, the rich he has sent away empty.” (Luke 1:46-55)

blissful productivity

• optimized to do hard meaningful work — our nagging suspicion that the Protestant work ethic is a bleak way to be in the world needs to be replaced by Frederick Buechner’s affirmation that vocation is where your deep joy and the world’s deep needs intersect…

• blissful productivity is woven deeply into notions of the priesthood of all believers, into profound understandings of vocation

• think of children! (Matthew19:14, Luke 18:16)

epic meaning

• can we imagine a story more epic than that of God’s relationship with God’s people over eons?

• Creation, the Exodus, the Covenant at Sinai, the Promised Land, Davidic rule, Jesus’ life and death and resurrection

• we hold within our hands and our hearts stories and practices that are a moral compass of the sort Maria Popova speaks

but where have these factors gone in our practices as Christians?

perhaps….

• can we learn how to “hold lightly” in the best sense of that phrase? can we learn to rely on God’s overwhelming love to hold us, to free us to take the risks necessary to mend the ruptures in our social fabric?

• can we learn how to live in repentance and the promise of forgiveness? can we embrace the joy that comes from trying and failing? the “do overs” of life?

• here is where our doctrine of the Trinity helps!

believe

createshare

let’s explore a bit with each other… let’s try some “what ifs?”

what if God is all around us, communicating with us even — perhaps mostly! — in the midst of

digital cultures?

what if…. try reading this commercial through your

theological lenses

turn to your neighbor and see if you can find a way to talk about an “and” move as you think about

what it means to be Christian…

what would an “and” move look like if we were using Christian stories to talk about it?

what if we could use social media to weave a more tight

social fabric? what could that look like?

turn to your neighbor and talk about something you’ve encountered via social media that has

helped to shape your sense of the social fabric

what if we could find ways to enter digital culture that

create and draw upon blissful productivity?

turn to your neighbor and share a story about a time when you found yourself

being blissfully productive… (doesn’t have to be in church!)

we need to work on sharing our stories, and digital culture invites us to do so in myriad ways

our religious communities need to share stories that claim experiences which we don’t otherwise

have language for, and have to help us find a moral compass in doing so

joy, mercy, forgiveness

sin, sorrow, repentance

hope

how will we “story” ourselves and the church? how will we invite people into epic meaning-making

adventures?

we also need stories that transform our perspectives, that reframe our taken-for-granted

views, that help us to “re-contextualize” in the face of context collapse

resources for image and sound

• which images will you use? (flickr, google)

• which sounds/music? (freesound, sound cloud)

• look for creative commons licensed resources

creation tools

• tackk.com

• animoto.com

• story corps app

• adobe voice app

• magisto app

• iMovie at Apple

sharing tools

• youtube.com

• vimeo.com

• slideshare.com

• storify.com

so now we have tools to use, and metaphors to play with, how do we elicit stories?

how do we listen carefully?

storytelling resources

• storyingfaith.org

• digital storytelling wiki

• art of hosting

• liberating structures

• public conversations project

• respectful conversations project

projects done by local churches…

• MN Episcopal Story Project

• Bethlehem Lutheran

• StoryingFaith.org

believe

createshare

storying faith

• keep in mind the mystery of the Trinity

• stories need encouragement to emerge

• working on creating stories supports faith formation

• reach out to learn, to hear stories that are not your typical stories

Q & A

image and photo credits (underlined citations are urls)

Time Magazine covers CEDA model (Julian Stodd) anglican “in” language complimentary rules cartoon denominational purity Banksy stained glass window hands earth joy (diana robinson) forgiveness (len matthews) may my soul note rest (eperales) repentance (vince42) hope tree (hartwig hkd) peace dove (stuart williams) trinity circle (action bronson)

all other photos and images by mary hess

video credits

future of storytelling (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjoO6Y29f7I)

be together not the same (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AD-oCSoI9OQ)

racism is real (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTcSVQJ2h8g)

apple: the song (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRsPnzcZ1VY)

the Syrophoenician woman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAl--5UKaPc)

an unexpected Christmas (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM1XusYVqNY)

poetry slam quarter finals (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tv00xjClbx0)

“cuz he’s black” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9Wf8y_5Yn4)

more info: mary hess meh.religioused.org

these slides live at: http://www.slideshare.net/maryhess1/