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Back to Church topics – long gap – apologies – I didn’t say 60 CONSECUTIVE days .

I was reading an article a friend sent me about a super-hip new wave online t-shirt company called threadless. It was sent to me in the context of “the missional church could learn a lot from these guys.” And I agreed – both on the positive and the negative. Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up (thank you Mandy Pantnkin):

Threadless comes up with new t-shirt art by holding online design contests that their community votes on. The winning designs get printed, the designer gains strett cred and web immortality, and the shirts sell out because the consumers of the product are directly involved in creating the product. Super-cool and a great online community they have developed over there.

There’s no doubt this is a workable business model. In some ways it’s a workable church model – community, connection, everyone being involved in the process, sharpening each other with praise and critiques, and a responsive group at the top that simply responds to the customers’ will. It has been suggested that other companies should learn from this model and become completely customer-driven.

Not a new idea, I know. I believe it was PT Barnum who said “give the people what they want” (if it wasn’t correct me so I know there’s someone out there – here’s a game – I have placed errors all over my blog – whoever finds them gets free candy!). In church-land, this has been a recent trend going all the way back to discussions of being “seeker-friendly”, then “seeker-driven” and now a more collaborative version is emerging.

It reminds me of Wikipedia – the online cumulative sum-total of all our individual knowledge, compiled by Wiki users adding what they know to the base. And there is power in that. But there are still some really important questions, like - is anyone right? And – do we need experts anymore?

Definitely not on threadless. Or at the most, you could say what is right is what gets voted for and sells. Even then, many winners get flamed in the comments as this or that or not very good designers, even though their shirts are selling like hotcakes. But there are some folk who are not subject to such scrutiny. For one, the guy who oversees the manufacture and screening of the t-shirts.

I haven’t found one post on threadless about the manner in which the expert silkscreener does his job. There is no community for him. He does not get helpful advice on how to improve his tradecraft. Because maybe 2 people on threadless even think he exists. And probably no one has anything to add to his compendium of t-shirt printing expertise.

But I imagine he did learn from someone - someone with experience who knows the trade, and somewhere back in history someone invented and then refined the process. Everyone had a teacher, whether they remember it or not…

And everyone knows what would make a BMW better (we are the consumers, after all). Here’s one quick suggestion – make them run on water but still ahve the same power – oh – and they need to be able to fly. Of course I have no idea why that is not possible. And I have no suggestions for fixing it. But I know it needs to get done.

In matters like car manufacturing and t-shirt printing and airplane design and nuclear reactor construction we still rely on pretty heavily on the crazies who have dedicated their lives to studying the subject. But in matters like art and philosophy and morality and faith, we have made the collective will the ultimate arbiter. And no one can tell us we are wrong because these are subjective personal decisions. You can’t tell me that what I like is not good art. And you can’t tell me my choices have to live in a given moral space.

In church, it is hip now to treat preaching and teaching as the Worship Wikipedia. Let me read this verse to you. What do you think it means? Hmm. Interesting. How should you apply that to your life. Hmm. Interesting.

Now I’m not saying that we shouldn’t find out what people think. I want to know what twisted ideas people have. But I also want the opportunity to correct them. The problem is asking “what do you think” and then leaving the listener with the idea that what they think is equally valid ans what we read out of the Bible.

The New Testament pattern is that the stronger in faith (those with more knowlege and understanding) should be patient and ”bear with” the weaker, but should also correct, rebuke, and instruct, with gentleness, humility, kindness, and most of all love. “Discussion” is fine, as long as someone is able to say, definitively, that there is a truth to be known.

In Wikipedia world, we have all become our own experts. I regularly talk to people who correct, rebuke, and instruct their doctors because they read webMD or (insert web site here) before their annual checkup. I know – all doctors are part of an evil corporate conglomeration ruled by pharmaceutical companies that teach them from the earliest days of medical school to prescribe drugs drugs drugs and they don’t look into alternatives and they are all bad.

Maybe. Some of them. Most of them are good honest hard-working ethical physicians who know about 10,000 times more about the spleen than I will ever know about the entire body.  Sometimes they’re wrong and unscrupulous. But mostly they will save your life.

Jon, you say, it sounds dangerously close to an infallible priesthood you are inching toward. Are you saying we should just shut up and listen to our pastors and teachers and not read for ourselves and just take what they give us? Of course not. But you should try to learn from them. And we all should recognize that, while not infallible, we could learn a lot from thsoe who have studies Hebrew and Greek and boooks by dead guys with thousands of pages. tThat our knee-jerk reaction or assumptions based on our own experience are not always right. That we still ahve something to learn.

Maybe, in the end, I’m just hoping that there is still a place for the gifts of pastor and teacher. That in a world where the customer IS the company, there are still expert screenprinters to help us make the shirts we dream up. Not to rule us. Not to own us. But to INFORM us. To EQUIP us with accurate information. The most valuable comments in any wiki are written by the guys who made the original product or were there at the event or have spent their lives studying that particular piece of history.

The truth is that behind the scenes of every great custom-driven, democratized, communal company there are experts keeping the infrastructure working. Successful community web sites have scores of expert web geeks (think you-tube). Successful indie t-shirt companies have more web geeks, accountants, and that lowly master silk-screener. They will never be talked about, but they are what make the thing work – we can’t achieve our success without them. And it’s best most of the time they don’t get mentioned in our current culture – in America today we like “grass-roots” a lot better than “expertly crafted.” Facilitator is better than Guru, even if they know less.

I think we still need experts and pastors and teachers. I think we still listen to them. Even if we tell everyone else the ideas were all our own…

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