Hope has been part of the Youth Chorale of the Fort Wayne Children’s Choir for three years, younger choirs, for four more years. In those seven years, she has never heard the choir she was part of sing.

We’ve been in the audience, of course, listening, cheering (silently), moved. But Hope has always been on the platform.

Until Tuesday night. Tuesday night, her choir sang and she sat with us, in the audience, watching her friends singing a practice concert before they head to Newfoundland to be part of a wonderful choir festival.

She’s not going.

Music is core to her, music is how she expresses herself, music is Hope. This last year she was part of more choirs and ensembles and events than I can count. She loves it.

So why is she sitting in the audience?

Last fall she had to decide what to do this summer. She looked at the tour with the choir (which originally was to Europe). A wonderful time. Fabulous opportunity.

She decided to go to West Virginia instead.

Hurricane, West Virginia, doesn’t have cathedrals. No festival choir, no orchestra. Just a work camp with about 400 people  meeting to scrape paint, and paint walls and help people.

Why?

Because although music is Hope, the music has to come from somewhere. And for her, last fall, it came from a choice to do something that wouldn’t be for her. She talked with God. They decided to go to West Virginia.

She’s a good kid. But she’s not the only one who makes choices every day to serve other instead of self. You’ve done it. I’ve done it. A bunch of guys a couple hundred years ago did it. One guy a couple thousand years ago did it.

Sometimes those choices cost us our comfort. Sometimes they cost our lives. And sometimes we sit and listen to the music that we could have been singing and think, “I miss that.”

And then we get up and go back to work with a smile, knowing that it would have been fun. But so is changing the world.

Grabill Missionary Church started more than one hundred years ago.

Here’s how it happened.

In 1898, a bunch of like-minded people were meeting in small groups in fifteen church buildings and school houses, all served by a couple brothers who were preachers, all within a circle about 12 miles across. Some of the places had preaching services, some of them had Sunday school.

Some of the people in these small gatherings came from other churches, responding to a new (for them) understanding of what the Bible taught. Others came from no church at all. There was great excitement about the new things God was doing, and some resistance from those who had learned the old way.

In 1900, the railroad decided to build a town and the spreadout groups started talking about a central location.  In November, 1901, a church building was dedicated. In January, 1902, the first train went by. In February, 1902, the first plat of the town was filed.

At the time, people from the congregation saw each other all the time. They lived within walking distance. They shopped from each other, traded goods, chatted while at the post office or hardware store. They lived local.

Much of the conversation was, I’m guessing, pretty mundane. People talked about weather and sick animals. They mentioned that they needed to get some work done. They mentioned coffee.

This mundane conversation was, however, the fabric of community. You can’t talk about deep spiritual concepts all the time. Sometimes you just talk. And in that chatter grows connection and in that connection can grow faith. Particularly when you watch what happens in a life across time, how a person handles crisis.

Community is formed in communication and communion, interaction and intimacy. The more of both, the deeper the relationships.

In churches, that kind of interaction doesn’t happen easily anymore, at least not for large parts of a congregation. The technology of the car has made it possible to travel further to church, to shop, to eat, to live. A community is less defined by geography.

Churches, at least wise ones, respond by creating additional times of interaction. We create small groups or Sunday school classes where people can share life together. Or that’s what we hope. And sometimes people are aware of what is happening in each other’s lives daily, and sometimes not.

And for a long time, no one has known any better. We’ve known that more communication and communion would be nice, that our sense of community was suffering, but we figured that we were like the rest of American culture, feeling the disconnection that comes from distances.

And then came a new set of communication tools. They are simple enough for almost anyone to use. They are cheap enough for almost anyone to afford (as cheap as a free library card if necessary). We call them social media. We could call them “small town streets”

Just like people were able to chat with each other while heading to the store or waiting at the mill or taking the milk to the creamery, people now can chat while sitting at home. And some of the conversations sound the same, about weather or work or coffee. Or the neighbor’s odd behavior at midnight every night.

At first, only one or two people in a congregation knew about these tools. The first person to talk about Twitter or Facebook or Myspace was viewed as peculiar. When it was explained that this was an Internet thing, all the stories about bad people lurking in chat rooms to injure children were mentioned.

A funny thing has happened, however. More people are becoming aware of these tools. Parents and then grandparents discover new ways to see pictures of the trips that their children or grandchildren are taking. And then conversations like this happen as a small group from a church gets together.

A: “How was that phone call this afternoon?”

B: “It was great. He’s doing well.”

A. had heard about the phone call from looking at B’s facebook status.

To look at social media as a new evangelism tool, just like broadcasting was viewed, misses one of the core values of social media: transparent interaction. Rather than thinking of social media (facebook, twitter, myspace, youtube, blogs, flickr) as a new broadcasting tool, churches are probably wisest to think of it as a way to live life together away from Sunday morning, to live in the community as a community, like churches that make a difference usually do.

There are some cautionary notes, however.

• We can’t fall into believing that this way is the best way, that people not on Facebook are somehow missing out. In fact, congregations using social media have to be more aware than ever of the need to be redundant, to provide key information in as many forms as possible, to foster communication and communion wherever possible.

• We have to remember that what is online is a search away. I have chuckled sadly at the times I have read online comments about how to reach people on the Internet, how to convert “lost people.” There has been a complete lack of understanding that those “lost people” can read what is being said about them.

• Social media is a place where the new is addictive. I spend time bouncing from platform to platform wondering if there is something new, if someone said something that I need to respond to. This fear of missing out (FOMO) is an addiction of sorts. Of course, people probably spent too much time chatting in front of Grabill Hardware, too. But no one ever thought the answer was to tear the porch off.

Technology is not relationship. Jesus did not talk about technologies, he talked about people. However, it the technology allows more frequent interaction, even about the details of life, then maybe we can build the same kind of community that happened in the early days of our congregation.

——————–

For more on online/offline as a difference on tools rather than a difference between real life/fake life, see Liz Strauss’s wonderful post Online Culture: is your definition out of date?.

For history on Grabill, Indiana see Grabill.net.

Grabill Missionary Church is on facebook at www.facebook.com/grabillmissionary.

That’s how much of the year is gone.

Six months. Seems like years. Seems like days.

I decided to give the two of us a way to evaluate these six months. I hope it helps.  Pour yourself a cup of coffee (or something) and sit on the deck and let’s reflect a bit.

—————————————————–

1. I actually know more about these three people than I did 6 months ago.

________                  ________                       ________

1a. And here are three things I know about them.

2. If I add my blogs posts together, I have written this many words that wouldn’t otherwise be written: ______

3. Though I wish I’d done more, I have to admit that I’ve given this much _________ (time, money, stuff) to help other people.

4. Though it isn’t as much as I think it should be, I have talked to God _____________ times  and I stopped to listen _____________ times.

5. I’ve read about ____ (#)  topics.  ___% of them had nothing to do with my job.

6. I have told _______ and _______ how much I care about them _______ times a ________ (day/week/year).

7.  Six months ago I didn’t know how to __________ and now I do.

8.  Though the list keeps growing, I have to admit that I’ve crossed at least ______ items off my to do list every _____ (day/week/month).

Bonus: Go back and write the numbers and phrases and people that you want to be able to list on December 30.

Air keeps you alive. Heroin does, too.
When you go without both you get twitchy.
When you go without both you might die.
More accurately, when you go without air, you will die.
When you go without heroin, you want to die. For awhile.
You feel like you are dying. for awhile.
No one lives without air.
Most people live without heroin.
And the ones who don’t slowly die.

———

Is my twitter/facebook/email/text/rss/twitter/facebook/email/txt/rss/twitter stream air?

or heroin?

I am not a Facebook person.

I’ll acknowledge that I did stay up to 12:01 on June 13 and I did become www.facebook.com/jnswanson, but that is just about keeping my brand intact (email, twitter, flickr, tumblr, and other things that no longer exist). But I have been much more connected to social media platforms outside Facebook.

When I have come inside the pages of The Book, I have been somewhat frustrated with all the games and quizzes and “how well do you know me.” I have limited the number of people that I have friended, primarily because I lack the energy to connect as well as one ought to with all the people I have known across the years.

This week, however,  I realized that Grabill Missionary Church has to have a page on Facebook (Grabill Missionary Church).

What led to this shift?

1. I keep having conversations with people in real life who are continuing conversations started in status updates. In contrast to the many Twitter conversations I have with people far away, these are intensely local, mixing off and online. We want to be available for those conversations.

2. There are many people who come to our building on Sundays but who miss pieces of what is going on. How we help them catch up is always a challenge. I realized that I keep seeing some of them on Facebook.

3. We have moved from print to an enewsletter, but there are many people who change emails, who seldom check email. While I was trying to figure out how to connect to some of these people, I realized that some of them were my friends on Facebook.

So, after getting some advice on Twitter, we started a page on Thursday. I invited everyone from our congregation that were already my friends. I included a link in our enewsletter.

As of Saturday night, we have 49 friends.

We’ll keep it simple at first. We’ll let people know when the podcast goes up each week We’ll let people know when the enewsletter goes out.  (And if the link is a bit.ly link, I’ll know how many people clicked) We’ll let people know what the next Sunday’s sermon is. We’ve already put up video about worship and service. And we’ve started putting up pictures from the previous week’s events.

A couple final observations.

1. The intention of the page is to help people who are part of the physical congregation stay connected throughout the week. To use unspiritual language, rather than being primarily about external marketing, this is about internal customer service. However, we will be incredibly aware of people who are looking in on Grabill Missionary Church or on church in general.

2. We’ll remember that only some of our congregation attend Facebook. Others attend email, snail mail, small groups, Sunday school, and other communication and fellowship settings. This will force redundancy, which will be healthy.

3. We’ll stay focused on people rather than platforms. Our passion is not on connecting to new technologies. Our passion is connecting people to God and to each other. This new page will probably help. But if it doesn’t, we’ll blow it up.

So what do you think? Are we thinking about this the right way?

If you know me, you know I drink coffee. I talk about drinking coffee. I take pictures of coffee mugs. I always have a coffee mug within three feet of my hand. (At this moment, I have my feet on my desk and so have two feet within three feet of nine mugs (only one is active)).  I even have a domain for coffee mugs.

It started because I needed something to drink when I started college teaching more than two decades ago. I liked coffee. I decided to take coffee to class with me every day (rather than the usual water.)

Over the past 25 years, I have no idea how many presentations, lectures, conversations, counseling appointments, essays, sermons, blog posts, trips, hospital visits, video productions, concerts, and quiet moments have been accompanied by a mug of coffee.

So what does that have to do with Hannah Montana?

Two things.

1. A friend and his family were on vacation. They saw this mug on clearance in a shop in the Outer Banks. They decided I needed it. While I had never thought that I needed a Hannah Montana mug, they were partly right. I, like all of us, needed to be given a Hannah Montana mug, an action that acknowledged the kind of relationship that knows what I like well enough to gently mock it.

That is delightful.

2. Though I know little about Miley Cyrus (an actor) and Hannah Montana (a role), I know that the former is somewhat reluctant to release the latter. The latter is how the former became known. The former (who is only 16) will likely be known for many of the years that will follow for her four year role as the latter. That kind of branding, similar to my coffee brand, can be challenging. A role, a part, a job, a mug can become the shorthand for a person. When we do that, we reduce them, we flatten them, we may even discount them.

That isn’t delightful.

I will, on occasion, drink from my Hannah mug, though probably not when preaching or teaching. I will remember the friendship that brought me the mug and pray that I remember to not commoditize Miley–or anyone.

Including you.

I’ve known Chris Brogan for several years. We met in the comments on a post. We see each other a couple times a year, we talk in between.

Chris and Julian Smith have a book coming out in August, 2009  called Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust. Chris and I have talked about the book occasionally, but it didn’t begin to resonate for me until the two of them presented the key points of Trust Agents at SOBcon 09. I began to understand that this book is going to have impact on what I do, working as I do in an area that both needs and lacks trust.

I decided that in anticipation of the book, I’d ask Chris some questions about what I’m hearing about the book and the concept of trust agents.

Chris graciously agreed.

Here’s our (email) conversation.

Jon: I didn’t like the name “trust agents” the first time heard it. (or the second, or third or fourth). However, I’m finally coming around to it. Is that part of the trust part of a trust agent? That they are the kind of people that, though you may not agree with what they say at first, there is enough relationship that you stick around to listen?

Chris: I’m presuming that no one will actually seek this title directly. It’s like “guru” that way. No one sensible *wants* to be called a guru, because it’s a presumptuous term. A trust agent is that kind of person who knows how to build and maintain relationships through the online medium, and who shares those relationships with those he or she trusts. These people make great conduits for how businesses can rehumanize the web. If you and I are to trust a person like this, it means they have to have demonstrated some signs that draw our comfort levels open a bit.

A trust agent doesn’t presume to be a guru or any kind of ultimate expert. Instead, they are the connector of good things. They are the humans who relate to you in a way that you prefer, and who are the keepers of knowledge about resources. It’s not what you know; it’s who you know, and how you connect that information to others.

Jon: In a video you talked about trust agents being at the elbow of connections. However, I’m guessing that part of what trust agents do is build connections between people without having to be an ongoing part of those relationships. For example, across our relationship, you’ve introduced me to a circle of other people like-hearted to me. We have ongoing conversations, ongoing projects, that don’t include you (They don’t exclude you, but you are no longer pivotal to their growth.) Do I understand that right?

Chris: You’ve got it right. Being at the elbow of every deal simply means being the person who gets the relationship started. I can’t scale as it is. Imagine if I felt that I had to be the center of every relationship. I would be knotted up within weeks. Instead, I love finding the right ingredients in other people, stirring those together, and then getting out of the way. Brilliant and meaningful experiences happen all the time without me there. I just try to get those started before I move on, such that there are new interactions that had nothing to do with me.

Jon: I just performed a wedding for our nephew. (not yours and mine, Nancy and Mine). I tweetsourced part of my message, and then put the whole message back on my blog. I was thinking about how much context was needed for parts of that message to make sense. I thought, “almost everything I say out loud (preaching, teaching) I want to be so suited to that audience that context is needed for anyone else.” How does that fit with the Trust Agent idea of writing everything down, capturing it digitally?

Chris: Our idea of “putting it all on paper” is to say that there are all these moments that are useful that should be captured. It started from the premise of how sales works on the web. Marketing for a product the old way meant being there all the time. It meant that once the lights were dark, the sales stopped. Now replace ’sales’ with ‘useful information’ and you can see why having information captured can mean so much more. People sharing an important event might be able to convey the importance of that event to others who can’t be there physically.

In your line of work, it means bringing the Word out to people who might not be able to make it to a place of worship in person. I love this usage. I think it’s a great way to express the value of sharing relationships out in the open.

Jon: A guy named Andrew had a brother named Peter. After Andrew heard about Jesus, he went and told Peter “This is the guy.” Later, when there were 20,000 people without food, Andrew is the one who said, “Here’s a kid that brought a sack lunch. What can you do with sardines and biscuits?” I’m guessing that Andrew did lots of linking but other people got the credit for significant influence.

Do trust agents have to be widely known or are they often just widely, but quietly, influential? Can we get misled by number of readers rather than paying attention to which readers we have?

Chris: Ah, here’s where I get my Venn diagrams all messed up. Trust agents don’t have to be famous or in the spotlight, but they have to be trusted. Famous people aren’t necessarily trust agents. Some trust agents are as famous as they are gifted at being a trust agent. The Andrews of the world, someone like my friend @Ed on Twitter, are a powerful trust agents who never seems to get to the shining lights of the stage. He deserves more praise than many famous people, but doesn’t exactly get it. But he’s a more powerful trust agent than some famous folks I know. [Jon: I agree completely about @ed]

To the other point, yes. Numbers are rarely a great measure. Sometimes, numbers allow a faster end to a search, but the numbers are never as good as the distilled goodness of finding and building relationships with those who are most connected to your interests, your passions, and your desires. Note that I don’t have the requirement of preserving the entire flock. I can cull. Your mileage may vary.

Jon: Do people set out to be trust agents or do they just set out to do well, to be effective at whatever they are doing?

Chris: I think people set out to do well, and those who can blend a powerful ability to work with people with a strong sense of how to use the web’s latest tools get a better shot at being trust agents. It’s not that we all want the same things, but those of us who learn how to make their own game instead of following a preset path will have a better chance. Those who choose to be one of us instead of standing apart will have a better chance. Those who know how to use leverage, how to network, how to be a good person at heart, and how to work well with others will be the best of the trust agents. It’s my own aspiration. We wrote the book to try and help others see the same thing.

————–

Trust Agents isn’t released but is available for preorder at Amazon – Trust Agents (disclosure: this link orders it from my Amazon store, allowing me to earn a bit toward SOBcon 10) or at Barnes and Noble.

Photo courtesy Chris Brogan

Given as the message at the wedding of my nephew and his fiance, June 19, 2009. Part of it was crowdsourced through an invitation on Thursday.

—————

Here we are.

All those people watching, they are ready to get to the “for better, for worse” and the “Ladies and gentleman, Mr and Mrs.”

I understand. I am too.

But this is a big deal. So I want to talk to you two a bit more, and then to them and then we’ll get to the promises and the party.

When we were talking a couple weeks ago,  I said that I didn’t understand the faith that it takes to be a farmer. Every year, a farmer takes their whole life and buries it in the ground. And if it is a good year, then life is good. And if it’s a bad year, with storms at just the wrong time, then life is stretching.

And then I started thinking about what I could say to you, what would help you think about today differently.

And I realized that I do understand the faith that it takes to be a farmer.

Here’s a bag of dirt. [I handed Adam a plastic bag of dirt]  It comes from land that you know well, Adam. Your mom knows it better. Your grampa knows it even better. It’s part of the second Kies farm.

[Note: The Kies family has owned a farm in Hillsdale county Michigan for 175 years. They have owned a second farm, the one where Nancy and her twin Jodie, Adam's mother grew up, for more than 50 years. That farm is being farmed by Nancy's dad, brother, and nephew.]

The reason that this farm is being plowed by the third generation of Kies’, the reason the original land is being plowed by more generations of Kies’ that I can count, is the same reason that your marriage can grow.

Generations of Kies’ have taken the dirt, this thing called a field, and they have cared for it.

• In the middle of the summer, when the last thing you want to do is to walk the rows of soybeans pulling up corn from last year you do it. because if you don’t, it will mess up the yield.
• In the winter, when the last thing you want to be doing is riding on a tractor pulling a machine that is throwing manure around, you do it. because you know that it will help the field work better.
• In the fall, you start before sunrise and you work until it’s dark because after you put so much into this field, into this crop, you aren’t gonna let winter take it.

Just owning a field doesn’t make you a farmer. Farming does.

Kids, you are like young farmers being handed your own field. It’s called “Adam and Becci Dobbs.” It is yours. It’s scary. You really don’t know what difference being married is going to make.

And now you get to decide how well this field is going to produce.

You could just throw some seeds in and come back in a few months and see what happened.

Some people do that with their marriages.

They wonder what happened.

But you don’t want that.

• Instead, you can spend time together preparing the soil, talking, walking, breaking through the crust that can form in the busy-ness of life.
• You can pull out the weeds together, the arguments, the ideas other people have about what you ought to be doing, the distractions that pop up.
• You can take turns going out and spreading manure. I know that everyone is coming up with their own images of that…but those of us who are married know that there are things that you have to do that are miserable, but help the relationship grow. Spending the night up with a sick child. Cleaning up more than your side of the room. Incredibly unromantic things.
• In the crisis times, you can be working side by side, bailing out the basement, holding each other when someone dies or someone is attacking your reputation or your job.

People will tell you how to take care of your field. People do that to farmers all the time.

Last night, when we were rehearsing, I said that i was asking the internet for what to say. Some people laughed. I was serious.

I asked a lot of my online friends what to say.

And they answered.

• have fun together. Play. laugh.
• tell them not to be so serious in serious times, not to be so happy in happy times. tell them to Have Fun Together.
• It’s easy to call it quits. It’s harder to stick it out. So put on your armor to survive the MANY challenges a marriage faces.
• Tell them to always be kind to each other.
• Complete Honesty. Sense of humor. Lots of intimacy
• That the deepest measure of love is choice!
• Chose to love every day. You don’t get to be angry because they are angry and you don’t get to mad because they are mad. You get to love.
• After 40 years of marriage (May 30), there are several key words. I’m sorry! (and mean it) I forgive you (and mean it)

[Note: I had many more responses, but I was already talking too long. So I edited.]

Lots of people have lots of suggestions that are very good. Lots of people will be very happy to tell you how to live.

But here’s the deal.

You, Adam, are the only one, starting in a few minutes, whose job is Becky. You, Becky, are the only one, starting in a few minutes, whose job is Adam.

When you make these promises to each other, God is handing you the responsibility to care about and to care for each other. And to break all the rest of those responsibilities that people think they have.

We can support them taking care of each other, but we, parents, family, friends, have to let go of being the ones who run our kids lives.

One year from tonight, I will look at a young couple as say those same words, as a parent of half of that couple. And I will understand how hard that is. But it is still true.

If you have any questions about this marriage, questions about how right they are for each other, dismiss those questions right now. If you are looking forward to probing, to hearing about what Adam did or what Rebecca said, let your dream of divisiveness vanish. For when they leave their families, they are turning to each other. And as I have told them, if you hear about the problem but not the reconciliation, you will be cheering against them, and they don’t need that at all.

What they need is for each of us to encourage, to pray, to celebrate, to rejoice and weep with them.

What they need—is to be married.

Tomorrow night (June 19), I am doing the wedding ceremony for our nephew and his fiance. I just tweeted the question, “what should I tell the couple?” I immediately got some wonderful replies, about honesty, about laughter, about relationship.

So I decided to ask you.

If you could have 2 minutes to talk to a couple getting married these days, what would you say to them? If you had 140 characters, what would they be?

Want to help me write my message to the couple? What should I tell Adam and Becky?

I called someone yesterday. I got an answering machine. I said “I’m calling to follow up on ___. Give me a call. You have the number.”

She does have the number. She called it in the first place. But she has three little children. I made a big assumption.

I send a friend Bible verses occasionally, online. I usually include the reference.

It is to a man’s honor to avoid strife, but every fool is quick to quarrel.  Proverbs 20:3

That’s because he might want to look at the context. Of course, the messages are received online and there are much easier, for him, ways to find the context.  Like this, for example: http://bit.ly/6f8A

If you want to help someone find you or find something, use language they understand and give them the numbers they need.