Amidst politics, websites

After three months at my new job, I finally have something to show for it: three new websites!

The Network is thick with politics, both internal and external. Some of the politics are ugly, some are fine. Watching it all is deeply fascinating, and I finally get why Woodiwiss and Hauerwas [geek note: Plone site!] kept talking about the Church as political, as concerned with power.

Human associations are abstractions, and the purpose of abstraction is always the magnification of power: we associate to accomplish things we never could alone. As constituent objects of these abstractions, humans wield greater or lesser power depending on their function. Association brings certain properties of the individual person to the fore--our capacities for cooperation, persuasion, competition, greed, coercion, malice, etc.--while our individual identity is necessarily lost. Briefly, then, our scale language opens up a whole range of questions for politics/ecclesiology, surely the most central of which is how the inter-personal ethic of the Sermon on the Mount applies on any larger-than-personal scale.

That's a teaser on applying scale language. The immediate upshot for my work is that because our main website carries so much political freight, we've decided to focus for the time being on a series of stand-alone websites. The three we just launched are for church planting, evangelism, and missions--three of our five so-called "ministry initiatives." Let me know what you think! Feed back to Chad Whitacre.