Return of the Tentmaker - Church 2.0 - Carl Raschke

The Return of the Tentmaker gathers this Friday from 10AM - 5PM. Click here for full details.

In addition to the phenomenal sessions (click here for a list), you'll have plenty of opportunity to network with others and find people you can help or who can help you put your vision into action. When you register you'll have an additional opportunity to post your vision or ministry on the website and offer and request help. This is a Web 2.0 creation.

We're also posting some of the interesting comments and feedback on the Chatter and Buzz page - Click Here.

Here is an interview with one of the speakers - Dr. Carl Raschke

Carl shared some of his desires and frustration looking for community within the current church paradigm. During breakfast last week, in Sherman Texas, I asked Carl to unpack his ideas that we called Church 2.0.

"I attend a small church in North Texas. We recently lost our senior pastor and we’re now finding out what holds us together. We are not a traditional church as I see it. Many of those churches focus on serving families with small kids. These churches understand that many parents still feel a need to expose their kids to a positive environment so if the church provides program kids like then the family will come too. But what about the rest of the people; singles, divorced, career people, retired etc. Some of the very large churches have enough resources to address the different demographics – but the trade-off of size and broad programs is often a lack of community.

I’m interested in finding the living church community, not a Sunday event driven church.

George Barna makes some interesting observations in his book “Revolution.” Many are stepping outside the traditional church to connect spiritually. People are looking for smaller contexts for connection. This probably explains why many of malls are dying – people are looking for more than a big box with a large variety of offerings.

Family is transferable but not easily scalable. Our institutions on the other hand have attempted to make it scalable but what they are doing doesn’t really transfer family. It transfers knowledge – a weak substitute.

This whole phenomenon of Web 2.0 intrigues me because people are rediscovering the power to self-organize as community. They’re now called social networks – but it’s a form of community and its growing within and without institutional structures.

We’re going to look more like the web; nodes that are hubs of interaction, connection and a new reciprocity in relationships.

I’m excited about The Return of the Tentmaker because it represents a social network of people looking to serve the Kingdom and connect with one-another in unplanned ways to discover where it might lead. It’s a living thing, not a program or an organization. This experiment will be interesting to watch."