A Whole New World

 I've talked about personal improvement.  I like to think of that as maybe discipleship.  But I promised I'd talk about group improvement, too.  This is what I'm calling ministry.  There are several angles I want to take with this one.  

The first has to do with one of the values I've already talked about: stewardship.  People are worth investing in.  They'll surprise you.  I know they surprise me, because if I'm honest, I don't often like people very much or have high expectations of them.  That's why they end up surprising me so often.  But most pastors and teachers will tell you, invest in your people and you'll enjoy the returns.  This is why I feel like cutting edge education technologies, like Montessori-like methods and MOOCS are worth investing in, because they create growing returns.  Churches owe it to their communities to provide quality, top notch schooling to their communities, preferably free of charge.  I think financing is another way they can support their communities.  This has to do with entrepreneurship.  Especially in communities of BIPOC's, career advancement might be limited if they want to go the usual route of working their ways up a corporate ladder.  Good jobs are pretty hard to find for some minorities.  Offering small business loans means entrepreneurs can always work for themselves and their families.  In this way, churches might owe it to their communities to start credit unions.  

The second angle I want to take in regards to group improvement is memetics.  I've touched on this before, using the biblical model of the Body of Christ as my inspiration.  I've found some of the clearest definitions and explanations for memetics in the book Virus of the Mind.  A meme is an idea, and in the human mind, these are broken down into three basic building blocks: the distinction meme, which categorizes things; the strategy meme, which is a kind of response to any given input; and the association meme, which is really about tying multiples of the others together.  Several distinction memes build up so you can get a better picture of something more complex.  Several strategy memes build up so you know what your doing in complex situations.  And combining each of those can give someone great flexibility in many situations.  The book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions gives a pretty good picture of what a lot of memes together look like.  In that book, it's called a paradigm.  Memes are cultural analogs to genes.  What a gene does for biological systems, a meme does for social/cultural systems.  You can have a single celled organism that has genes that it uses by itself to navigate the world, like bacteria, or algae, or yeasts.  So you could conceivably be a single person using your ideas to make your way on your own, like people on desert islands or something.  Things get really interesting when you have organisms comprised of thousands, millions, billions, or even trillions of cells.  They use the genes and real time communication with each other to figure out how they're supposed to specialize and how they're supposed to fit in with the rest of the organism.  Equally, things get really interesting in social groups when you have many people using the same set of memes and real time communication to create the cultural equivalent to an organism: an organization.

I've thought for years about what memes create a healthy Body of Christ.  When a human body has cells that don't follow the genetic code, you get something like an autoimmune disease, cancer, or, at best, allergies.  Genetic disorders are generally pretty hard to cure.  I feel like the Body of Christ is riddled with analogs to cancer, and autoimmune disease, and even allergies.  With genetic disorders, there's a treatment that is still experimental that promises to not just alleviate the symptoms, but cure the disorder, called genetic engineering.  The same is true for memetic disorders in the Church: there is a potential treatment that won't just live with the symptoms, but cure the disorders; memetic engineering.  There's really just so much you could do with this particular lens in application to the Body of Christ.  I'll come back to it in later posts.  I want to touch on the last thing that I think about when I think about group improvement.

Collective intelligence.  This of course, can be easily nested inside memetic theory as it applies to the Body of Christ, but I also like to look at it for its own merits.  Collective intelligence promises a few things, the first being a higher intelligence.  We have for so long trusted in the decisions of individuals in the Church's history.  This means men like Moses, David, even Paul the Apostle, Popes, and televangelists, have all had the burden of interpreting not only Scripture for the rest of us, but in directing where the billions of Church members worldwide are aimed.  This is so limiting, since God's mind is so much higher and vaster than any human's.  I suppose it's like looking at the world through a pinhole camera: it can suffice for basic work, but when you try to view God's will and world through the eyes of just one person, you're left with something inverted and fuzzy.  Collective intelligence is like high fidelity: you get extreme definition when you use all the pixels.  You could even get something holographic, if you let all the different projections interfere with each other.  This is the promise of collective intelligence.  Of course, it requires figuring out just how best to generate that collective intelligence, as well as make sure the components of it are programmed with the memes of Christ.  In this way, you can ape the mind of God better than any one person can ever do it.  There are also plenty of things to be said about this, and I will be coming back to it in a later post, but that's the end goal of group improvement, in my mind.  Using a collective intelligence to govern the Church.  

That's it for now.  I think I've touched on a bunch of different ideas.  God is a collective, and having been made in his image, we are social beings.  So, we can't just leave others as we go and try to improve ourselves.  We have to take others with us as we climb.