I read an interesting article today about “The Duct-Tape Programmer“, definitely worth the read. Here are a couple of my favorite excerpts:
Duct tape programmers are pragmatic. Zawinski popularized Richard Gabriel’s precept of Worse is Better. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it.
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Sure, there’s nothing officially wrong with trying to write multithreaded code in C++ on Windows using COM. But it’s prone to disastrous bugs, the kind of bugs that only happen under very specific timing scenarios, because our brains are not, honestly, good enough to write this kind of code. Mediocre programmers are, frankly, defensive about this, and they don’t want to admit that they’re not able to write this super-complicated code, so they let the bullies on their team plow away with some godforsaken template architecture in C++ because otherwise they’d have to admit that they just don’t feel smart enough to use what would otherwise be a perfectly good programming technique FOR SPOCK. Duct tape programmers don’t give a [expletive] what you think about them. They stick to simple basic and easy to use tools and use the extra brainpower that these tools leave them to write more useful features for their customers.
While this article was specifically about coding, it is leading me on a rabbit trail which I want to pursue in the realms of leadership and productivity. Alas, that will need to be written another day.
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I got the pleasure for the last week of playing tour guide for my friends Ryan and Laura Ho. They came into town to check out the city, find out more about our church plant and team and whatnot. It was a thrilling week that left me exhausted as it felt like there were so many conversations and things we wanted to do while they were in town. All in all it was a really great week.
I’m including a couple pictures from the weekend, one of our CA Info Dessert on Friday and a few of hanging out downtown with Ryan, Laura and Desirae (also involved in the church plant).
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There’s been a lot of print in the Christian blogosphere lately on the topic of multisite, video-venue churches. I am officially against them, though I have never blogged about it, I have put out some thoughts on comments of other blogs. So while there may be nothing original about my problems with video venues, I would like to lay them out.
Pastoral Concerns
Perhaps more than anything else, I have major worries about the pastoral nature of sermons. If sermons are being piped in to different locations, the sermon very quickly moves from a pastoral role concerned with applying scripture to issues being faced in community life to something generic. Especially as video venues become translocal, there is no way the all-star preacher can be connected to the things happening in community life at all the different gatherings. As part of this, I am convinced that a sermon that is all exposition and missing pastoral contextualization is not good enough.
On these same lines, I think that it hurts our church understanding of pastors. Video venues advance the idea of professional Christians, that there are some people who we pay to be experts at the Christian thing. It perpetuates a fictional divide between clergy and laity, a division that need not exist in the way we perpetuate. If our focus in just on how good a certain speaker is, or how talented they are, it further points to an archetype that all pastors should strive after – the message to young pastors like myself becomes “if you want to be successful as a pastor, you must be like Mark Driscoll, Rob Bell, or _________.” I firmly believe we need to be moving the other way, communicating that there is much less of a difference between those of us in leadership and those who aren’t but that are a part of our church communities.
Missional Misgivings
From a missional perspective, I have major fears about what such an emphasis on the sermon means to our understanding of church. Isn’t the assumption of video venues “if we just have a better communicator, more entertaining sermon, more engaging speaker people will come”? This sort of thought is the very opposite of being on mission, where we try to shift from “come to us” to “go to them.”
And on this point, who primarily are we going to be attracting by piping in a better sermon? It seems to me the primary people drawn by this approach are people who are already Christians, who have been programmed to think of church as a provider of religious goods and services, where you just need to find who suits your needs best. Once again, this is the opposite of being on mission.
Celebrity Culture
Thirdly, I have a fear of this as being a furthering of our cultural value of celebrities. A brief examination of the last 20 years of American church shows there’s a danger of developing people into celebrity pastors, how many stories have we heard of various types of failings with the celebrity pastors we create? I obviously want to hope for the best here, I’m certainly not hoping that anyone falls, but there’s something that happens as one becomes more and more of a celebrity, where they get more power and less accountability because of their fame.
Alright, that’s it for now. What do you think about video venues? Am I giving them a bad rap? Are they actually a good thing? Or do you agree with me that there are dangers? Let you opinion be heard in the comments.
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actually the only reason I would with an older phone would be to make it work without the phone 