Remixing Faith in the 21st Century

UK' s uber-popular rock-band Radiohead has been making waves since their album OK Computer won "Best Alternative Music Album" of the year in '98. This past fall they kicked everything up a notch whey they recorded, produced, and then distributed their album, In Rainbows, through their website. This was all done with no major industry label backing them. One of the world's biggest band's bypasses the powers-that-be and did it all on their own. And if that was not enough, they left the price of the album up to each customer who could decide how much (or how little) he or she would like to pay for the album. There are many speculations, but no one knows how much money they made or how many albums were downloaded. What we do know is that once the album was released it became one of the best records of 2007.

This past April Radiohead did another thing that sparked imaginations and challenged the preexisting structures of the music industry, yet again. They setup a website and invited people to remix one of their singles, "Nude." Along with the invitation, they released the audio tracks containing the guitars, strings, drums, bass, and vocals through the iTunes music store. They invited people to participate in a contest to see who would make the best remix of their song, all the votes would be made by Radiohead fans (the winning remix received 38568 votes). By looking at remix culture, I think the church can learn something about how creativity and imagination interacts with existing ideas and structures and builds off those resources while also moving beyond them in new ways.

Here's one such example of remix video that's been really popular all over the web (here's what the original sounds like):

Follow up:

A Shift in "Mission"

In recent years our thinking about the church and culture has lead to a development of a mission-informed theology that has helped to re-frame the nature of the church as one rooted in the missio dei (God's mission). If, as the current missiologists have argued, God is at work in the culture around us we ought to, as a community-in-mission, participate in that work. This idea broadens the fairly narrow view of "mission" as preaching a sinner-centric salvation message in order to bring people "in," and challenges the assumption that the church has the corner market on all-things God.

As thinking about mission has shifted, so has our understanding of the word "church." In contrast to the classic New Testament, as well as historic Friends', understanding of church as the peoplehood of God, much of our churches give the perception that it is a building, or a worship service. This has created faith communities that are situated around attraction or "coming" rather than being a people-on-the-move embodying "church" wherever we are. This mentality seeks to bring people out of their culture, God is void in the secular, into the sacred culture of the church and become consumers of our message.

The Rise of Participatory Culture and the Emerging Church

In class my adviser, Ryan Bolger, often tells a story about a pastor of a mega-church in Arizona. One day the pastor, while walking with his son across the campus of the church he built, said, "Son, this is all going to yours someday,” and his son took a step back and responded, “I don’t want anything to do with this kind of Christianity.” It was then that this pastor realized his church was rooted in a boomer culture phenomenon (and has since gone on to rethink their mission as a church). This "mission-station" approach is rooted in a different time and sensibility than that of our younger generations. Theirs is a do-it-yourself culture: sites like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia and open-source community-based software need community cooperation in order to work. These sites represent a rejection of powerful top-down hierarchies where the flow from producer to consumer maintains control, predictability and efficiently. Those influenced by the participatory culture, actively participate in creating where they see need and they do it with or without permission from those in power, they share information and welcome low levels of control, they are highly energetic and creative and they want to be active in shaping their future through a variety of grassroots means.

One example of the church engaging with this participatory culture is the emerging church. I find these groups helpful in describing the possibilities of a church that attempts to be based off a missio dei approach to "mission," where the assumption is that God is already at work in our cultures and the people of God join in that work. In the their book, Emerging Churches, Gibbs and Bolger argue that these groups see the participatory culture as an aspect of where the Kingdom of God is peering through at us. Emerging churches set out to reclaim these the non-hierarchical, community-centered aspects of the Kingdom in live together as the church. Some of the characteristics the authors note that resemble higher levels of participation are (Gibbs and Bolger, 2005: 159-170):

• Worship as a way of life (seven days a week)
• Emphasis on contributing to worship rather than consuming it
• All people are involved with the responsibility for the service
• Giving space for everyone to contribute their stories
• Interactivity and dialogue
• All ages incorporated
• Space for a variety of gifts to be exercised

If remix culture is one way we can name the growing participation and creativity we see on the Web and elsewhere, I expect that we will continue to see more interest in ways to "remix" our faith and practice with old and new elements alike.

Remixing with Tradition and Imagination

Up to this point the focus has largely been on the new things happening in our world. But what about our beloved tradition and history, are we to just throw that out for whatever is new and fashionable? Some would say yes, I would argue absolutely not! It seems to me, convergent Friends, represent one group within the Friends Church encouraging both this kind of creativity and participation as well as holding up the importance of tradition. For them, the Quaker tradition offers the resources needed for the church to move forward. Convergent Friends seek to encounter the newness of our postmodern world within the ongoing narrative structure of the Quaker tradition.

Holding tradition and innovation together is a difficult balancing act, yet I am convinced there is no other way. We see this tension in remix culture as well. Henry Jenkins, MIT's professor of comparative media studies, interviewed Owen Gallagher of TotalRecut (a website setup to raise awareness on remix culture) who touches on this issue of hanging on to the artist's original (tradition) vs. a free-for-all approach (innovation):

The current landscape places too much emphasis on the copyright owner's control over how their content is used and leaves little room for new artists to exercise their rights to freedom of expression. However, a free-for-all where all content is free would result in no compensation for copyright owners, which would mean less incentives for people to produce new creative works. The balanced approach enables copyright owners to make money from their work, but also enables other artists to freely use samples from the entire pool of creative works to express themselves. This contest encourages people to draw inspiration from the culture around them, from the culture they grew up with and to use these images and sounds to produce something innovative with a brand new meaning.

Owen's own call to remix culture encourages a balanced approach for dealing with copy-writes and artistic expression. Inspiration comes from people's natural surroundings, what they are used to and what is a part of their own sense of self, yet all of this builds on original work that acts as the boundaries or resources for the artist. A balanced approach in remix culture keeps copyright owners happy, and artists free to explore; a balanced "convergent" approach is also committed to mothers and fathers of their tradition, while at the same time being free "artists" who want to make their faith meaningful in a new world.

Traditions always have their disputed or rival interpretations. In the same way, what constitutes a true "remix" is also disputed. But these disputes are a part of the whole enterprise, they are the disputes that open us up to new understandings and interpretations - to the peering through of the Kingdom of God. My over-simplification of the options we have before us can be understood as:

1. Free-for-all: Innovation over against tradition (a contextualization that tends towards individualism)
2. Copywrite: Tradition over against any innovation (a conservatism that tends towards separatism)
3. Remix: Tradition as grounds for Innovation and Imagination (a contextualization that borrows the language and resources of our community)

I, and I think convergent Friends, favor this third "remixing" option. This kind of imaginative approach requires creativity and surely change, and only time will tell what this will look like lived out. Let's encouraging this kind of playfulness, creativity and high levels of participation from everyone, reclaiming this lost feature of the Kingdom of God. Participation and creativity is what makes remix culture exciting and work well, and even though it necessitates a "letting go" of control over that original material, this letting go then opens up the possibility for new something new where everyone can get involved.

Where have you sees the church already enacting this kind of remix model? What kinds of creativity and participation would you still like to see happen?