The Oates Journal (ISSN: 1098-1446) is a publication of the Wayne E. Oates Institute addressing issues related to spirituality, ethics, and healing from the perspective of pastoral care and counseling.

As we move deeper into our journey as pastoral leaders in the digital age, let’s start by looking at some of the transitions we are encountering in terms of the ways that we work, learn, and socialize.

I have been reading Don Tapscott’s latest book, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation Is Changing Your World (2009). In this he is following up on his two prior books, Growing Up Digital (1997) and Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006), and reporting on the findings of a $4M corporately funded research project studying what we can expect as the Net Generation, those who have grown up with personal computers and the Internet, enters the workforce. His work dovetails very nicely with the work being done by Henry Jenkins with Comparative Media Studies at MIT (Convergence Culture, 2007) and John Palfrey (Harvard) and Urs Glasser (University of St. Gallen, Switzerland) in Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives (2008). While we still have some options for isolating ourselves in closed off enclaves, for most of us the future that is emerging is our present and it is significantly different from our past.

The notion of living amid massive and rapid change is not new to us. We have been feeling the leading edges of this front for some time. At the beginning of this decade my colleague, Dr. Vicki Hollon, and I set out to identify some of the major change forces that were driving and energizing the cultural transitions that are setting the tone for the future. We saw basically four forces: the collapse of distance, shifting worldviews, the advent of digital technologies, and the explosion of new information. These are basically the same forces that energized the watershed cultural transitions during the 16th century that spun humankind off in a new direction; the age of enlightened rationalism.

At this end of the decade, one force has emerged as influencing the other three more significantly and accelerating us into a new age of digitally interconnected convergence. With the advent of Web 2.0 applications the Web evolved from being a broadcast medium (the information highway) to being a fully interactive and convergent medium. We are awash in the bits and bytes of interconnected networks, new metaphors for conceptualizing our reality, and new public squares surrounded by virtual communities. The population of Facebook alone now exceeds 200 million. At the same time, our companies, organizations, and congregations are being infused by a generation of highly energetic, highly connected, highly innovative collaborators. And as they enter the workforce and leadership roles within our organizations, congregations, and community, we are also facing significant dissonance between how prior generations approach work and how they approach work. They approach work as a game; concerns seeking creative approaches that are fun, meaningful, innovative, and collaborative while utilizing the best tools and technologies currently available.

Let me share a YouTube video with you to illustrate some of the transitions and pace of transitions. This is a derivative remix of a repurposed presentation that was originally done for an Iowa school board to demonstrate the challenges that we are seeking to address with our schools in this century. As the future emerges it is common, particularly among the Net Gens, to use prior works to create new variations and new works (derivatives) by remixing and adding new elements and then redistributing them with a new purpose or audience. This one is a 2008 remix of “Shift Happens.”

As we look at the transitions that are emerging, one thing to keep in mind is that this is also the generation of “Yes, we can.” They are ready to engage collaboratively, openly, energetically, and creatively. In his latest book, Don Tapscott shares how Net Gens are coming into the workplace and our various organizations energized around eight defining norms or values. We will talk more about these down the road, but he identifies these as their expectation for (1) freedom in everything, (2) the opportunity to customize, (3) transparency and the opportunity to scrutinize, (4) corporate integrity and openness, (5) every part of their life to include entertainment and play (work, education, and social life), (6) collaboration and relationships (they expect to engage and participate), (7) speed in everything (not just video games), and (8) opportunities to innovate (which also means the opportunity to risk failure). They also have demographic numbers, talent, and the courage to act.

The emerging generation is bringing new approaches to leadership, new ways to contribute, and new ways to create value. In his previous book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006), Tapscott shares four new leadership ideas that this generation is bringing to the table along with their expectations to participate. The ideas are openness, peering, sharing, and acting globally; and these merit sufficient description to come back to them in a future column.

In the midst of conversations at last week’s Festival of Theology at Louisville Seminary on New Ways of Being Church, I was reminded that we also are seeing transitions emerge in our theological starting points. This fall Phyllis Tickle’s new book, Great Emergence: How Christianity Is Changing and Why, called attention to this with a recognition that the transitions we are in the midst of during the next 500 year transition are similar to that experienced during the reformation era. During this time of transition we are seeing a shift in theological starting points from the Great Commission to the Great Commandment, from an angry God in need of atoning appeasement to a loving God inviting created beings to join in collaborative co-creating, from a perspective of dominating and consuming the world’s resources to developing sustainable and regenerative approaches to all created being, and from the authority of scripture alone (the sola scriptura, scriptura sola of the Reformation) to the collective experience of God in relationship.

In the midst of conversations about all of these transitions, people keep asking me if there is hope for tomorrow, whether our children will have faith, and whether the Church will continue to exist. Yes, yes, and yes; it is just going to look different than what we have known up to this point. And here we intersect with our exploration of Theory U as an avenue for leading from the future as it emerges rather than trying to adapt to all of these transitions by downloading and deploying our solutions from the past.

Next up: Just in time learning.

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