How-To

Learning from parallel visions

By Justin Long ⋅ November 3, 2009 ⋅ Email This Post Email This Post ⋅ Print This Post Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Most people who are reading this blog know that I tweet. A lot. In fact, I tweet even more now, because I have discovered a plugin for Wordpress, which powers my blog, that links my Tweets to the blog. So where I used to tweet sporadically and post a lot of “links elsewhere,” now I spend all of my scanning time posting links to twitter which are automatically funneled into the right place on the blog. Nice, streamlined, efficient.

I tweet for three reasons. First, I will never be able to think of everything or experience everything. Lots of other people out there are experiencing and learning and sharing things that have direct bearing on the concept of swarming. I teach and promote this idea because I believe it is the ideal way for people to build simple low-cost sustainable highly-effective teams that can reach the unreached. So I scan for “links elsewhere” and post them for my readers’ benefit.

Second, I tweet because it helps, as do my blog entries, to share my vision and plausible promise. Every time I tweet, every time you retweet my tweet, the idea of missions, of reaching the unreached, of finishing the Great Commission, of how this really can be done, of how plausible this promise really is, gets out there. So I tweet to teach, and I tweet to publicize.

Finally, third, I tweet to build community. Most of the people that I retweet are known to me. They share my vision and my passion. I want to give them a greater voice, and let more people know what they are doing, because I believe it is worthwhile. In turn, they often retweet me. We don’t usually tweet on the same specific visions, but they are related.

Vision + Relationship = Swarming. Or at least the first two measures of it.

1.

I collect friends. It’s what I’ve gotten pretty good at doing, without even knowing it. It’s funny, because I’m actually on the Myers-Brigg scale a heavy “I”—Introvert. Often, for every hour that I spend with someone, I need to spend a significant amount of time alone to recharge my batteries. But I do love being with people, too. I love learning about them, love hearing their passions, love understanding things. If I didn’t have the vision that I have, I’d probably have been an ethnographer. One of the funnest things I ever did was to delve deep into Chinese culture while we were in Southeast Asia and learn all sorts of little intricacies.

One of the friends I have recently collected is Rob Edwards. He’s a pastor of a Baptist church here in Tidewater, working in a small urban enclave. If you’re ever with Rob, driving around the neighborhood, what’s fascinating is how his heart, vision, passion just rush out. He will be citing statistics, pointing out the six different house styles in the neighborhood, talking about demographics, ministry options, ideas, you name it. Rob is the kind of guy who you know—this guy just isn’t meant to be a cross-cultural missionary to some African or Asian nation: he has found the vision and calling God has given him.

Rob and I met via twitter. We followed each other because we were both tweeting things that were interesting to each other. One day he DM’d me (direct message, a private message for those of you not on twitter!) to say he was a friend of a friend and could we get together. We did, for coffee, and one of the things he began telling me about was the Angelfood Ministries program that his church was part of. This was a fascinating ministry to me—a sort of food distribution coop for the poor, where people can buy food at a very reduced price—but even more was the sort-of swarmish network he was developing and the vast number of spin off ministries that were available. And, also, his heart for his neighborhood.

I have another friend—whom I don’t think I’ve ever actually met in person! Pat Noble is a missionary mobilizer in upstate New York. She used to be with Caleb Project and now is with Pioneers. Pat’s passion is for mobilization but also for international students. She is, right now, deep in the middle of hosting what is an annual international student dinner. She and I spent an hour or so on the phone today, talking about the prototype swarm they were developing.

A third friend, Nell Green, is with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. We don’t know each other as well yet, but she’s been in several webinars I’ve hosted. Nell’s been working with CBF churches to reach out to internationals in their cities. And yet another friend, Angela Zimmerman, shares my focus on unreached peoples – and yet she is also seeking to do something about the homeless in her city.

Do you see a pattern?

2.

Because I tweet and write specifically about my vision and the ways I am trying to fulfill it, I have seen people ‘attracted’ to me who share the same vision and methodology. While they may not share specifically my vision, they have something parallel, and our methodologies can therefore be parallel.

We can learn from each other. Rob is, through experience, developing a very useful strategy for using a food distribution ministry to bless his community, and also to innovate his way to several new parallel strategies. Pat is using a dinner to bless international students—so her strategy for hosting a dinner might be useful to Rob, who is looking for innovative strategies around food. It would almost certainly likewise be useful to Nell, who is not necessarily seeking to reach only international students, but also other internationals. And Rob’s ministry of food (as well as the idea of a sit down dinner) could be useful to Angela, who is reaching out to the homeless.

Second-degree connections—friends-of-a-friend—will sometimes yield people who are directly interested in your plausible promise or your values. But they can also yield just as fruitful connections: people you can share with and learn from. The key to this is being willing to read someone’s tweets, someone’s blog, or have a phone conversation, and really deeply listen to what they are doing. Once you understand their passion, what they are doing, and why they are doing it,  you may see parallels, cross-overs, and even be able to “contextualize” their strategies to your own situation.

The next important step is to write down your strategies, and to share them with others in some kind of system where people can make modifications and suggestions. For example, I am opening a page in the Missiopedia for swarming, where I hope to begin collecting “Teachable Behaviors” and “Modular Strategies.” (The page is http://www.strategicnetwork.org/wiki/Swarming). If you don’t use our site, perhaps you can find a similarly useful place to post material—a wiki of your own, a shared Google Doc, etc. Such a respository enables you and friends to not just share your strategies but to co-edit them, improving them over time, and to spin off new strategies.

For example, if Pat can document how they do an international student dinner, she can share that with Rob, Nell and Angela. Nell could modify it a bit to be useful for any internationals. Rob could modify it further to be useful for a community of urban poor. Rob’s modification could very well be useful to Angela, who is looking for ways to help the homeless. Rob & Angela’s modifications, for use amongst urban poor and homeless, might then be useful to others, in other countries, who are likewise working among the urban poor, international students, and the homeless.

3.

There are three key takeaways here for those interested in swarms:

  • Know what your vision and promise are. These are the things that drive and motivate you. They keep your focus pure. As one of our participants said yesterday in our Vision webinar, “You have to be able to choose between good, better, and best things. Sometimes that involves saying no to other things.” You can do this if you know beyond a shadow of a doubt what your purpose is.
  • Share them! They are worth sharing! The thing that God calls you to do is not worth “less” than the thing God calls anyone else to do. Rob’s God-given vision for a small poor inner city urban area of Portsmouth, Va. is not less important or worth less than my vision for 58,000 teams or any vision by any other friend for some least-reached region of Asia or Africa. Share your vision so others can find you. Modern technology makes it easier than ever to find people who share your vision—but only if both sides are talking about it.
  • Look for people who are equally committed to their vision, who are doing things, particularly for visions that are tangentially related to yours. Don’t just look for people who are doing what you’re interested in. They likely won’t have uniquely different answers that may help you. If you’re working among international students, hunt up people that are working with international businesspeople, or students, or migrants, or what have you. Learn from them. Don’t fear that you are going to be drawn off course. Keep your passion alive, but learn from other people.
  • Be willing to share your ideas, your ministry methods, your strategies. You’re not here to build a multi-million dollar empire. You’re here to solve a problem. Share your strategy and ask others to share strategies in return. See how you can contextualize, modify, fit. Share your changes.

When you do these things, and you share with others, you’d be surprised: it’s nearly inevitable that a swarm will form. And problems will get solved, too!

Follow me online – http://twitter.com/nsmjustinlong – and you’ll see me RT (retweet) the folks I’ve mentioned above – as well as many others. Tweet and share with me your vision, your promise, your actions, and I’ll probably share yours as well! Come be part of a community focused on the least-reached of the world!

Print This Post

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed:

Discussion

No comments for “Learning from parallel visions”

Post a comment

Readers who viewed this page, also viewed: