Buried Treasure

I was reading again in Alan Hirsch's, book The Forgotten Ways.

With all of the information available to us AND sources from which to attain it, we (our staff) continue to ask ourselves, "How can we communicate with our students and leaders without being just one more indistinct sound in the cacophony?" (OK, so we usually say it more like, "Why the heck doesn't anyone know what's going on?!)

So, as we have experimented with multiple aspects of effective communication...this thought from Hirsch has stuck with me this week:

"...because systems exist in a mass of disordered information, the task of leadership here will be to help select the flow of information and focus the community around it. Not in order to dominate and try to predetermine the outcome, but rather to supply accurate and meaningful information to the systems so that it can in-form itself in response to it."

SO, here are some decisions we've been thinking through within our own structure of a network of community groups:

1. What are the essential things to communicate?
2. How do we focus the whole community towards those things?
3. If we do get their attention, what does a community that "in-forms" itself look-like?
   

It seems my role as a pastor in an information age is to help students be more discerning in their inquiry to find more accurate and meaningful information, rather than give them more information...my role may be to point them to buried treasure.