Church and the Interwebs, Part I

I'm about halfway through Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky. It's about peoples' ability to organize quickly and easily using the internet, and how that makes a lot of institutions redundant. This is because there used to be a high cost to getting organized, so you needed large institutions to collect the people power to get it done. For example, journalists used to be people connected to publishers who owned printing presses or radio stations or TV studios - the means of producing and distributing information. Now, however, anybody with a cell phone and a web connection can get information out to the entire world instantly. What used to be a tremendous cost is now almost free.

This has me thinking a lot about traditional churches, especially since I'm starting up a church myself. (Here's the website.) What were the difficulties and costs that traditional churches were brought together to overcome? Gathering people into groups, building houses of worship, educated and accountable leadership, economies of scale for overseas mission, and, that's what I can think of right now. Which of these things still require the church as an institution?

On a more personal level, this has implications for the clergy as a profession as well. (Ulp!) Of course, I already knew that, since I know a bunch of people who have become ordained online to do a friend's wedding. But what is the purpose of ordination if what a clergy(man) used to be was one of the most educated people in the village? Knowledge is not a scarcity anymore.

Shirky writes the story of what happened to scribes. Before the printing press, scribes performed the valuable service of maintaining libraries by recopying books. Once people started using printed books, scribes co-existed for a while, but eventually faded out to almost nothing - modern-day calligraphy is about all that's left. Is that the destination of our major institutions, the church included?