Toward a Missional Economy, Part 2

Yesterday I said that economics permeates every realm of life as the “rules of the household” for handling our resources. I also proposed that Exodus 16 is the defining economic narrative of the bible, that it’s rules create an economy of sharing so that everyone’s needs are equally met, and that the implications of this cut deeply into what it means to live together as a community.

Manna in the Postmodern Desert
With these rules of the household in view we can readily recognize similar economic undercurrents being explored outside the Church today. This is where our exploration becomes “missional,” by asking the question, “What is God the economist doing in the world around us?”

I’ve come to believe God is doing quite a bit in the economic realm through the current cultural shift known broadly as Postmodernism. Whatever its epistemological or ontological challenges, Postmodernism represents a shift away from Modernity’s sacred value of the autonomous self and toward an alternative paradigm of communal reciprocity.

There’s no better example of this than in the myriad of alternative sub-cultures that have formed around the Internet. In his online article for The Garreu Group, Bearing Gifts, They Come from Afar, Joel Garreau writes,

“From the earliest days [...] the Internet was seen as a space where people could find ways to collaborate without the need for either governments or markets to mediate social bonds.”

The best example is the “hacker” culture of open-source software engineers who have created a widespread gift economy of storage space, software, and expertise. Hackers freely share their creations create, leading to the development of freely available alternative Operating Systems like Ubuntu and alternative knowledge sources like Wikipedia.

In recent years this initial trajectory has exploded at the popular level. The (mostly) free listing service Craigslist is now present in over 250 U.S. cities and receives 20 billion page views per month. Burning Man, a massive festival/gift-economy in the Nevada desert, has grown to nearly 50,000 participants and Really Really Free Markets, a grassroots movement of free commodity marketplaces, have surfaced in over two dozen cities across the U.S.

In each case, Postmodern sub-groups in America are demonstrating a concept of the self, the community, and of resources that are a radical alternative to the dominant economic culture and radically congruent with the biblical economic narrative.

Tomorrow I’ll begin to touch on three major paradigm shifts these changes represent. But first, a few questions for discussion:

1. Have you participated in the gift economies mentioned above? If so, what has been your experience and your reaction?
2. What examples can you think of that represent God demonstrating mission through people and cultures outside the church?
3. How can we know whether the emerging gift-economies in sub-cultural groups like hackers, burning man, etc. represent God’s mission?