About RadicalNow!
RadicalNow! is a community of people dedicated to living radically for Jesus right here and right now.
Radical
Radical means “root”. We want to live lives rooted in Jesus and his practices. Radical also means “revolutionary” — we want to live a Kingdom reality that’s different from the status quo.
Now!
Now means we’re serious about contextualization. Contextualization means, literally, how our faith is woven into our lives and the lives of others. We want to learn how to do this artfully.
The RadicalNow! Platform is a private social media environment focused on practical application of the Way of Jesus (his example and teachings) for every day people. We wanted to create an easy-to-use, safe, and largely distraction-free social media environment that leverages the power of social media to build relationships and organize action — while avoiding Attention Pollution and Degrading Interactions and content.
Who is Behind This?
RadicalNow! is hosted by Camp Deerpark Inc. — a summer camp and retreat center that serves the youth, families, and churches of NYC. We are a community of Christ composed of many churches and working with many diverse people — all to equip believers to serve Christ in the city and beyond. We needed a platform like this to extend our community life beyond our campus, and we just thought we’d open it up to bless others. We’d love to add other partners to help us build and support our community — so if you’re interested let us know. If you’d like to support our work, please consider a donation or becoming a full Member.
Camp Deerpark is a ministry of the Mennonite Churches of New York City. As a hospitality ministry driven by the Peacebuilding and Discipleship mission of the Radical Reformation, we believe in creating space for all people, regardless of their characteristics, to encounter the love of Jesus and be equipped for life with him. Our camp and retreat center is open to all types of Christian groups, so we would like to welcome to this site all people interested in encountering and following Jesus. Think of our Platform as your own personal online retreat space — where you have the opportunity and responsibility to meet Jesus together with your people, supported by our caring ministry.
Who Moderates this Content?
As a social media platform, users create a lot of the content on this site. Our Terms of Service — including our User Code of Conduct — hold participants accountable for making sure this content is safe for what we consider a General Audience, but we don’t generally moderate user content for alignment to theological or doctrinal orthodoxy — which has a very diverse definition even within denominations, individual churches, and other Christian circles. We want to encourage dialog and learning, and therefore we offer space without much censorship, but we work hard on our Platform Design so that users will see mostly content they find encouraging, uplifting, and applicable and rarely offensive, confusing, or discouraging. Our best advice to users: join Groups you trust filled with people you consider good examples of Jesus-following and where you see God working — and avoid those you don’t.
Generally speaking, the Organizers and Moderators of Groups are responsible for the moderation of the content and interactions within their Group. We generally only get involved in Group Moderation where a group is in violation of our Terms of Service or where participants are claiming that a group is unsafe.
As of right now, our Platform uses no algorithms to suggest content to users. The Timeline feed feature of our Platform shows user activity and content of the Groups that you as a user join — so you are selecting the majority of the content you see by your Group memberships. Our staff does post some curated content we feel especially helpful to following Jesus on the Timeline and we also author the content in this KnowledgeBase and on our Blog.
Other Stuff
Where did the name come from? The guy who build our site wrote a prayer poem to celebrate the 500-year anniversary of the Radical Reformation called The Radical Now. In the poem it says:
Believe now this radical Word,
It is my Son, the Word that is the root among you.
It is my Spirit, the wings of remembrance and dreaming forward.
And now, in this moment, I am your Father.
Nothing remains but to join our voice,
To set our hands together to our work.
And to be One, the last prayer and it is Finished.