The Pea in Landon’s Mattress: Like-Mindedness and Sleepless Nights

Landon Whitsitt has posted a thoughtful and carefully considered response to my last post. He’s been irked since the NEXT Church Indy event, and my post pushed the right buttons to bring that irk . . . age clearly into focus. You’re welcome, Landon.

You should read the post, you should read Landon’s book Open Source Church when it comes out this spring, and you should read his Open Source Gospel ebook now. Landon is an innovative thinker who is widely read and who leaves fewer stones unturned than most when it comes to proposing a way forward for 21st century mainline protestant Christianity.

Also, we’re tight. He and his wife sang in my wedding. I baptized one of his kids. You get the idea. Speak uncharitably of him and I’ll hurt you.

What Landon takes issue with is my lack of alarm at the like-mindedness that characterizes both the NEXT Church conversation and the Fellowship of Presbyterian Pastors one. Much of the criticism aimed at that latter group centered on its lack of gender, ethnic, and vocational diversity (they’re mostly white male pastors of big churches).

Yet the NEXT gathering betrayed much of the same bias (far less so, though, in the area of gender), and that has caused many hopeful progressives to throw up their hands in despair. Landon is among them.

He writes:

Regardless of a group’s defining characteristics, when group members are similar, they tend to become cohesive – or “like-minded” – fairly quickly. The more similarities, the faster the cohesion is achieved. This cohesiveness is deceptive. We interpret it as a good thing because it seemingly allows us to get our work done more effectively and efficiently. But the actual effect of this cohesion is that it promotes reliance upon the group to such a degree that members become insulated from outside opinions.

Insulation from outside opinions is a serious threat, and Landon is right to worry about it. But I don’t agree that cohesion in a like-minded group has to lead to this effect. Both the Fellowship and NEXT groups have thrown their doors wide and invited everyone in. How people are greeted when they accept the invitation–that will be the test of insularity. It’s not a foregone conclusion.

More to the point, I don’t think any association of individuals who are trying to change an institution can get very far with an unlimited plurality of opinion. It just won’t work. I’m no slave to the mantra of efficiency, but conversations like NEXT and the Fellowship PC(USA) are after some kind of concrete change. That requires a modicum of like-mindedness.

Both James Davison Hunter and Steven Johnson were mentioned at the NEXT gathering, and both have written about the importance of “networks” in innovation and cultural change.

Hunter says this:

the key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks. And the more “dense” the network—that is, the more active and interactive the network—the more influential it could be. This is where the stuff of culture and cultural change is produced.

Johnson says this by way of explaining the rapid rate of innovation that took place as people transitioned from nomadic hunter/gatherer societies to life in cities:

In the dense networks of the first cities, good ideas have a natural propensity to get into circulation. They spill over, and in that spilling they are preserved for future generations.

Both Davidson and Johnson used the descriptor “density,” which I think is far more helpful than like-mindedness. The latter is a marker of the former. From a Christian theological point of view, we could substitute “community” or “kinship” for density and bring the issue more clearly into focus: how do dense networks that begin with like-minded thinkers expand to become effective communities characterized by diversity?

The church is charged to model Kingdom-of-God type community. To me, that means people at cultural margins are heard equally with those in “tall steeples.” It means that racial and gender diversity are not optional. And, for Presbyterians, it means that pastors’ voices are not privileged over the voices of Ruling Elders.

Both the NEXT and the Fellowship efforts have serious holes with respect to that charge, as has been amply pointed out by Landon and many others, and as those efforts’ organizers are well aware. But I don’t see those holes as crippling, at least not with respect to the NEXT gathering, for two reasons (I’ll save my reasons for limiting these qualifications to NEXT for a later post):

First, networks aren’t about themselves but the people in them. The people behind the NEXT conversation are people both Landon and I trust. I trust them to have their eye on the need for a diverse community of voices as they host conversations about contentious subjects. This first one, admittedly, got away from them, and you can’t expect people in progressive circles to let something like that go. They haven’t.

Second, it’s a beginning. One of the organizers tweeted in response to Landon’s post that the planners of NEXT saw the Indianapolis event as a “beta” test and not a “full release.” This was not the launch of a strategic program but of a conversation with undetermined outcomes.

The pea in Landon’s mattress is a divinely-inspired caution against self-righteous retreat into safe enclaves of shared opinion. I hope that pea gets into all of our mattresses. But I also hope we can reach in there, take the pea out, look at it carefully, and decide if it’s really worth losing sleep over.

For me–right now–it’s not. But that could change.

Presbyterian Death Match: NEXT Church vs. The Fellowship

“so what’s the difference (other than theological perspective) between #nextchurchindy and the fellowship/whitepaper? any takers? #pcusa“

I’m fool enough to take that bait, laid out by @gspcrobert yesterday amidst the waning reaction to the NEXT Church gathering in Indianapolis earlier this week. I quickly tweeted:

“@gspcrobert I’ll take that. #nextchurchindy is a gathering looking for answers. The Fellowship is an argument looking for a gathering.”

That answer generated a couple of responses that I want to get into here. @Suzemb replied:

@yorocko @gspcrobert do the answers being sought exploring ways for both sides to find common ground so the denom isn’t torn apart?

And @charlesawiley added:

@yorocko Wonder about your distinction between Next and Fellowship. Next had irenic tone-but with a pretty like-minded group #nextchurchindy

First, the basic background for the uninitiated. Several months ago, a group of Presbyterian pastors, many representing what you call “Tall Steeple” churches from the progressive/liberal regions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), were invited to Kansas City to start a conversation about the future of the denomination. The invitation came from Tom Are, Pastor at Village Presbyterian Church in Prairie Village, Kansas, and it went out, as best I know, to people he trusts and who’s insight he values. Specific areas of concern had to do with mission and the need for a different way to engage the denomination’s areas of conflict that aren’t dependent on a political winner-take-all model.

The NEXT Church Indianapolis gathering was an outgrowth of that Kansas City conversation (and, I think, another conversation or two). The organizers invited all interested parties to come to Indy and explore different ways of doing mission, vocation, and governance in the PC (U.S.A.).

Meanwhile, last month another group of Presbyterian pastors, also representing mostly “Tall Steeple” churches but from the church’s conservative regions–and calling themselves The Fellowship of Presbyterian Pastors–distributed a letter and an accompanying white paper that asserted that the denomination is “deathly ill” and that invited folks to an August event that would explore the formation of a parallel Reformed body separate from but related to the PC (U.S.A.). That letter and white paper were followed by a brief video posted online in which Jim Singleton, Pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Colorado Springs, that further laid out the strategic vision of this Fellowship.

So what’s the difference between NEXT and The Fellowhip?

One difference is very clear. NEXT organizers want a conversation among like-minded Presbyterians. That conversation is about very specific things, and the way it’s been structured so far, it could plausibly produce a number of varying–even competing–results. It is a conversation looking for answers–and new ways of engaging the denomination’s problems.

The Fellowship, on the other hand, is proposing the answer at the outset. It is inviting like-minded Presbyterians to join in a process that has clearly articulated outcomes. The organizers have set in motion a process, and people will gather in August to join in that process.

@charlesawiley’s observation that both efforts appeal to like-mindedness is apt, as is @suzemb’s concern that NEXT transcend that like-mindedness in search of common ground. But I don’t think like-mindedness is a problem. Shared convictions and common ways of viewing problems are the fuel of effective movements for change. Both The Fellowship and NEXT are appealing to people who think like the organizers and who like and trust one another. There’s nothing wrong with that.

(Try to get people to join a gathering populated by people they know they don’t agree with and whom they don’t like–I believe that’s called a presbytery meeting.)

And, practically speaking, both efforts are intentionally trying to get beyond the tired effort of finding common ground among liberals and conservatives that leaves both feeling ignored and wronged.

In the end, the biggest difference is how NEXT and Fellowship are using like-mindedness, the former as food for an open-ended (but topically delimited) conversation, and the latter as a vehicle for accomplishing precisely defined aims.

More NEXT Church Summary: In Defense of White Male Pastors

That much of the speaking that was done in Indianapolis on Monday and Tuesday was done by white male pastors did not go unnoticed by the event’s participants. Their observation is accurate. Out of three sermons, two were given by that demographic; two of the three “testimonies” offered after the worship liturgies were also delivered by white male pastors.

In addition to the speaking that went on in the sanctuary, many of the leaders of small groups were also, you guessed it, non-female, non-ruling elder, non-non-white people.

So in the event’s final hours, when event-goers were invited to share their thoughts about the goings on, this got pointed out. And pointed out. And pointed out some more.

The qualification has been given by John Vest that, though this characteristic was something of a flaw at NEXT Church, the gathering was clearly a beginning to an important conversation, and a very good one at that. If the next NEXT event looks the same, then the movement may have a serious systemic limitation.

In addition, I want to point out two things, one by way of explanation and the other by way of correction. First the explanation. The NEXT Church gathering was conceived of and organized by a group of progressive pastors, many of whom serve tall-steeple churches. It’s a largely white male group. That at its first denomination-wide gathering the leadership gave most of the prime speaking time to itself makes organizational sense. They were framing the conversation, and since it’s a conversation they started and then invited everyone else into, they were the first to speak.

Second, it shows a bad understanding of what the NEXT conversation is aiming at to criticize the makeup of the small group leadership. A personal anecdote will illustrate my point.

One of the leaders (a white, female pastor) had her plane diverted to Louisville on Sunday night due to weather and so was not able to lead her Monday morning small group. She texted me and asked me to fill in as facilitator. I replied, “Sure, but would you rather ask an expert on the topic?”

Her answer was simple: “The facilitators aren’t meant to be experts, only listeners and recorders.”

So at least one of the white male pastor small group leaders was there by accident.

But all the others were put there for a reason: to let other people talk. I attended a Monday afternoon small group in which the white male pastor facilitator hardly said three sentences in the allotted hour, all of which were for the sake of clarification and invitation. The most frequent voices in that group came from a female seminary graduate looking for a call, a female deacon, and a female pastor (all white).

NEXT is trying to provide a platform for lots of different voices within the PC (U.S.A.). I for one am assuming the best about its intentions, intentions which were on display during its inaugural conference, especially in the role played by its small group leaders.

NEXT Church Summary

I spent the last two days inIndianapolis with a bunch of Presbyterians mulling the NEXT Church. We worshiped together and had lots of structured conversation around things like social media and young adult ministry. Of course, the reason you go to these events has less to do with actual program content than it does the people who will be there and the offering of a platform to interact with and learn from those people.

NEXT Church was full of great people. Every significant conversation is.

And while there was the expected observation that lots of people who should be in the conversation were not (ruling elders and non-white Presbyterians, namely), NEXT was a beginning. It was a good beginning, because it brought together good people–thoughtful, creative, innovative, passionate people.

Check out the event’s website for lots of video and to connect to the ongoing conversation.

New Study on Teen Bullying

The LA Times is reporting on a study published in the most recent edition of the American Sociological Review that finds a direct link between the social status of teenagers and their propensity to bully their peers.

This is hardly groundbreaking. I don’t think I’m alone in recalling that the most menacing kids in school were the ones who were most concerned with their position in the social pecking order. My own worst behavior coincided with high sensitivity to my low popularity stock and desperate attempts to improve it. Everybody who has endured even a day of American middle or high school knows that aggression is the emission of the teenage social machine.

But here’s something interesting from the study:

However, those who were in the top 2% of a school’s social hierarchy generally didn’t harass their fellow students. At that point, they may have had little left to gain by being mean, and picking on others only made them seem insecure . . .

I remember this too. There were certain cool kids who were . . . cool–to everyone. They seemed possessed of a self assurance the rest of us lacked. Perhaps their popularity afforded that luxury, or perhaps their popularity was a product of it. In any event, they were above the usual social feeding frenzy.

When I tried to talk to my high school students earlier this year about bullying and the social pecking order, I was surprised to hear a rather rosy description of affairs. “People can hang out with whoever they want,” some of the told me. “Nobody bothers you.” All the while, a silent minority traded knowing looks with one another. A big part of the story wasn’t being told.

My rosy-eyed students weren’t lying. And they’re not naive. They are part of that top 2% of their peers. I’m sure of it. For them, life at school really is a cake walk. Nobody bothers them. They’re never the targets of aspiring socialites’ arrows of verbal and physical injury. But they’re not inflicting it either.

The challenge with these students, it seems to me, is to cultivate some empathy for their peers who are suffering the slings and arrows that they, the popular elite, never see, so that 1) they share in the experience of the bullied and maligned ,and 2) they advocate on the beat-ups’ behalves among their popular peers, upon whom these elite kids exercise real influence.

How to do this? There’s a treasure trove of narrative resources in scripture, from Jesus’ advocacy for the least of these to the prophets to the giving of the Law. There’s lots of doctrinal reflection that can be done here too, from the community of the Trinity as a non-hierarchical community of self-giving love to the mission of God’s people in sum.

What are some of the best ways to do this, to equip the cool kids to stand up for their uncool peers?

“There’s Frightfully Little Real Going On”: Rushkoff on Social Media

“There’s frightfully little real going on,” I believe is the quote near the end, the one that makes this whole talk worth watching.

As always, Douglas is prescient and clear: “Social media exists to help people create and exchange value directly with one another.”

The questions he puts to these marketing professionals are questions churches need to be asking ourselves: what value are we creating, and how are we helping people create and exchange value? In other words, how are we helping people exercise their humanity?

The more I think about it, the more “value” becomes a clear theological imperative for ministry.

So, what value are you creating? And if ministry doesn’t have a quantifiable value, how do you describe the good that it does?

A Sermon in Light of Saturday

I don’t normally post sermon texts, because I don’t think they make for good reading. But some people have expressed interest after I publicly narrated my decision to scrap my Sunday sermon in light of Saturday’s shooting, and after the advice of Diana Butler Bass.

So, then, here it is. As always, feedback is appreciated.

Also, my colleague Andy James did likewise. Check it out here. It’s solid.

***

On a normal Tuesday night in April, 1999, I popped in to see some friends, Dave, Debbie, and Alistair. Dave and Debbie lived in a small flat on the protestant side of the Springfield Road in West Belfast, right next to the Methodist church where Dave was the pastor and where I was serving as a short-term mission volunteer in the church’s cross-community children’s and youth programs.

I’d been there since the previous September, and Dave and Debbie’s place had come to be something of a hideout for me; Dave was also an American, tall and good-humored, with a very useful Bruce Sprinsteen cd collection, and Debbie was a walking showcase of Northern Irish wit and charm and hospitality.

Alistair worked with Debbie at a community-based organization that helped teenage boys who had got mixed up in the protestant paramilitary organizations that ran the neighborhood. Alistair was good with these kids, because he’d been one of them. He was involved in paramilitary violence by the time he was 14, and he’d served 13 years in prison for murder. When he was 17 he carried out a hit job on a local catholic man. He shot the man through the front window of his home.

Alistair unfolded this story to me in pieces over the many weeks in which I had got to know him that year. Our conversations were clipped little things, because Alistair used an economy of words and studied your reaction to his words very carefully. Once he invited me to watch with him a video of a tv special in which he’d been featured describing his crime. But more than that, he also talked to the interviewer in the show about his time in prison, his conversion to Christianity and an ethic of nonviolence, his admiration for the Dalai Lama.

[Interesting sidenote: while trying to find the title of that television special, I made a startling discovery: in 2009, Alistair’s story was dramatized in a film called “Five Minutes of Heaven,” which won two Sundance Film Festival awards. Alistair was portrayed by none other than Liam Neeson.]

Alistair, Debbie, and Dave were some of my closest friends that year. I dropped in to see them that Tuesday night just like I had several Tuesday nights before. But that Tuesday was April 20th, the day that a shooting massacre was unfolding at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, mere miles from where I’d grown up. It was on the news when I walked in.

Alistair broke the news to me, and I will never forget my surprise at the toll the things he was describing were taking on him. He seemed baffled. He stared at the floor and shook his head. And when he looked at me his eyes didn’t have the look of a hardened criminal well-used to shootings, but of a devastated human absorbing the blows of human brutality.

***

On days like yesterday, the sheer brutality of humanity can take your breath away. Hearing news of a shooting rampage in a public parking lot, one that targeted an elected official and killed a nine year-old girl and a federal judge, your shoulders sag and your head drops. Maybe you cry.

But if you’re like me and you follow every piece of information and speculation the moment it’s published, those sagging shoulders presently become fortified with righteous indignation. Because one moment you learn that Representative Giffords was one of several Representatives targeted with gun crosshairs on a map of vulnerable congressional districts published by a conservative political action committee.

The next minute you watch the shooter’s YouTube channel. The videos there are weird, and they feature anti-government slogans.

Then it’s reported that the judge who has died recently allowed a multi-million dollar civil suit to proceed that was brought by illegal immigrants against Arizona ranchers.

You read the Pima county sherriff bemoaning Arizona’s morph into a “mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”

You grit your teeth and clench your fist at the obvious nastiness of it: politically-motivated gun violence fanned by prominent conservative politicians.

Well, the intervening hours muddy that picture substantially. There still a lot that we don’t know, but it seems pretty clear that Jared Lee Loughner isn’t a right wing crusader taking orders from Tea Party demagogues. He’s mentally ill. He’s a 22 year-old kid who’s been kicked out of classes at the local community college and rejected by the army.

We’re back, then, to the sagging shoulders and the bowed head, the posture of . . . of what? Grief? Anger? Confusion? Yes, all of those things. But also, let us pray, of repentance.

Jesus came to John at the Jordan to be baptized by him with his baptism of repentance. Repentance, as in “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near,” and “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? Bear fruit worthy of repentance.”

Repentance? This is Jesus. This is the one who, as John has been telling everyone, “Of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke,” the one who is more powerful than John, who is coming after him, who will baptize with the Holy Spirit and fire, who’s winnowing fork is in his hand, who will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary, but who will burn the chaff with unquenchable fire.”

Repentance? That seems to be the Baptizer’s thought. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”

Jesus’ baptism, it seems to me, is as much about a posture as it is anything else. And it’s not the posture we necessarily want from a savior. Contrary to John’s press releases, it’s not a posture of power. It’s not a posture of threshing and gathering and judging and burning, at least not now.

Now it’s a posture of repentance. Which means it’s a shoulder-sagging posture of really being human and really absorbing the terrible things that humans can do. Really feeling the weight of human violence as something for which you share culpability and something against which you must struggle every day, even if costs you everything.

If we don’t know how to feel and how to comport ourselves in the light of yesterday’s events, we could do a lot worse than Jesus’ example at the Jordan.
***

Yet repentance is not resignation. A posture of repentance doesn’t lead to despair, but to action.

One of the things that we should hear in Matthew’s description of what goes on here at the Jordan is an echo of Isaiah 42, the text that Angel read a moment ago, which is the first of several “servant songs” found in the second part of Isaiah. Those songs address the people of God in exile in Babylon, having been crushed at Jerusalem by an invading army and forcibly moved across the desert to a foreign capital. To those exiles, Isaiah’s words are a reminder of who they are and to whom they belong, despite what their present circumstances assert: “I am the Lord,” God says in verse 6. “I have called you in righteousness, I have taken you by the hand and kept you.”

For Christians, Isaiah’s words of hope strike a resonant chord as well. When Jesus’ comes out of the water and the skies open and a voice says, “This is my son, The Beloved, with whom I am well pleased,” we hear an echo of “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights.” Christians have always seen Jesus (to varying degrees) in the person of God’s servant described by Isaiah.

So the description of the servant’s work is particularly relevant: he will bring forth justice to the nations; “he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth;”

“I,” God says to the servant, “have given you as a covenant to the people, a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out the prisoners from the dungeon, from the prison those who sit in darkness.”

This is the work given to God’s “servant.” This is the work that shapes Jesus’ life and ministry, inaugurated here at his baptism: open blind eyes and bring out prisoners from life’s dark dungeons. There’s nothing resigned or hopeless about that.

Alistair now works with victims and perpetrators of violence all over the world. He helps people tell their stories to one another and so discover a common humanity and brokenness and strength in one another. Northern Ireland, South Africa, Kosovo, the Middle East: he’s worked with groups in all of those places. He lives every day with an intimate awareness of his own capacity for violence, even as he works to bring healing and justice to those blinded and imprisoned by the violence that continues to stalk humanity.

***

This is the paradox of faith. If we are to be Jesus’ people today, then we have to do two seemingly contradictory things at once: struggle against violence and evil, even as we practice a posture of repentance.

We have to struggle–really struggle, like, scratch-and-claw struggle–against attitudes and laws that tend to bloodshed even as we resist simple assignments of blame. We have to write elected officials and march in favor of gun control even as we confess out loud to God and one another the violence lurking in our own hearts. We have to advocate for a more civil public discourse even as we give up uncharitable ways of talking about people who’s opinions infuriate us.

John would have prevented Jesus from submitting to anything like a baptism, which would affiliate Jesus with repentance and the human need for God’s help. John wanted half of Jesus. The scratch-and-claw half.

But John needs–we all need–all of Jesus. Which is why Jesus prevails upon him, “Let it be so now.” May that be our prayer, and may we, like John, relent to Jesus’ posture of repentance and take it up ourselves. For it is proper, Jesus says, in this way to fulfill all righteousness.

To fulfill all righteousness. Let it be so now. Amen.

Program or Be Programmed, part 4: You May Always Choose None of the Above

Next up on the yorocko tour of Douglas Rushkoff’s latest book, “Program or Be Programmed: 10 Commands for Life in A Digital Age,” command number three: You May Always Choose None of the Above. This follows the commands to Live in Person and Do Not Be Always On. See all the posts on Program . . . here.

I’ve long loved G.K. Chesterton, and two of my favorite Chesterton quotes are scribbled in blue ballpoint on the inside flap of my hardbound copy of Heretics and Orthodoxy:

“The admire mere choice is to refuse to choose.”

And

“Every act of will is an act of self-limitation.”

Both are from an essay entitled “The Suicide of Thought” that extols the necessity of limitation in any conception of freedom, either of action or thought.

Douglas Rushkoff has realized, though, that as important as the irrevocable choice may be for philosophy and democracy, we need to know who or what is setting the parameters of our choices. In a digital realm, everything must be pitched as a choice presented by a programmer as code. The classic example is the cd, in which a sound engineer records sounds as a series of digits that can be copied. This is a technological advance over cassettes and records, where an actual physical event disturbs a needle or cellophane strip thus leaving a real record of that sound event that is released when played back.

The record and tape are capsules that captured something that actually happened. The cd (and thus the mp3) are symbolic representations rendered in a series of digits in order to be copied. The difference has to do with much more than sound quality. It reaches into the nature of sound and music itself. For example, the custom of inviting friends over to listen to records gave way not to a custom of inviting friends over to listen to cd’s, but rather to a trade of cd’s and then a sharing of files, because the music itself became something different when it became digital. It became a commodity to be traded among individuals instead of an event to be experienced in groups.

It’s what Rushkoff calls “digital technology’s pre-existing bias for yes-or-no decisions,” its bias “towards the discrete.” He gets at the problem of the bias like this:

All the messy stuff in between yes and no, on and off, just doesn’t travel down wires, through chips, or in packets.

All the messy stuff in between. That stuff is not of interest to the program. Whether it’s in sounds that don’t register on the cd or consumer preferences, if it can’t be pinned to a 1 or a 0 and stuffed into a program, it isn’t valuable. “There’s a value set attending all this choice,” Rushkoff says, “and the one choice we’re not getting to make is whether or not to deal with all this choice.”

In the next post, I’ll explore how ministry is captive to all this choice, and ways that ministry shows an alternative.

I’d love to hear your experience and thoughts on it.

Program or Be Programmed, part 3: Live in Person

Find POBP part 2 (Don’t Be Always On) here, and part 1 here.

Media is biased outside of time. It promotes interaction that does not depend on the second-to-second interaction of real people but rather depends on sequential commands from those same people in order to carry out any of its tasks.

Media is also biased away from locality. It’s really good at connecting people and facilitating communication across distances (think of the primitive cans connected by string). Consider this:

. . . the bias of media has always been toward distance–that’s part of what media are for. Text allowed a person in one place (usually a king with a messenger running on foot) to send a message to a person in another place. To those with the power of the written word, what was happening far away became actionable, or even changeable. Similarly, broadcast media gave the newly minted national brands of the industrial age a way to communicate their value across great distances. Where a customer may have once depended on a personal relationship with a local merchant, how he could relate instead to the messaging of a nationally advertised product.

For all that, media tend to suck at conveying relationships and messages among people who share a localized space (however, the teenagers texting each other in the backseat of the same car, thus conversing without the awareness of the adults in the car, may be an important counter-point).

The “local” provides a homefield advantage. The real relationships that result from face-to-face interactions among customers or congregants are concrete things that add humanity (and therefore value) to interaction, and that can’t be replicated by media. Recent interactive media platforms like video calling can approximate that interaction, but as anyone who uses those tools regularly knows, it’s not the same thing. It’s not a worse thing; it’s a different thing altogether.

Churches often use media to intensify the local homefield advantage. Printed bulletins allow the whole congregation to say prayers and creeds in unison; graphics and video supplement music and sermons. But does that really do what we think it does?

Rushkoff refuses to use computer graphics to aid in the speaking gigs he’s invited to all over the world, much to the annoyance of conference organizers. Here’s his rationale:

. . . the reason to spend the jet fuel to bring a human body across a country or an ocean is for the full-spectrum communication that occurs between human beings in real spaces with one another. The digital slideshow, in most cases, is a distraction–distancing people from one another by mediating their interaction with electronic data.

Churches love few things more than a good distraction.

This is not to say electronic media ought to be banned from sanctuaries. It’s only to say that we need to know what that technology wants to do–facilitate communication across distance–and to think strategically about whether our use of that technology is actually doing that (Skyping with a far-flung mission co-worker, for instance) or forfeiting the homefield advantage that our being together in the same place at the same time wants to give us.

How does your church use media in worship or education or governance? Are you feeling a pull away from the local in your technology use, or toward it?