Tag: present shock

The Present Shocked Church: Chronobiology

I’m making my way through Douglas Rushkoff’s new book, sharing observations for the church as I go. The book’s received complimentary reviews in the New York Times, among other sources, if reviews are important to you. My first post on the book is here.

Here’s what Douglas is worried about:

Instead of demanding that our technologies conform to ourselves and our own innate rhythms, we strive to become more compatible with our technologies and the new cultural norms their timelessness implies. We compete to process more emails or attract more social networking connections than our colleagues, as if more to do on the computer meant something good. We misapply the clockwork era’s goals of efficiency and productivity over time to a digital culture’s asynchronous landscape. Instead of working inside the machine, as we did before, we must become the machine.

We’re conducting something of a “listening campaign” in my church that involves lots of one-on-one conversations conducted by a trained group of people who then share what they’re hearing with one another. We’re hearing what Rushkoff describes, particularly from folks in the prime of their working years who also have school-aged kids. They expect machine-like efficiency and precision of themselves in their jobs, at home, and even in their community commitments. And the youth I work with? Of course they’re addicted to Instagram and Facebook, but not for the reasons grown ups think they are. It’s actually worse. They must be social networking machines because they’re terrified of missing out, and thus being left out, of the social life of their peers. One of my students recently confessed her guilty angst that she missed a text from a friend in need at 1:00 in the morning.

One obvious asset our church has to combat this “digiphrenia” is the liturgical calendar. To people who expect mechanistic productivity of themselves all day every day, every day of the week, whatever the season, the liturgical calendar offers a valuable narrative canopy and rhythm for life. The colors, stories, and songs that attend Advent and Lent and Easter and–my favorite–Ordinary Time are a lifeline, a road to stroll, not march. People badly need that.

But there’s more to this. In an era of participatory decline, anxiety abounds about the future of the church. Many in my denomination have left to start something new out of protest over liberalizing theology, yes, but also over worries about decline (which they clearly tie to the liberalizing theology). One departing colleague said to me, “I just want to be part of something that’s growing.” You could hear the yearning in her voice.

There’s a clear expectation here that the church be always growing. Getting smaller raises all kinds of fears and longing for a more robust era or church involvement. Like the price of a stock, we fret and strategize when church attendance goes down. What else would we do?

Present Shock gives two examples of businesses that have built regular decline into their planning, even into their identity. One of those is Duncan, the toy company that makes the famous yo-yos. The toys

“enjoy a cyclical popularity as up and down as the motion of the toy itself. The products become wildly popular every ten years or so, and then retreat into near total stagnation. The company has learned to ride this ebb and flow, emerging with TV campaigns, celebrity spokespeople, and national tournaments every time a new generation of yo-yo aficionados comes of age.

There’s also Birkenstock.

Birkenstock shoes rise and fall in popularity along with a host of other back-to-nature products and behaviors. Instead of resisting these trend waves and ending up with unsold stock and disappointing estimates, the company has learned to recognize the signs of an impending swing in either direction. With each new wave of popularity, Birkenstock launches new lines and opens new dealerships, then pulls back when consumer appetites level off.

Could we see church “decline” as something more cyclical? Could it be something that happens naturally, something that we allow to shape our experience of the church’s story (death and resurrection?) rather than kicking against the goads to get the thing running like it did back in ’55?

What say you?

Bonus points to the first person who comments with the details of their Duncan yo-yo.

 

 

 

 

The Present Shocked Church

Douglas Ruhkoff’s new book arrived this week, and, predictably, I’m hooked. I’ve devoured nearly everything Rushkoff has written in the past decade, and my interview with him for PLGRM Magazine last fall was a landmark experience for me. The Douglas Rushkoff tag on this blog is dense.

Present Shock is concerned about the ways that contemporary life is thoroughly simultaneous. To his great credit, Rushkoff worries about stuff, and the stuff he worries about he writes and talks about. Now, he’s worried that texts and Facebook and The Simpsons have driven us all to be present RIGHT NOW to lots and lots of stories and people in disparate places.

Example 1: the collapse of narrative. Present Shock is full of nuanced and searching analysis of the ways in which the traditional narrative arc has stopped working. Broadcast media are rapidly learning that the interactivity ushered in first by the remote control and then by the internet has rendered the traditional narrative arc a dull weapon. That arc rewarded the storyteller who was able to lead her audience into greater and greater states of anxiety before saving them with a climax (read: a product) that resolved all the conflict. Rushkoff is arguing that audiences won’t stand (or, rather, sit) for that anymore.

[excursis: “The Bible’s stories–at least the Old Testament’s–don’t work quite the same way. They were based more in the oral tradition, where the main object of the storyteller was simply to keep people involved in the moment. Information and morals were conveyed, but usually by contrasting two characters or nations with one another–one blessed, the other damned.”]

Here’s my assertion: modern evangelical and liberal theology is dependent on the traditional (non-Biblical) narrative arc, and part of the “decline” of these expressions of Christianity is the result of peoples’ media-trained immunity to that arc. For Evangelical theology, one’s salvation and the threat of personal damnation is the conflict that is solved by the climax of the cross and empty tomb. Yet for people who don’t go with the evangelist into the conflict, the climax holds no meaning.

Similarly, liberal protestant theology unfolds a story of increasing conflict not over an individual’s salvation but the state of humanity and the planet. The climax comes with values (typified by Jesus) of sharing, self-sacrifice, and, of course, love.  But for a religiously plural populace, the question is: who’s values are those and why should I trust that person?

In place of the narrative arc we now have The Moment. People live in The Moment, love in The Moment, believe in The Moment, and search for The Moment. Where is faith in The Moment?