Stretching Minds III
If we want to see a renewal of our collective Christian mind to alleviate our discipleship crisis, we will have to think beyond Sundays. I’ve got a number of suggestions to make across this series, but this is a posture more than a specific idea: we need to go where our people are.
To refresh you, as I’ve strung this idea out for months now, I am arguing that the British church is in a discipleship crisis where we neither live nor think Christianly. There isn’t a solution, ‘solutions’ and a quick fix mentality are one of the things that got us here, but one of the goals we should have is stretching our minds. So, when I talk of our collective Christian mind, I don’t mean a select group of intellectuals who do hard thinking with the express purpose of blessing the church. I’m not derogatory about that, these isles have produced many who’ve blessed us in that way and we need to think together about where these ‘Doctors of the Church’ come from, but I’m talking about a broader development that everyone can get in on.
If we’re looking to develop the Christian minds of those in our congregations, how can we do that? Move beyond Sunday and go where they are.
Does that mean we shouldn’t schedule additional ‘stuff’ for people to gather together and learn? No, I don’t think so, most of my ideas I’ll share as we wrap up this series involve gathering together in some fashion. Before we get into those though, we should initially reject the paradigm that the answer is, in one way or another, programmes. Putting more events in people’s diaries may not be the answer. Adding a carefully chosen couple might be.
At the same time as considering scheduling events that gather, we should have a way of teaching our people as they’re scattered. We should go where they are. Once upon a time the pastor might have gone door to door and catechised a family. He went where they were. What’s the modern equivalent?
You still go where people are. Where are they? They live in their phones.
Digital frontiers
I am generally derogatory about the effects that the digital revolution is having on the way we operate as humans (like thinking humans ‘operate’), how they’re changing our attention, our capabilities, and our communal life. I think we should be concerned about it. The data is beginning to gather that smartphones are terrible for young people and probably should be banned in schools, as well as that social media is having a range of corrosive effects on mental health and community cohesion. Not all of that is ironclad yet, but the initial results are concerning enough for healthy scepticism and careful use. I think parents not giving their children smartphones should be a common Christian attitude. Fight the black glass bricks of babel.
So why would I suggest we go into people’s phones to teach them? Two reasons. Firstly, I do think all that and I’m still writing in a medium that you can only access via the internet. Most readers are reading on their phones. No one would even engage with my thinking without it. I am for healthy engagement rather than complete disengagement for most people. As Ian Harber puts it, in the digital wasteland you’re either a monk or a missionary. Either you withdraw or you are consciously engaging in another cultural space. Naïve or passive use is the biggest problem we face. We don’t send children into the Amazon to preach to unreached tribes on their own.
Secondly, even as we call people out of their phones, we acknowledge that’s where they currently are while entering in to teach them. Some wariness here is wise; the medium is the message as Marshall McLuhan famously said.
Within the resources we have, and to the extent that our congregation are digital natives, we should engage them.
Some Options
At the simplest end this is about putting good resources in peoples’ hands. We should recommend good books and try to encourage a reading culture. We are faced with the challenge that all our attention is being squished by our phones, we’re now firmly a post-literate culture. Most people don’t read. Even fewer people read hard things. I still think recommendations are a good idea, as well as ways to help people engage with books by reading them with others, but the reality is that few will take you up on it to start with.
We can recommend articles, blogposts, podcasts, YouTube videos, and songs, for people to read, and watch, and listen to. More will engage here, especially if they already engage with that medium. Few who never listen to a podcast will listen to something you recommend, but if they already watch a lot of YouTube then they may well watch what you recommend. Though, if it’s an eleven-hour video from Mike Winger, maybe don’t send that around.
At the more complex end we can start to venture into the wasteland ourselves. There are a lot of traps here for the unwary. Becoming a content machine or building a platform are not the aim and if they happen need to be navigated very carefully.
Patrick Miller discusses the idea of a parish podcast. In essence his argument is that the congregation want to hear from their Pastor. Produce something for them. If more people listen, fine, but keep it focused on your people. His article talks you through how you might do this, though in the British church you’ll need to downsize it all a bit.
The principle is more important here than the form of the suggestion. Consider hard what your people need to know. Is there a way to communicate this in a media they’re engaged in without the form destroying the content? TikTok dances about the hypostatic union probably aren’t the way. Considering that it takes 35 minutes to become addicted to TikTok, according to TikTok’s own data, I’d think carefully before using that platform at all.
Sometimes people get very excited about the possibilities here. I think we should be chastened and cautious. It takes time (and money) to do things well. The ‘building an audience’ trap is easy to fall into but detrimental to the cause, and to some extent inevitable with content that’s encountered algorithmically. I still think that the principle is sound: go where your people are. Right now, your congregation is wandering around in digital Babylon. Tell them something true, if you can.
Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash
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