What is the purpose of the Church?
The Church of the 1970’s is over (social-gospel, mainline Protestantism); the Church of the 1990’s is over (Evangelical Seeker); the Church of the 2000’s is ending (GenX Emergent).
The late 20-Century Church model is over, even as the formal structures try in desperation to maintain it.
The culture is no longer with us. What are we to become in this day and this context? That which has endured will continue to endure!
What is Democracy without Privacy?
We all have a part to play in the creation of a good world, a fair and just society – all for the emerging generations that are coming after us. To be selfish, to be self-centered, to be arrogant in our assumptions that all revolves around “me” or “us” or “our generation” or for only “our people” or even for “our specific time in history” is ridiculous. It is self-deceptive and in the end self-defeating – as individuals, as a culture, as a people.
There is much to indicate that things are bad and getting worse. If we learn from history and receive the wisdom of tradition, we know that this has always been the case. What makes a one people different from another is, perhaps, that one dwells on the “bad and getting worse” and one dwells on “what can be.” Another difference might be this – if a people reside within a collective hubris or whether within a collective humility.
While I do not believe the locus of “salvation” rests with human endeavor, I do believe that the way humanity works and believes and behaves will certainly lead to either a good or a terrible end. Such potential in the faces of our young people, but we as adults have an obligation and a call to make sure that the potential is realized not for ourselves or for the here-and-now, but for a good future!
The Future is Ours from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.
Code/Space, Story Telling, and Artificial Intelligence – we all just want to find love. 🙂
A presentation by James Bridle at a recent Lift conference entitled, “WE FELL IN LOVE IN A CODED SPACE”
From an airport check-in space (just a warehouse with angry passengers if the software fails) to the fact that most of our culture and literature now abide/live in “coded spaces.”
After giving a “canonical” example of an airport check-in space being turned into “warehouse of angry people if the software fails,” James Bridle goes on to say:
I want to push the metaphor… I suggest that most of our cultures lives now and particularly our literatures are lived in code spaces.
We live in a world where we increasingly outsource our memories and experiences to the network; which is fine and good but it has these intensive consequence for us. Our time is spent in negotiation with the network in order to understand these memories and experiences that we have. Our experiences are co-created with these repositories of memory experiences and so on online and on.
“The dining scene hints at the fact that many youth and young adults today have a relationship with technology and social media that is core to their formation. With this access to the Internet and, through it, the world, their worldview is significantly different than that of pr
via @daylife
evious generations”
This is an important article and commentary by Adam K. Copeland that anyone… everyone… who has a desire to impact the lives of emerging generations should read!
Read the whole thing here:
I’ve been a Mac aficionado since the early days. I used an Apple II
when I was in college. Then, my roommate Nick, who in 1984 worked for an educational entity that enabled him to buy the very first Macintosh at educational pricing, brought one home. We were all amazed. The product lived up to the commercial hype.
Harkening back a little further, to, say, the 1960’s and the computer of the visionary film “2001.”
I was in charge of technology support for Undergraduate Studies at Kent State at the change into a new millennium. I was the Y2K guy. And, well yes, I do like my Macintosh best.
Steve Jobs, who was not perfect by any means, not a prophet and all that, was a visionary. He was capable to understanding what was needed and how to do it. I do think he will be remembered as one of the greats! Rest in peace, Steve Jobs.
When Scripture and the liturgies were first presented in the language of the people, and for our Church that occurred with the Church in England broke with Rome and the first 1549 Book of Common Prayer, it was vigorously opposed by the Roman Church authorities because of the presumed loss of control of the Church over the people. There were legitimate concerns that the common folk, who were by in large uneducated, would not understand the intent and meaning of Scripture (determined by the Church, of course). Yet, much of the opposition to Scripture and liturgies in the vernacular had to do with control.
When the people do not have access to Scripture, the worship of the Church, and the Church’s documents in a language they understand, they by default are subservient to the hierarchs.
Considering the Church’s current drive to go further down the path of full-liturgy bulletins, projection or display of hymns/songs, liturgies, and prayers overhead, even if justified by making it easier for new people or suffering from the assumption that books are passé, what actually ends up happening is the dumbing down of the people. Perhaps, what actually happens is the making of the people subservient to the priestly cast! Does this end up being an issue of control?
If people are able to read Scripture for themselves, they are empowered! If people are introduced to, taught how to use, and encouraged to engage with the Book of Common Prayer (BCP), for themselves, even if in the pews on Sunday morning, they are empowered! They learn for themselves the liturgies, the prayers, the theology that is actually espoused and maintained in the BCP. They are able to then hold accountable the clergy cast who find it far too interesting and edgy to play around with time-honed and tested liturgies for the sake of being novel or out of their own boredom.
In the parish I’ve been a part of, a several years ago a bishop was conducting his episcopal visit. The bishop was in the pulpit preaching when on of the matrons of the parish stood up, in the midst of him speaking, and said, “Bishop, that is not the teaching of the Catholic Church.” She challenged some “edgy,” novel teaching he was espousing. He stopped, turned around, exited the pulpit, and his sermon ended then and there. If this woman had not been taught the Faith, if she did not engage with the BCP regularly, if she did not know Scripture for herself, she would not be able to hold accountable those who are supposed to guard the Faith. She was empowered! She challenged the hierarchy when they deviated.
Change will always occur, and there is nothing intrinsically wrong with change. There is nothing wrong with LCD screens projecting everything. Yet, the reasons for change whether in theology, use of technology, or praxis are very important. The more we encourage, teach, and bring people to engage for themselves Scripture, the Book of Common Prayer, and the documents that inform our faith and life in Christ, the more empowered the people are to take control of their own faith and life in Christ.
My desire is to work myself out of a job, our of a position, out of a place of a determining authority by teaching people to think for themselves, to know their own texts (whether a physical book in the pew, on an iPad, or whatever). In so doing, I provide for them the knowledge and ability to know for themselves. There are specific acts and responsibilities that are given to me by virtue of my priesthood and will only be done by a priest, yet the more I enable people to be independent (in the context of community) in their thinking the more able they are to live a full Christian life.
I’ve come to believe that doing it all for the people ends in the impoverishment of the people, a dumbing down of the people, and a renewed control of the clergy cast over the people. My experience tells me that people are more attracted to a way of living the Faith when they know as much as they can, not in an deluded attempt by the clergy cast to make them feel welcome by doing it all for them.
I recently read an essay by Elizabeth Drescher on the “rd Magazine” website entitled “Turn Off, Slow Down, Drop In: The Digital Generation Reinvents the Sabbath“
I love this paragraph:
At the other end of the spectrum, fantasies that the application of new
technologies to traditional practices will, in themselves, enrich life
in general and spirituality in particular are no less misguided. Take a recent blog post on the U.S. Congregational Life Survey, which shared with italicized surprise the utterly unremarkable finding that “use of visual projection equipment in worship is not
related to church growth.” No kidding? Survey says: a dull video or
lame music is just dull as a preacher blah-blah-blah-ing on in person
with no relational interest in or connection to the people to whom they
are blab-casting. So, too, an engaging, interactive minister who
genuinely connects to people and encourages their connection to one
another is going to be compelling face-to-face and in
technologically-enabled engagements (see, for example, @texasbishop, @MeredithGould, @jaweedkaleem). [emphasis mine]
For some reason, and this gets to some of the other stuff in the article and in the life of the Church in general (particularly the Mainline denominations and more particularly the Episcopal Church, of which I am a priest), we think we must manage God. After all, if we don’t manage God everything will just fall apart and we will devolve into nothingness. (Yeah, and how is that going for us?)
The Episcopal Church is in crisis because we are a dying institution (has little to do with the gay-issue or the conservatives leaving the Church – although it has a whole lot to do with it… irony). So many people are rushing to do triage and to save this venerable national treasure, but the ways and means they are trying to save it are little more than the same old things that have been going on for the last 40 years that have gotten us into the mess to begin with. They dress up these tired old ways and means in hipster clothing or Emergent garb thinking that things like PowerPoint presentations, bad rock-ish music, hip-cool candles and flashy lights, casting off vestments, or better yet taking out pews, sidelining the Prayer Book, explaining away Scripture, or outlawing Rite I language will magically make the Church all rad (yes, I know) so that streams of young people will suddenly fill the empty spaces. What they end up doing is just another form of blab-casting.
What we so often forget is that Jesus is the one that builds the Church, and if we so manage affairs of the Church according to trendy culture dictates that Jesus is nicely tucked away out of site, well, we have already failed.
There are streams of young people filling churches. Just not our churches. Around where I live (Brooklyn, NY), within an 1/2-hour walk I can take you to at least 5 churches that are in the hundreds of members each and are made up almost exclusively with those under, say, 32 years of age. They beg for people over 40 to come to their churches. St. Paul’s, where I serve, has a very close relationship with a few of these churches. You know what they are doing in their services? Old Hymns song out of hymnals. Traditional liturgies (they are rediscovering the significance of liturgy). We use Rite I at St. Paul’s for our principle liturgy (Rite II other times – we aren’t protesting anything), but when we talk about changing to Rite II, it is the 20-somethings who have been coming in greater numbers over the last 5 years who protest the loudest.
This is why my work in the Imago Dei Society/Initiative isn’t focused on being trendy, but on understanding emerging generations and emerging culture to find out not how to become like them, but to discover how to translate the Faith to them in ways they can understand, form them into consequential Christians, and learn how to receive, living into and pass on the enduring Tradition in its Anglican form. This doesn’t play too well when those attempting triage are bent on re-hashing the latest hip-cool thing the culture throws at us (even when all the evidence shows that what younger people are looking for is something substantially different from all that hype and manipulation).
From a short article in Newsweek (Feb. 14th edition, pg. 6) dealing with e-books and the future of print books into the future.
“The Future of the Book” – from James Billington, librarian of Congress:
“The new immigrants don’t shoot the old inhabitants when they come in. Our technology tends to supplement rather than supplant. How you read is not as important as: will you read? And will you read something that’s a book – the sustained train of thought of one person speaking to another? Search techniques are embedded in e-books that invite people to dabble rather than follow a full train of thought. This is part of a general cultural problem.” (emphasis mine)
What impact might this “dabbling” have on the “train of thought” of the Gospel? What impact might this development have on already short attention spans? How might this impact our engagement with knowledge, that requires sustained and perhaps linear processes? How might this change teaching and learning?
I believe this is an important idea or consequence to investigate.
I was looking through Flickr.com this morning. I’m in the process of uploading my Israel/Jordan photographs to my account. I noticed a couple photographs from people I follow and ended up on this guys website. “Mer” is his moniker, perhaps his real name… I’m not sure. Anyway, one post on his blog caught my attention. It is entitled, “Anthony’s computer is giving him diverticulitis.” The post is presented as a conversation – whether actual or as commentary I don’t know – between I suspect Mer and Anthony.
“I don’t know my best interest.”“It appears that way.”“No I need someone to come into my life….someone maybe hired that comes in and protects me from this culture.”“What?”“That person would put me on a cultural diet.”“I’m sorry?”“I
would have to go into texting or cable news deprivation for months.
That person would demand me to use a land line for a prescribed amount
of time. Putting a lap band around my laptop use.”“Slapping mobile devices out of your hand.”“This person would come into my life and begin cutting away at the obesity of distraction.”“Sounds like textration.”“I
need this. I love this sort of socialist counselor. I have ran amok.
Gorged myself on the hedonistic part of the culture and come away with
diseases. All because I like a big bowl of societal High Fructose Corn
Syrup.”“Sounds like it includes table spoons of dramatic.”“It
is me. I wasn’t built for this society. As a kid I sat with my on
internet; my imagination. Using Army men as play station. I should be 90
already and getting ready to die soon. This disdain for life is coming
too early. I just need prescriptions of hand written letters,
socializing without cellphones and news deprivation.”“OK. Your point?”“I can’t do it alone. Somebody has to come in. I need a trainer.”“You think you could find someone online?”
Consider the article in this week’s Newsweek entitled, “The Science of Making Decisions,” or “Brain Freeze,” concerning what the constant barrage of input into our brains does to our brains and our ability to make good decisions:
“The Twitterization of our
culture has revolutionized our lives, but with an unintended
consequence–our overloaded brains freeze when we have to make decisions.”
There are diminishing returns to the constantly plugged in society.
So, Mer’s post concerning Anthony’s statement, or conflict with himself – does this present a coming state of mind of many of us? Everything I read tells me that we need to give our brains a rest. By doing so, we are able to assimilate, contemplate, and make much more wise and satisfying decisions.
What happens when immediate trumps wise?
