Isolation

Onward, Christian Hermits?

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And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.
—Acts 2:46-47 ESV

After church yesterday, a friend and I discussed the reality that for many people, their primary source of human contact is Facebook. Alone at duskIn truth, the discussion was more of a lament for what has been lost.

All the small groups my friend and I were a part of are defunct.

I’ll let that sentence stand by itself because it serves as a testament to where we are in our society today. Social media have been a boon for connecting people who are distant, but it seems to have become detrimental to relationships within driving distance. We no longer meet face to face but instead enjoy the distancing mechanisms of technology. Our high-tech gizmoes help us keep up with others to the level we feel comfortable, and they give us the ability to walk away on our time schedule without feeling bad about disconnecting.

Our time schedule.

The early Church decided that meeting together every day mattered. We envy their closeness to the Holy Spirit. I wonder if there is a connection. Hmm.

The Acts passage above said that the number saved grew rapidly. You wouldn’t think that hanging out together would be evangelistic, but some synergistic sharing of Christ happened nonetheless.

The Acts passage notes that people thought positively about the Church because of its strong emphasis on connecting with others and being obviously friendly and social. How different from the PR the Church in America “enjoys” today.

Of course, there was also that “iron sharpens iron” thing. I guess the modern replacement is flaming each other in an online post’s comment thread. Less a sharpening and more a tempering, I guess. Temper, temper…

I think if you really pressed Christians today, few would be able to give a spiritual reasons why getting together daily is worthwhile. I think most see wisdom only in meeting once a week, twice at most. Wouldn’t want to overdo a good thing.

That reticence makes me wonder, though.

For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue, and virtue with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with steadfastness, and steadfastness with godliness, and godliness with brotherly affection, and brotherly affection with love. For if these qualities are yours and are increasing, they keep you from being ineffective or unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ.
—2 Peter 1:5-8 ESV

If God is love, and love is the highest expression of a complete Christian life—as noted in the Peter passage above—how is it we can barely stand to be together once a week? What does it say about our effectiveness and fruitfulness in Jesus if meeting together once a week is all we can muster?

Perhaps for all our talk of community and brotherly love and affection, we don’t really like each other all that much. If we truly do, wouldn’t getting together more often be a priority?

More and more Christians think we are in the last days of The Last Days. A verse that speaks to that:

And let us consider how to stir up one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.
—Hebrews 10:24-25 ESV

How is it then, if the Final Day is indeed drawing near, that we seem to be getting together less often rather than more? Does our reticence to meet actually reflect a willful disobedience? Have we all secretly fallen under the spell of the “powerful delusion” the Bible warns of, with our lack of meeting a physical expression of our mental dissonance?

Talk of mental health issues have dominated the Godblogosphere in the wake of the suicide of the son of noted pastor Rick Warren. I wonder how many mental health cases could be healed without medicine by the simple act of people fellowshipping more regularly.

Can we admit that something is wrong with the way we interact today?

A different friend confessed to me a couple years ago that he felt a greater kinship to the people with whom he plays board games. That affinity group bore each other’s burdens better and dispensed more grace than the Christian small groups he had been part of. What a sad indictment!

I can think of no greater distinguishing mark of the Church than the idea that no collection of individuals exhibits deeper love for its members. So, is this the case?

We wonder why people are increasingly eschewing Church. Perhaps our community and fellowship issues are ground zero for revival.

Resisting Your Own Little World for the Sake of the Kingdom

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Tim Challies linked to an interesting article that reflects a topic I’ve discussed in depth: technology’s attack on genuine community. A good article, worthy of your time and consideration.

Toward the article’s end, one educational scientist, William Kist of Kent State University, makes an intriguing statement:

[Kist] also pointed out that the “real world” that many social media critics hark back to never really existed. Before everyone travelled on the bus or train with their heads buried in an iPad or a smart phone, they usually just travelled in silence. “We did not see people spontaneously talking to strangers. They were just keeping to themselves,” Kist said.

Many Christian writers/thinkers/pastors/bloggers talk about community, but rarely have I heard any of them discussing what Kist states above.

That ability to engage a stranger is foundational to any healthy society. And it goes beyond simple transactional engagement, such as asking the butcher for pound of ground chuck.

As Kist notes, in the days before the proliferation of tech devices that wired us into our own little worlds, people were already in that world, we just couldn’t see it. Lonely in a crowdI would contend that industrialization and social Darwinism abetted that transformation long ago, as we heartily received the false gospels of self-sufficiency and survival of the fittest.

Ours has become an “I don’t need you” society where people fight over scraps. Witness how easily a simple pending snowstorm turns grocery shoppers into frightened hoarders because their self-sufficiency is briefly threatened.

I honestly believe we can counter some of that mentality if we break out of our little worlds.

I was that guy on the plane flight who was chatty with the people in my row. I’m told that makes me a nuisance, but that was before everyone was plugged into a computer, iPad, iPod, Blackberry, or whatever. And you know, I never once had a conversation with rowmates that wasn’t fascinating. Nor did I ever get the feeling that those in the conversation resented the chat.  People did open up. In fact, most people would leave the plane laughing or smiling after such a talk. Made the flight go faster too.

What got me was that just talking with a stranger opened up a level of connection that most people now avoid like the plague. Tech only makes it more obvious. (I would tend to disagree with Kist, in part, because a person with a gadget truly is less likely to engage another, lost as they are in their cyberworld. People may have been silent in the past, but that was only because they’d been acclimatized by conditioning to be so. Now, it’s supplemented.)

Those conversations I have on planes (and in checkout lines, buses, sporting events—wherever) have meaning. They tie people together and remind us that we’re not only NOT self-suffucient but that other people have worth, that their stories matter in the larger story of God’s redemptive history.

This brings me to my final point.

I’ve been wondering why Christians today are so lousy at personal evangelism, and I believe these issues play right into that. If we can’t engage people, if we aren’t the ones who break the silence, then no one will hear about Jesus.

I’m constantly amazed at the personal details I hear from strangers I engage. The young woman running my bag of carrots over the grocery store scanner has a story. And if I talk with her, I may find out her husband just left her and the kid to fend for themselves. Or that her mom just died of cancer.

For those of us who are Christians, how can we be silent? How can we be buried in an iPad when the drama of the lives of broken, shattered people plays out around us?

Do you think Jesus has anything to say through your lips to that young woman whose husband just left? Does He have anything to offer her after her mom died right when she needed her most?

Each day, our opportunities to lead lost people to Jesus are legion. How can we possibly be silent, to let others pass by trapped in a world they can’t understand, while we who claim to know the answers dwell in our own little world, oblivious?

Tech, the Church, and the Death of Community

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Everybody’s talking at me.
I don’t hear a word they’re saying,
Only the echoes of my mind.
— Harry Nilsson, “Everybody’s Talking At Me”

I now sit behind a Plexiglas wall.

It’s about five feet high and surrounds most of my drum kit. To drown out the deafening wall of sound reflected off the barrier from my drumming, I wear in-ear monitors that seal off everything but the mix (which I’m not in).

When the rest of the worship team talks to each other, I don’t hear them. Or I get a strange, far away echo picked up from the stage mics. Disembodied voices that seem to come from nowhere, yet everywhere, the words mingling into murk.

There’s a vibe you get as a musician playing in a band. When everyone’s doing their thing right, you gain a sixth sense of where the music is going. You can riff off what others do. You feel a part of something bigger than yourself and your contribution to the music. It’s almost a rapturous thing.

Unless you sit cut off in your own little room.

As of the start of the year, I now sit behind a Plexiglas wall. And jammed in my head are tiny, sophisticated speakers supposedly keeping me connected to the outer world.

It’s a perfect metaphor.

I’ve been on Facebook about a year. I think it has replaced my normal community, not because I wanted it to, but because it’s what others I know have rushed to embrace.

I think everyone is rushing. Not a single small group I’m a part of meets regularly anymore. No one can find a place on the schedule. Which is why Facebook is appealing. You and I can maintain the semblance of a relationship to other humans by texting from a Blackberry all the fun things we’re doing by ourselves.

I long ago gave up scheduling parties. Trying get three couples together face-to-face to do anything is akin to mounting an expedition to Everest.

So we text. And the Facebook walls fill up with graffiti.

I read fewer blogs anymore. It’s a lot of text from people who increasingly seem like the imaginary friends of my childhood. I find it a bit disturbing. That line in Ecclelsiastes that reads that the making of books has no end was long before the profusion of text bombarding us from every direction, most of it utterly throwaway.

We have all these high tech devices to help us communicate, but as I see it, there’s never been less genuine, lasting communication than there is today.

Below is just a sampling of news stories I’ve seen recently (and yes, I understand the circular nature of that statement):


‘Internet Addiction’ Linked to Depression, Says Study
Could it be that something about our society today causes depression, and those most affected by it are the ones seeking a respite in the “approved” source of modern comfort, the Internet?

Computers Can’t Replace Us
Tech pundit Jaron Lanier laments the dumbing down of interaction and the lost sense of identity that the Internet fosters.

The Teens Who Can Barely Talk
What happens when a person’s vocabulary reflects only words found in the most commonly texted phrases?

In Praise of Online Obscurity
When Wired magazine wonders if all this social media is only robbing our relational bank accounts and diluting effective communication, well…

The Facebook Myth
Plenty of cause-joining, quiz-taking, and online activity, but does it amount to so much self-pleasuring and sloth?

I look at what is happening to communication and connection and wonder why we need this tech middleman to work as a go-between that links you and me to real life. I wonder if the depressed person is the one caught in the move away from the kind of face-to-face community cachet that used to fill our relational bank accounts. I read the above articles and I’m chilled by them.

And now I want to make one of the most bold statements I think I’ve ever made on Cerulean Sanctum:

In all my years of watching the Church, I’ve never seen an individual church improved by technology, only diminished by it.

I want to add that there is a difference between lifeblood and convenience. Tech can make things more convenient. Having a computer and color laserpinter to design and print the church bulletins is great for convenience. But no computer or laserprinter can build the core functions of the Church. And when we confuse convenience with lifeblood, look out.

Yet how is it that churches are spending collective billions to become more tech savvy? How is it that upgrading the sound system in the church can become more important than helping a member fix her car or pay a bill he cannot pay due to job loss?

And how is it that we think we can insert tech into the basics of the faith and make them better? We had hymnals, then overhead projectors, then Powerpoint slide shows, and now we have the words of the music we sing to God backed by a full-blown media presentation complete with a 24-fps YouTube video of other people worshiping and capped by a Blue Angels flyover.

How can we not understand what we’re losing?

We can plaster our church lobbies with costly flat-panel displays showing stock photo slideshows of smiling, fair-haired people with nice teeth telling visitors to our church just how much we love them, Monkey in a cageyet those very same visitors can walk out without a handshake and a genuine human being who says, “Hey! Come join my wife and me for lunch after the service.”

We can pour line after line of text into Facebook and still not understand that our “friends” are desperate to truly connect with other people, yet no longer know how.

We can grow jealous of the person who has the tech device we don’t, which allows him or her to communicate in a way we can’t afford.

We can continue to buy into the marketing that we must surround ourselves with yet one more tech gizmo we didn’t know we truly needed—and then miss the reality that none of us seem to get together anymore.

And we can fill our churches with millions of bucks worth of tech, only to find each of us behind a Plexiglas wall, our in-the-ear monitors failing to pick up the full conversation, as we wonder what happened to that freeing vibe we used to feel in the music of real community.

I can’t help but think that technology is turning our human conversations into white noise, even as it isolates us and leads us to a place of asking if anyone really, truly cares.