Faith Works 2-13-21

Faith Works 2-13-21

Jeff Gill

Thinking like a community

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If a worshiper hears one thing from the pulpit for sixty minutes on Sunday and then gets a completely different message from twenty-seven hours of media consumption at home and on their devices, there's an imbalance that's hard to fight.

But the message of a ministry, the good news however you frame it — the Christian gospel, the call to faith of Islam, the noble truths of Buddhism, the rationalism of atheism, even — is often at odds with the surrounding culture. I am a Christian, by upbringing and by adult conviction, and I know much of what I believe is ultimately true about life and death and eternity is regularly contradicted by the culture in which I live.

One of the tensions of recent years is that we had a few decades where people of my faith perspective could expect the surrounding culture to mostly affirm our beliefs, and rarely if ever challenge them, let alone contradict them. This is a secret advantage minority beliefs had in the Twentieth Century: they never assumed for a minute that classroom instruction or popular media would do their work for them. If they wanted children and families and newly convicted adults to come to their understandings, they would have to teach and reinforce them on their own. Christians, especially Protestant Christians, got . . . well, we got lazy. And took for granted that Hollywood and TV news and Miss McGillicuddy in the third grade would do at least some of our work for us. When the overarching culture got crude and profane and agnostic at best, anti-theistic at worst, it not only has been a shock for many, it also has laid bare how our assumptions have not served us well in teaching and forming faith into adulthood.

But there's another challenge today: for a congregation of 100 people in, say, 1970 there were three TV networks, and you generally watched one or another, let's say Walter. There were three news magazines, and your house got Newsweek. You subscribed to either the morning Columbus Citizen-Journal or the evening Dispatch, along with the Newark Advocate. At church, your minister promoted the denominational publication, which was generally a monthly, often mailed in bulk to the church and distributed at the door with the bulletin. There were still a few movie theaters downtown, but each was a single screen, maybe rotating a pair of movies per week at most. And the discussions about politics and culture people had outside of church were largely defined at workplaces and in neighborhoods. There's your whole media environment.

Today, a congregation of 100 people has 1000 different ways to consume media, with tens of thousands of programs and channels. My 1970 predecessor could at least be conversant and generally aware of the entire incoming information environment, or close enough to speak to it all in general, with their interpretation of God's Word for the day. A preacher today cannot even begin to be certain what images, ideas, or impressions have bounced off of the imaginations and intentions of their congregation just in the week since they were last together.

A hundred years ago, ministers really were, and were expected, to be one of the best informed people a church member would meet, and their suggestions, let alone pulpit proclamations, about what people should read or reflect on or even to think about had the weight of respect and status behind them. If you were a thoughtful farmer or factory worker or even local professional person, the minister's reading and knowledge was taken as one of the best and most reliable guides you could rely on.

Today, we find we are often just one more opinion in people's ears. They don't mean to be disrespectful or dismissive, but trust me (see what I did there?) we feel it. A passing blog post can sweep away a point we've been building up carefully for weeks; a TV commentator's vast generalization pushes past a very personal message we've been trying to share.

Is there an answer for preachers and ministers in this misinformation age? I think so. Come back next week, and we'll be in Lent, a good time to reflect on this very question.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been thinking a great deal about media and ministry this past year. Tell him what you're thinking at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 2-6-21

Faith Works 2-6-21

Jeff Gill

Discussion, declaration, and discernment

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If you agree, as I said recently, that neither you nor I are God, then it's not a big leap to accepting that neither of us can know everything.

This is where the firehose of the internet becomes a challenge. You can be tempted (aha! theologically familiar ground) to think you can know much, even almost everything you need to know, if you take enough bites out of the apple of online information.

Looked at reasonably, let alone theologically, we know that's not true. In fact, many of us have had reason to look back at things once often said, including by ourselves, about how the main barrier to understanding and transformation was lack of information. "If only people knew more about others, different cultures, various ways of being, we would have a better and more loving world." Yeah, that experiment has been run, and having at least access to, and maybe even actually getting more information doesn't necessarily change behavior or attitudes or feelings. 

And that's really what I've been talking about here for the last few weeks. More information actually is creating room for confusion, even adding to tension and dissension. On a personal and practical level, I don't think less access is a good thing, so censorship or restrictions on free speech aren't where I'm going, but in truth I do believe we need to think and even pray about how we do consume content, how we choose what to read and view and take in. Or in the metaphor I keep coming back to, I don't want government or even, up to a certain point, my faith community, to tell me exactly what to eat, but I do think it's a part of healthy religious dialogue and teaching to be reminded that "we are what we eat."

Everyone generally acknowledges this with food: eat junk, especially too much junk or exclusively fast food, highly processed and additive-laden, and you will get poor outcomes in your physical health. "You are what you eat." Eat junk, feel junky.

How much more so, then, your media diet. "You are what you view." If you watch crud, your thinking and emotions and reactions are going to get cruddy. If you view lots of porn, your understanding of intimate relationships will become twisted and unrealistic and damaging for both you and those you love. If you absorb mass quantities of celebrity gossip, I think it's emotional and financial pornography of a sort: it messes up your understanding of what real life and relationships are like. And when it comes to political news . . .

These are perilous waters I'm proposing we paddle in. It's easier for me to talk about why you should avoid porn or gossip entirely for the health of your soul, and I hope that case is clear here as well. But civic affairs and electoral activities are something you really can't avoid 100%, nor do I want to make that case. Yet if I even hint I have the absolute solution for which channel or outlet to watch, I'm going to push the eject button for many of you still reading this far into my reflections on this terribly important subject.

Can I for this week say this much, as a former parish pastor and still an ordained Christian minister: in most churches I've served, if I had two solid hours a week of your ear, I was doing well. Sunday morning worship, maybe a Bible study midweek or evening prayer and devotions service. A newsletter could add to that impact, and now we have email and social media, but it's still in bits and chunks.

Two hours plus some change is the absolute most I could imagine having access to your ear and mind and heart. But what my predecessors in ministry couldn't imagine is a time where, on leaving the church building, many of the most devoted members would then go home and give another perspective an average of three to 23 hours (or more!) per week.

Look, I've always known some would leave church and go home and hear what Robert Schuller had to say. And would hear about how my message didn't quite measure up to his. Made my (relative) peace with that a long time ago. But I had an hour, and the Crystal Cathedral had an hour. Now, with 24 hour cable news, and online push notifications, Sean Hannity has at least five hours a week to my one; Rachel Maddow or Wolf Blitzer ditto. How does a preacher compete, just on the hour by hour basis? On a certain level, you just don't.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been thinking a great deal about media and ministry this past year. Tell him what you're thinking at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.