Faith Works 7-5-24

Faith Works 7-5-24

Jeff Gill

Making connections in a divisive era

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In recent weeks I've ruminated about retail formats and communications technology, and some of you have emailed or messaged me to say "Jeff, you're not talking about faith!"

I get it. I do.

What I'd love to do is spend time in this space outlining spiritual disciplines and personal practices which lead to inner peace and outward work towards God's justice. Maybe I could do a better job of that.

Where today's marketplace is, though, is different.

In the last few months I've had a number of friends and colleagues travel to the eastern Mediterranean and post pictures along with stories from their travels. They put some contemporary images alongside my own awareness of ancient archaeology, and the textual witness. In most Greek speaking cities of the Ancient Near East was an "agora," a marketplace which was where people came to do business, to interact. 

Home was often a compound, a walled enclosure with many buildings backing onto a perimeter barrier and a single gate, and I have friends who in relatively recent years have been in Iraq and Afghanistan, who tell me about such extended family residences.

So combine that more immediate image of a residential enclosure with the ancient world, and marketplace for social interaction which was on the edge of the administrative center, with a central plaza, often a well nearby, and booths set up for short term rental or some in family hands for generations, and downwind a less desirable open end of the three-sided square which was seasonally home for hide tanners and tent makers.

In the middle, an open space, like any courthouse square or main street or "broad way," so to speak, where people on certain days would gather and converse and discuss and even debate.

This was the context, the setting, for Paul's initial teaching and preaching, from the Areopagus in Athens at the foot of the Acropolis, to agoras in smaller cities like Corinth and Thessaly and Ephesus. The public marketplace was a cultural norm and a social technology, like a courthouse square in our more recent past, or a mall very recently.

Today? In 2024 and what is to come, how do we put ourselves in the path of those seeking the way to God, towards hope, in the direction of redemption? Do we go downtown, or the blocks adjoining? That was once the smart way to preach and build and invite: put a church near the center of the city. If we are buying and selling and shopping and investing online, then faith needs to be present, somehow, in those "places" (quotation marks quite intentional).

Yet we do not understand how virtual connections, artificial intelligence, online realities, shape the person, the families, the souls which are the intended focus of faith communities. We just don't. Agoras turned into cities which became malls which are now . . . something else. Churches went from the four corners downtown (look at Granville, for pity's sake) to a ring of steeples a block beyond the retail core to big boxes parked out just beyond the retail big boxes and vast parking areas. It all makes a certain amount of sense, but . . .

Now some suggest we need to create churches, and be faith communities, which are almost Luddite. And I get that, too. We set aside our phones and tablets, and turn back to printed programs, bound books, Bibles in print, not online. That's one way to be counter cultural today. Will it build deeper roots and more lasting institutions? It might, but it might not.

Or is there a way for faith and prophetic vision and religious institutions to create community in the middle of the personalized technology we all carry around with us? Can our apps be at least a part of what saves us?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he is definitely thinking out loud, and that's not always a good thing. Tell him what you think he's trying to say at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.