Faith Works 7-12-24

Faith Works 7-12-24

Jeff Gill

Face to face in an electronic age

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There's a cause and effect question I continue to have about contact and communications and technology.

I was talking about agoras, marketplaces recently, and how Paul and the early Christian church would communicate the good news of God's love made known in Jesus Christ through simple everyday personal interactions. Paul, and Priscilla and Aquila, and most of the apostles as they moved out from Israel, did their initial evangelistic work through face to face encounters. Tent making on the edge of the market plaza was a setting where you could sit and work and talk to passersby.

Obviously, Paul and Priscilla and Aquila did not compete with re-runs of "Friends" pulling people home to watch TV, or potential customers walking around head down viewing Tik Tok videos on their phone. Talking to each other was pretty much all they had.

Jump ahead in the history of evangelism, and we can make interesting connections between the invention of movable type and printing press technology and the Protestant Reformation (cheer or boo as you are so moved). Sailing and navigation technology combine with improved machining of materials for buggies and coaches to put populations as well as goods on the move. Did all of this change how we both teach rising generations about the faith of their ancestors, or present the Gospel to new audiences and different cultures? Of course it did.

Then we get internal combustion engines, airplanes, and interstate highways: all drawing closer to our time, while speeding up the pace of change. Television follows radio, cell phones replace landlines, and then the internet. [Gasps for air.]

So I asked last week "Can our apps be at least a part of what saves us?" The pace of change, and the impact on faith communities of all sorts, has some wondering if we need to think very differently about how we use technology, even as even small rural congregations have raced to embrace screens in the sanctuary and learned how to stream services.

It's a mess. But did church leaders think that after Gutenberg complicated how information was shared? Did pioneer preachers dread the influence of national radio broadcasts into parishioners' homes? (Yes, and yes.) Religious faith in general and Christianity in particular has dealt with many such transformations over the last two thousand years. We talk about "Dark Ages" not because all human advancement stopped in the Medieval period, but because many leaders, secular and sacred, thought the fall of the Roman Empire would mean the end to effective communication and illumination . . . which is not, in fact, what happened.

Now we seem to be entering an age of not darkness, but of too much illumination, a light beam of so much information pouring over us it blinds us. We do need sunglasses; the future or even the present is so "bright" we gotta wear shades. Or at least filters, like eclipse glasses to allow only a certain amount of illumination through.

The problem with those filters, though, is who decides what is important information? How do we know which authorities to listen to? Because we cannot learn or even internalize everything that's pouring out over us. And I don't even know how to use all the apps that are on my phone as it is.

This is where a community of trust comes in. We need to start identifying what a trustworthy network of leadership and mentorship and teaching looks like, especially around faith. And I think technology can be part of that.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he is setting up some thoughts, but is still open to input. Tell him where you turn for trustworthy information at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.