Faith Works 7-19-24

Faith Works 7-19-24

Jeff Gill

The theology of experience, spiritual and technological

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What is "a community of trust"?

This is a formulation I closed with last week as we were talking about the firehose of information which obscures as much as it illuminates. It's not just "fake news" or deep fakes or outright falsehoods which confuse us today, I would argue, as it is the sheer volume of what's coming at us, beyond our ability to process.

It's no longer enough to know who in our local marketplace knows what's going on, the senior or revered or simply well-connected person. And we now don't choose between Cronkite or Huntley and Brinkley for "the most trusted name in news," either.

In terms of faith and practice, we've lost a huge amount of trust in hierarchies and official channels. I could outline the reasons for this at length: it begins in living memory with Vietnam and Watergate, and continues through revelations around abuse of the vulnerable in church and camp settings, enabled whether intentionally or not by power structures which looked out for their own preservation before protecting children.

You can't just say "because the church says so" about much of anything. Maybe, just maybe that line of argument never really did work, but today it's clear to preachers and evangelists and advocates alike that the appeal to authority is not going to open up an audience.

Yet there are many of us who've worked and served in church leadership, from the local to the more general, who would point out, chastened but firmly, that the appeal to experience is not as reliable as it seems. We can be fooled by what appeals to us personally, and in fact, the degree of intrinsic appeal may actually make us more vulnerable to deception. Our experience is, by definition, limited to what we've experienced, and that's a small slice of the reality now available to us.

In other words, we need some authorities in our lives. Dictionaries to settle arguments in Scrabble, weather apps to let us know what's going on over the horizon, news channels to help us understand what we are called to do as citizens in a democracy. Maybe even a Bible for a witness to the much bigger picture beyond our own experience, a Big Picture into which we fit.

Still, we don't know which authorities we should listen to about the Bible, when we're unsure or even more dangerously resistant to giving "an old book" any authority over our lives. I find many people, even unchurched people, suspect the Bible is a source of more than just "old stuff," but when it comes to life application, to taking ancient lessons and using them to define our current experience, they're wary more of who is telling them what the Bible says than they are of the book itself.

Being an ordained clergy person is not enough; being an established church tradition or denomination carries almost no weight at all. Look at how many choose to be married by a friend or colleague ordained for $25 out of an advertisement, not a formally recognized minister. The same sort of indifference increasingly applies to funeral services and who leads them, how they're handled, or what is said.

This is where most churches are finding we are rebuilding the concept of "a community of trust" from scratch. The old logos and relationships are not working on their own to establish trust. But how do we accomplish that in the media environment of today?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he hopes to be a trustworthy source of illumination. Tell him how you decide whom to trust at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.