The Evolving Church
By Charles Rush
May 20, 2012
Matthew 5: 14-16
[ Audio
(mp3, 6.6Mb) ]
e headlines this week featured Mark Zuckerberg with Facebook's opening the Stock Exchange for Facebook's IPO. A 28 year old kid that could easily be working as a waiter while he figures out his life, now has 19 billion dollars in his pocket, plus or minus some loose change. It is a fantastic, only in America tale. I couldn't help but reflect on how much the world has changed in one generation. Perhaps you saw the cartoon last week in the New Yorker. It features a middle school kid saying to his father, “Dad, can I have some friend over so we can stand around in my room and text each other?”
About a year
ago, I had to clean out the house after my father died. I found a shoe box,
opened it and pulled out a stack of post cards. Do you remember post cards? And
a couple of those sheets of paper that Europeans used to use to mail letters
overseas, incredibly thin little paper.
They were all
the post cards that I mailed to my mother in college. It really doesn't seem
like it was that long ago but it was like looking back at a whole lost world. I
stayed out of college, saved my own money back when people actually worked and
went to college at the same time, got on a plane to Europe with a passport and
an American Express credit card because that was the only international credit
card at the time and you could only get money by finding an American Express
office. Pretty often that was also almost the only place you could make direct
international calls which no students ever did because they were incredibly
expensive. So for months there was absolutely no way my mother could make
contact with me.
The poor woman. She did start turning prematurely white
about that time, now that I think about it. The mail was so slow that I was
gone for weeks before she received a card I wrote on day 2 in Europe. Thank
God, this is what I wrote.
Dear Mom, I met
some guys from Pakistan in Zurich. They drive cars from Germany to Damascus to
sell on the black market. I've agreed to drive one for them to Istanbul. Lucky
me, it is a BMW. I met a great girl from Trinity College in Dublin and she is
with me. The Alps are stunning. Say a prayer as we are crossing Yugoslavia and
will be behind the Iron Curtain in Bulgaria tomorrow. I wonder what that will
be like? Love, your oldest Son.
Bulgaria was so
much more remote then. A short thirty years ago, hardly anyone in the West had
ever traveled anywhere behind the Iron Curtain or to mainland China for that
matter. For all intensive purposes, we were completely cut off and there was
literally a fence all the way around it with guards, dogs and towers.
I'm at dinner
the other night and one of my friends gets a text from his daughter in
Barcelona, who probably needed more money, although my friend wouldn't admit that
to me publicly. Princess and friends are name the restaurant they are at, which
my friend has eaten at independently, so he looks up the review that got him to
that restaurant the first time, shoots it to his daughter, like she was in New
York… or Summit for that matter.
We were swapping
notes about the vagaries of communication these days. His mother is aging and
gets confused easily these days, still wants to live independently, but she
keeps writing checks to the wrong people for the wrong amount, and gets more
confused when she has to fix them. So she calls him at the office because he
put his picture on her phone at home to make it easier for her to dial. And she
interrupts him in the middle of meetings, very upset. He is calling a two
minute breather in the meeting, walking down the corridor looking for an empty
meeting room to calm her down, so that he can call her back later and then go
on-line that night to look at her account, redress the
mistakes, call her again to smooth everything out. He has one generation that
is in Massachusetts and another generation in Spain but he hears more from them
than if they all lived next door.
We are so much
more connected today. I got a tour of the Goldman Sachs building right across
from Liberty Tower, beautiful building. I was watching the analysts and
traders, so much quieter. I've seen a picture of Dave Bunting on the floor at 1st
Boston when he was 37 and he literally has five different phones on his
shoulder and he is shouting across the floor.
Today, analysts,
literally from all over the world, have a bank of screens in front of them
equities, treasuries, commodities, futures. The markets in
Europe, in Japan, in Singapore, in Hong Kong, in China. All of them trending. It was kind of beautifully mesmerizing
in a way, except that it vaguely reminds me of the monitors in ICU. You
associate a certain anxiety with monitors in ICU and these monitors at the
trading desks now are never off. There is always a market trading somewhere and
that market could suddenly have critical implications for everything else, so
you could start plugging in obsessively I suppose.
Our world has
become so much smaller since Walt Disney pronounced, “It's a Small World after
All” fifty years ago. Now, we have to hear some would-be terrorist threatening
the world from the remote desert of Yemen because he uploaded his video and Al Jazeera is playing it for all of Europe to fret about. We
know all of the intricacies and players in the Greek parliament and the default
there will unroll and impact us in a way that we not only know about, we will
personally feel.
Whether or not
Israel actually bombs Iran has major implications for us even if we don't care that much about
either Iran or Israel, so we follow the political landscape in Jerusalem and
the insanity of Teheran and we can watch a YouTube video of a demonstration
there shot from some kids cell phone twenty minutes ago.
Who can say how
this has changed us emotionally and spiritually? We are in the very front end of a period when
the quantity and quality of communication has doubled now, not every decade,
but every few years.
I don't really
need to know that some guy I went to High School with actually likes a recent
video of Rush Limbaugh because we haven't actually spoken to each other since
graduation and even then our most important exchange was making change for a
dollar, but thanks to the miracle of Facebook, I see that he never married, has
a dog and 700 friends on Facebook compared to my paltry 250. And I now know not
to ask him about politics at the reunion this summer. Instead, I can extend my
handshake and ask, “how is your dog Thumper doing?”
You have these
groups that you are connected with at work, committees, relatives no matter
where they reside in the world, posts from your godson that you'd rather not
see of people cavorting at college- oh my God, what is she doing?, more news,
viscerally unedited on occasion and it is coming at you all the time. I'm
wondering when we'll read about people checking their phone on the way to the
bathroom in the middle of the night.
My generation
grew up reading books in college like ‘Future Shock' by Alvin Toffler, knowing
that change itself would become a defining social
challenge in our lifetime. Still, I have to tell you that I've underestimated the extend and the breadth of what change actually means for
our social and spiritual life. Somehow we are becoming over-exposed,
over-connected, and it creates in us this broad responsibility that is anxiety
engendering, to the point that we are feeling nearly overwhelmed too much of
the time. For some reason, it just feels like you can't take on much more of
anything because there is too much to keep up with already.
I'm willing to
predict that this is going to change how we do church and what we do in church
in this next chapter. I suspect that we are going to come to church to shift
gears and reflect. I suspect that we are going to do less and be more. The
irony is that we go to church less because we have so many more commitments that
it is getting harder and harder to fit it in with everything else, and yet we
actually need it more and more.
We need
something genuine, something moving and meaningful. We need a grounded
community that is not stress inducing like so many of our virtual communities,
where we can share more out of our common desire to be a little deeper than
liking Stephen Colbert, more about why we are here and what is important in the
few remaining years we have of this life.
I suspect we are
going to come together as a community of seekers, opening ourselves to God,
seeking to run the tape back through our lives, to transform and renew our
minds in a different direction. Left to our own devices, we sort of know the
direction we are likely to slide as a generation.
[Video]
This next year,
I need you to be involved in the discussion. We are in unchartered social
terrain ahead and the experts will not be any guide for the future. I need you
to help all of us think this out and figure out how we need to change for the
changes that are happening all around us right now. Make meaning here first and
it will be like a light unto the community that will draw people for the right
reasons to meet the right needs. Unlock what is inside of you, inside of all of
us, and live in a deeper key of life. Amen.
