I recently heard a comedian speaking about the death of pub banter. He explained that in the past all you needed was a trigger, like the question ‘how many Bond films was Sean Connery in?’ And the banter would begin:

‘He was in Goldfinger and Diamonds Are Forever, definitely,’
‘He was un-arguably the best James Bond,’
‘He was in Live And Let Die,’
‘No, that was George Lazenby,’
‘Who?!’
‘Connery was in stacks, nine or ten!’
‘Name them then!’

And on it would go. Pub banter; one of the great joys of pubs. The comedian went on to remark that when a similar question is asked now, someone at the table will undoubtedly dive for their smart phone, searching for the information at lightning speed, then slamming the phone down on the table. BOOM. ‘He was in six.’ End of conversation.

The comedian lamented pub banter as a lost art. Yes, the correct information had been found, but it had been at the cost of the process.

I am beginning to think that technology may be costing us more than we realise.

Caught in the Net

We are all distracted a lot of the time. This is probably not news to you. We have all at some point stopped listening to our friends because of the beep of our phones. We have all checked our social media in the middle of a presentation we should have been listening to.

As I began to research the topic of distraction for this magazine I discovered an alarming mine of information about the detrimental ways we are being shaped by technology; prophets of doom – sociologists, psychologists, authors, teachers – their warnings echoing into the wilderness of the inter-web. I began to read perturbing things about the way we are processing information, that we could actually be re-wiring our brains to fast paced information decoding, whilst damaging our ability for deep contemplative thought. I found experts saying that there is no such thing as multi-tasking, we have all simply trained our brains to skip quickly from task to task to task (one doctor suggesting this fast paced concentration changing trains the brain for an Alzheimer’s-like state – yikes!). I read and heard many testimonies of people who used to love reading, plunging into the depths of an argument or losing themselves in the thread of a narrative, but now struggle to maintain their attention for more than a few pages, becoming distracted, checking their phones, tuning out.

Many will shrug off any criticism of information technology because of the vast good which it has afforded us: its encouragement of freedom of speech, its dissemination of information, its ability to connect us to more people and more content than ever before. But when theorist Marshall McLuhan coined the term ‘the media is the message’ he was pointing out that the way in which we receive information can be as formative as the information itself. In short, we are not just what we read, we are also how we read. I think perhaps we have embraced much of our information technologies because of the great content they bring us, but have overlooked a careful examination of the way we are taking in this content, and therefore the way the medium is shaping our processes of thought.

Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains, says ‘when the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image.’ It takes literature, music, news, even people, and turns them in to flickering mega-pixels, infuses them with hyper-links, ads and related content. It defuses our concentration, pulling it in many different directions, causing us to skip from link to link to link (it’s in their interest – the more links, the more ads, the more money. Contemplative reading is not very profitable at all.). Carr says, where we once would scuba-dive in a sea of words, music, images or discussion, we now zip along the surface like a jet skier. Rather than feasting on the wisdom and talent of others we become mere decoders of information.

Alarmed by the effects of this distraction epidemic I began to see its fingerprints in my own life. I began to notice the way information traffic had squeezed its way into every available space in my day. I read of psychologists suggesting that the rate at which we intake information correlates with our levels of stress, and my alarm increased. I know this correlation is true in my own experience, but I began to see how anxiety levels have increased all around me. I heard of more and more people no longer able to cope with their level of anxiety, especially young people. I heard of chaplains beginning the school year presented with a list of entering year sevens already known to have anxiety disorders. It didn’t used to be like this.

Are we allowing kids to fall into damaging cycles of pounding their brains with information, sentencing them to sickening anxiety, without any warning? Are we all unknowingly falling into this trap?

What does this mean for disciples?

Certainly there are some questions to be asked about the way we interact with information technologies. But this distraction epidemic has some unique implications for disciples of The Way. If you take some time to mull it over you will probably come up with a few of your own. Here are just a few of the ways I see our state of distraction eating away at discipleship.

PRESENCE I was in an airport terminal picking up my sister from a long trip recently and while she waited in the customs queue I got to thinking about the importance of presence. I had video chatted with her multiple times while she was away, seen her pictures, heard her stories, told her that I loved her – all online. Yet when she walked through the doors and I got to see her in the flesh I felt like crying. Why is that? Because physical presence is so important. Being able to touch someone, see their expressions, walk with them, allows such a deeper level of connection than anything you can achieve from a distance or online.

That’s part of the wonder of Jesus, our God in the flesh. By coming to earth he could get dusty feet, cry salty tears, feel hunger, thirst and pain. God and man relate on an intimate level because he has been with us.

It is important that we do not hold on to a false sense of connection through technology. Or simply become too distracted to really connect with those God puts in our path. God calls us into committed relationship with our family, the poor and marginalised, our spouse, our church, the land he has put us on. We do not honor him by neglecting these relationships out of distraction.

WISDOM When the practice of writing was being developed Plato voiced quite prophetic concerns in the dialogue Phaedrus. Concerns that through the new medium people would ‘receive a quantity of information without proper instruction’, would ‘be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant,’ and would ‘be filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.’ This misunderstanding of wisdom is prevalent today, where the speed at which information is attained is valued over what is actually done with that information and how it is synthesised.

We cannot afford to begin to process the words of the Bible the way we take in other information, skimming along the surface, taking key points and skipping on, lest we be deceived by ‘the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.’

The Bible is to be devoured, soaked in, wrestled with. It is a text that if allowed, shapes us, re-forms our world view, allows us to see the spiritual as well as the physical. My Dad says that ‘gold found has ten times the value of gold given to you.’ The things that I wrestle with to a point of understanding, and the gems that I find within the pages of the Bible that grip me, will hold so much more value for me than those things that I receive on a plate due to someone else’s wrestling and study. Those things we come to for ourselves are the basis of wisdom.

Depth

As I have dwelt on this topic over the last few months there has been one thing that God has consistently and gently challenged me with. It is that God needs deep leaders. People who don’t switch off at the sight of pain, who ponder the roots of injustice, who re-imagine the world made new, who sit and ask God about his mysteries, who listen to people whole-heartedly and seek to understand their story.

The uncomfortable edge to this is that I hear God’s voice prompting me that I cannot practice being shallow now, and expect to be able to lead from a deep place later.

Never before has such a war been raged against our inner peace and depth. If you are waiting for culture to give you permission to carve out true Sabbath and quiet space to hear God’s voice, you will wait in vain. There is much at stake, and perhaps the time has come for some drastic measures.

Read more from Youth Vision Quarterly ‘Distractions’ here.

“If you can’t go to church and at least for a moment be given transcendence, if you can’t pass briefly from this life into the next, then I can’t see why anyone should go. Just a brief moment of transcendence causes you to come out of church a changed person”

Ken Gire, Windows of the Soul

Transcendence, capturing glimpses of it has been my passion for over 30 years. My God is so big, so beautiful, so vast, so intimate that I could spend many lifetimes exploring and reflecting His character.

When the people of God gather, there is no excuse for boring, unimaginative, same-old same-old worship. We are created in the image of the Great Creator and we are operating in His character when we bring creativity into our worship. It is also great teaching technique. Some learn best visually, some need to listen while others learn by doing. If we can find ways to communicate our message in all these ways, we will lift the effectiveness of our teaching.

What does creativity in worship look like? Of course we can use music and the spoken word, but we can also use dance, film, art, photography, drama. We can create candlelit reflection spaces or craft experiences that allow people to feel their worship in the physical.

What can such an experience look like? At a recent Gateway midweek communion service (with a smaller congregation of about 100), we wanted to encourage people to move on from past hurts into the new future that God has prepared for each of us.

We started with excerpts from the film Great Expectations. Miss Haversham is jilted on her wedding day and 50 years later is still sitting in her dusty wedding dress. What a great analogy hanging on to the hurts of the past! We contrasted this story with Joseph’s: a man who could have chosen to sit in the bitterness of his past but allowed God to walk him into his future, having learnt valuable lessons from his pain. People were then challenged to move around five stations or spaces that we set up around the room.

1 We were encouraged to think about and write down the messages about ourselves that were given to us by our parents or significant others, messages that have hung in our spirits for years.

2 In a quiet candlelit corner, we sat with individual MP3 players listening to Scriptures being read, scriptures that expressed God’s opinion of us and His plans for our lives. For many people, the contrast was an awakening moment.

3 We read Hebrews 11 and imagined ourselves as heroes of the faith. As we looked back on our lives, what lessons could we see that God had taught us in hardship which allowed us to be more effective disciples?

4 A pile of heavy backpacks were placed at the back of the room. These represented past hurts that weighed us down and as we carried one to the front of the church and left it at the foot of the cross, we were encouraged to pray that the physical act would represent a spiritual reality.

5 We came together and took communion to help us seal in prayer what God was saying to us.

Let’s get practical. How do you spark creativity? First, feed your creative side. Expose yourself to art, film, theatre and books. Soak up the things that inspire you and fill you with awe. Gather a team that is passionate about creative communication of the gospel. Give your mind time and space – my best ideas come in the shower! Dream through the service. What emotions do you want people to feel throughout the worship time (e.g. peace, anger, wonder)? Can you craft experiences using video, song, visual images to help move souls in the direction of God? How can you get out of the way and let God do His work? Can you encourage reflection using silence or instrumental music?

This process takes time, work and planning, but wonderful things can be achieved; for even a brief moment, the physical world can melt away and we get a glimpse of eternity and our hearts ache with longing for God’s coming perfect creation where we will find our home.

To read more of Youth Vision Quarterly ‘The Art Issue’ here.

There are very few people who would disagree with the notion that the Church needs to embrace creativity. One of the great moves over the last ten to fifteen years in Christian culture has been an attempt to close the creativity gap between the Church and the wider culture. Thus a great deal of Church websites are now more pleasing on the eye, our brochures look slicker, Christian bands look cooler, our worship is more experiential, and there are conferences aplenty to serve those wishing to learn more about creative ministries.

Yet are these moves really about creativity? I am not so sure. So much of this movement to make Christians more creative is wrapped up in the quest to make Church more relevant. Which is a kind of short hand way of trying to say that we need to close the cultural gap between the Church and the wider society. That for the Christian faith in the West to remain relevant (note that word) we must be running at the same pace as secular culture when it comes trends and fashion. If we can achieve this, if our music, our images, our worship services look and sound like the wider culture, the doors of the Church will be broken down by the spiritually hungry.

This view assumes that secularism is not the main reason that the Church is marginalised in the West, rather we have gotten our aesthetic wrong. A problem easily remedied by simply mimicking the style and fashions of the wider culture. So our services begin to look like Australian Idol, our Christian indie bands look like secular indie bands, youth ministry websites look like secular websites trying to reach the youth market. In the midst of all of this Christians do get a chance exercise their creativity, through their musical or design based gifting, but is this the kind of creative endeavor that we as believers are really called to? Is this genuine creativity or mimicry?

When we see creativity as simply a tool to aid us in our quest to become relevant, we hungrily seek out those who have crossed over the cultural divide and who straddle the mysterious line between Christian and secular artists. For the last twenty-five years Christians have enquired about the faith status of Bono, now young believes ask similar ‘are they or aren’t they’ questions about The Temper Trap, Mumford and Sons, and Sufjan Stevens. These questions are rooted in the belief that by association with the social currency of celebrity the cultural gap can be further closed.

When we simply mimic the art of wider culture, we become something like gift shops at the art gallery, the real works are inside, and all we offer are mass produced prints and imitations.

I believe that we have to start again. I believe that the mission of the Church to the West will not be achieved by simply becoming cooler, or by mimicking the styles and tastes of the wider culture. Instead the church must understand what it truly means to create rather than to mimic. We only have to look to the past to see that this is possible, there is a whole cavalcade of creatives whose faith inspired them to be at the forefront of cultural creativity. We only have to listen to Handel, to look at a painting by Carrivagio, to walk through a building by Gaudi, or read Dostoyevsky to understand that for these great artists creativity was not about bridging a gap between the wider culture and the Church. Rather faith for these people was the foundation that enabled them to create sublime, incredible works of creativity which speak to us still today.

I believe that we need to return to a biblical understanding of our God given mandate as humans to create. We are created in God’s image, God is the creator of the world, the architect of the Himalayas, the Bird of Paradise and the Andromeda system. God speaks the world into being. We are called to be his ambassadors on earth, to act as he acts; so the ability to create, to imagine things and then to bring them into being is an essential part of our humanity. We are not called to simply mimic, God gives us the ability to create.

When God created humans in the garden he gave us the role of guardians or stewards of creation. When I hear steward I think of someone in a fluorescent vest ensuring that people do not run onto the pitch at sporting events. The Hebrew word used is Shomer, the english translation struggles to capture the true breadth of this word. A Shomer in Jewish thinking is someone who is chosen to look after and guard something of worth, and who is held accountable for their stewardship by a Rabbinical court. The role of the Shomer is not simply to be a passive guard but to cultivate the item in their care.

Thus as stewards we are called to partner with God in his great creative project, the redemption of a broken cosmos. God calls us to be a part of the creative process. Creativity is not a choice it is part of our mandate.

On the Cross we discover a vital element of God’s creative nature. One of the struggles of the artist is to hold together the awe inspiring and the transcendent elements of life, those moments which remind us of God’s glory, with the painful and broken elements of life. Christians tend to do okay at the first part, Christian bookstores are filled with prints of glorious mountain ranges, we love the transcendent apex of the worship song. But we tend to struggle with the broken elements of life, with integrating suffering, lament and loss into our creativity. On the Cross, God intervenes in history with such staggering alacrity and originality we can only marvel at his creativity. In one moment, God’s glory is revealed, Jesus takes sin upon his shoulders and defeats death and evil, yet at the same time, we are confronted with the image of a dying God, a man whose painful screams speak of his isolation from God. The crucifixion is one of those rare moments, where the transcendent and the immanent, the glorious and the earthly, the human and the divine are held together. It is the ultimate template for Christian creatives. Hold those extremes together and you will produce work that no longer is mimicry but which is truly creative.

Read more in Youth Vision Quarterly ‘The Art Issue’ here.