I
work in an environment that requires – demands – an array of communications
technologies, platforms, systems, and applications. My team is responsible for
managing social media channels – Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, a blog, assorted web
sites – for the organization. We’re part of a larger digital team that also
manages all of the primary web properties.
We
use smart phones, iPads, laptops. We’re supported by rather complex IT systems.
And we use a number of online tools to help us manage volume and speed.
Our
work happens in the dimension of speed, and often in the dimension of crisis.
We
go to seminars and conferences. We participate in webinars. We read everything
we can get our hands on for trends in technology.
Experts
rather cheerfully report that attention spans are getting shorter. For example,
we’re told that few people want to watch videos longer than 15 seconds, and six
to eight seconds is optimal.
Six to eight seconds.
Speed
is exhilarating, for a time. Then it becomes exhausting, and then destructive.
Western
culture in general seems to be moving to a six-to-right-seconds mentality. A “fast”
culture isn’t just about the internet and Facebook. Everything accelerates,
bowing before an insatiable demand for faster and faster.
We
want to implement change – now!
We
want new programs – now!
We
want new systems – now!
The
church offers no respite from the six-to-eight-second mentality. A lot of
church wreckage litters the landscape, remnants of the battles of organization,
size, growth, social issues, economic issues, justice issues, politics, and the
worship wars.
As
we hurtle down the ever-accelerating speed lane, we’re shedding important things.
Time to pause and rest. Time to reflect. Time to think and consider. Time to
understand the wholeness of what the church is supposed to be about.
We’re
supposed to be the alternative to the world, not a corporate subsidiary of it.
At
some point, many churches embraced a corporate model, likely influenced by all
the corporate executives who ended up on elder boards. Those who did missed an
important fact of corporate life: corporate cultures have downsides that must
be constantly attended to and mitigated.
Self-perpetuation
becomes all important, sometimes at the expense of what the organization is
supposed to be accomplishing.
Size
and growth are usually accompanied by alienation.
Bad
behaviors can become entrenched to the point of pathologies.
Leadership,
insulated from the chaos of the marketplace, comes to believe that it alone has
the wisdom, understanding, and vision to achieve goals and objectives.
Being
told that what the organization is doing that is wrong and harmful is not me
with a smile, because organizations believe they never make mistakes.
I’ve
experienced every one of these behaviors in churches I’ve attended. I’ve talked
to people at enough other churches to know that this is not uncommon.
This
is why I think Slow
Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, by Christopher Smith, John Pattison and Jonathan
Wilson-Hargrove, is one of the most important books I’ve read in the last
decade, and why I’ve devoted the past many Mondays here to talk about it. I don’t
agree with everything the book says, but then, I don’t have to agree with
everything to understand that what it does is something vital.
Slow Church
points to a different part, a different way. We the church don’t have to swept
up in the culture of six-to-eight-seconds. We can resist and abandon what the
authors refer to as the “McDonaldization” of society and the church.
“We’ve been formed by a culture of speed,” the authors write,
“but if we recognize our malformation, and the selfishness and fearfulness that
are fueling it, perhaps we can become less resistant to God’s transformation.”
Slow Church,
above all, points to a choice we can make. We can choose a different way, a
transformed way.
The church can become the alternative to the
sic-to-eight-seconds mentality.
Read Slow Church.
Photograph by Vera
Kratochvil via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.
1 comment:
"Speed is exhilarating, for a time. Then it becomes exhausting, and then destructive."
Isn't that the truth.
Yesterday, my husband and I sat on the couch together, just cuddling, not doing anything. All weekend long he'd been asking me what I needed after a long, hard week. I couldn't say. With four young kids, a recent move and home improvements to make, we've been moving faster and faster, slumping on the couch to watch TV in the evening. Yesterday the kids swirled around us, but we sat still in the midst of it for a long time. Doing nothing, just being together and I realized it was exactly what I needed.
Post a Comment