The Six-to-Eight-Seconds Culture

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.

Shall We Gather at the Table?

From the beginning, the tiny group of Christian believers in Jerusalem gathered together on a regular basis. Not long after the ascension of Christ, Acts 2:42 says that believers devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching, to fellowship, to the “breaking of bread,” and to prayer. These are all communal activities, although prayer is also individual.

What this signifies, though, is that the original model of the church was people coming together and sharing among themselves. They might have shared teaching, meals, conversation prayer – but they shared it. Christianity was communal. Believers met in homes; they were not exactly welcome in synagogues or other places where Jews congregated in their religious life, although they did go to the temple for a time.

In Christian churches today, all of these activities are recognizable, including the “breaking of bread.” The food may be more plentiful and elaborate than what the early church experienced, but the idea is the same.

The difference is that we live in a (Western) culture today where food has become something of a social and political act, much like the environment was for an earlier generation (mine). There is a desire for simpler, more natural and slower (rather than fast) food. Processed and imported food is suspect; we want natural and local. Many of us also want people to know what we doing in our desire for simpler and more natural food, part of the conspicuous virtue that has replaced the conspicuous consumption of the 1950s and 1960s.

This wasn’t the point when the early church met and broke bread. Food was not an end in itself but a means to an end – the being together, even with your children running about. Christopher Smith, John Pattison and Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, in Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, ask us to imagine a common life “centered around (a) eating together at the table and (b) the slow, Eucharistic conversation that convivial feasting encourages.”

My own experience with churches eating together is something different. They have more been times associated with an event or purpose – a missions meeting, a congregational meeting, a newcomers luncheon. There is food and conversation, to be sure, but it’s often hurried and surface so we can get to the point of the group meeting. Off-building meals with Sunday School classes has been different, approaching something like what the Slow Church authors suggest.

What if the being together – the sitting, the eating and the talking – was the point? What might happen as a result?

I don’t know, but I’m willing to find out.

For the past several Mondays, I’ve been discussing Slow Church. This chapter, “Dinner Table Conversation as a Way of Being Church,” is the last chapter in the book. A short conclusion remains, and next Monday I’ll finish my own discussion with some overall thoughts about the book.

Illustration by Piotr Seidlecki via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Hospitality in a Foreign Land

I’ve been reading Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, by Christopher Smith, John Pattison and Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove, and highlighting it here for the past several Mondays. The book is important, with an important story to tell.

Little did I expect to experience directly the message of the chapter entitled “Hospitality.”

We left for a two-week vacation in London on Sept. 28. Travel was uneventful, movement through British Customs at Heathrow uneventful, and soon we found our jetlagged selves at the same hotel we had stayed at last year, 51 Buckingham Gate.

Yes, it’s expensive. But it’s also reasonably expensive, and located two block from Buckingham Palace, three blocks from Westminster Abbey and Parliament, a block from a tube station, close to buses and, rather surprisingly, in a quiet courtyard off the street. In fact, when you’re in the courtyard, it’s so quiet that it’s difficult to imagine you’re located in the very center of London; it’s that quiet. Our room was on the seventh floor, and I could look out the window and see the top of the gold-plated memorial to Queen Victoria that sits in front of Buckingham Palace.

Our first two days went as planned – recover from jet lag, see a few things, start easing into a new schedule and time zone. On Tuesday I took an early morning walk across St. James Park to St. James Square and Piccadilly, and watched the swans and pelicans in the park lake.

On Wednesday morning, I was in the shower, and leaned to wash my foot. I felt my lower left back muscle pull. It had happened before; I know what it means. Take some ibuprofen, and take it easy. I took ibuprofen, and stuck to the original schedule. We had limited our activities for that day because we were meeting friends for dinner. On Thursday, we took a long walk on the South Bank, from London Bridge and Southwark Cathedral to Westminister Bridge, with a few stops along the way. On Friday we hopped a train to Salisbury to see the town and cathedral.

Back in London, I went to bed late Friday night. About 2 a.m. Saturday morning, I woke up, any movement causing severe pain in my back. My wife helped me get out of bed (it took several minutes to maneuver this). I finally did what I knew was the most comfortable thing to do – lie flat on my back on the floor, in the living room area next to the coffee table. Any movement created a back spasm that froze the left side of my back in knock-your-breath-away pain.

On Saturday morning, I was able to get myself up and stagger to the bathroom. I immediately went back to the living room, and my wife had moved her Pilates mat next to desk and phone. I got myself down on the mat, curled in a fetal position on my right side, while she called the hotel concierge.

Severe back pain is no fun. Severe back pain in a foreign country is frightening.

I remember snatches of the conversation. The hotel doctor on call was not available. Another doctor, from the National Health Service, was coming, promised with four to six hours. The alternative was an ambulance to a hospital, and the wait there could be as long.

Boots on Victoria Street

The NHS doctor arrived about 11:45 a.m. “You back muscle feels like a brick,” he said, “and any movement creates a back spasm.” He explained what he would do – a pain shot, followed by three prescriptions – one for acute pain, one for longer-term pain, and one like Valium to control the spasms (and keep me calm). He was caring and knowledgeable. He did write the prescriptions on one form – and one was a controlled substance, needing a different form.

My wife, after getting the first two prescriptions filled at a nearby Boots pharmacy, got herself on a bus and headed for Soho, to get the form from the National Health Service office near Soho Square. (She can now tell you about Soho; it’s never been on our list of “must-see” tourist attractions.) (If you don’t know about Soho, Google it.) She encountered a problem: the center couldn’t write the prescription.

NHS on Soho Square

Arriving back at the hotel, and not having the most important prescription, she turned to the hotel staff. Kristina was the receptionist on duty. She calmed my wife down, told her to go upstairs to tend to me, called the hotel doctor (who was at his daughter’s birthday party), had the doctor talk directly to my wife, and arranged to have a bellman pick up an over-the-counter medicine prescribed by the doctor. A few minutes later, I was taking the equivalent of Tylenol in Alka-Selzter form – with codeine (they can sell this over-the-counter in Britain).

The hotel staff delivered dinner for my wife, maneuvering around the fetal-like husband on the floor. My wife was able to get a cheese-and-tomato sandwich for me (and I couldn’t eat much more than that).  By midnight, I was finally able to stand and walk around the hotel room.

Bus 24 on Charing Cross Road

I still slept on the floor – the hardness stabilized my back. I slept for 11 hours straight. I stayed in the room on Sunday, taking my medicine, with the hotel housekeeping staff working around me.

The entire hotel staff knew what had happened. We were tended to and taken care of. I actually left the hotel on Monday morning for a short walk, and Sergio the concierge (who had not been on weekend duty) immediately asked me how I was feeling, and that he was glad to see I was up and about. For the next two days, I received the same question from the entire staff, include the dining and housekeeping staff.

“Hospitality connects us to a place,” the authors of Slow Church write, “because while hospitality can happen pretty much anywhere, it has to happen somewhere. Hospitality requires proximity, and by definition, proximity requires nearness in space, time or relationship – all of which assume certain limits.”

Hospitality happened to me at 51 Buckingham Gate, some 5,000 miles from home. And yes, it connects me to a place, and the people at the place.

We knew where we will stay the next time we go to London.

A National Scarcity

The CEO of the corporation I was working for had agreed to be part of some prestigious national commission, and needed to have a staff person assigned who could do research, assemble reports, write speeches, and basically “staff” the CEO on the project. It would be a six-month assignment.

The search immediately focused on the speechwriting team – three of us who wrote for a dozen executives, did issue papers, prepared the quarterly financial reports, and generally any other kind of writing project the executives needed. (In addition to speeches, it fell to me to write the quarterly reports, a few issue papers, and the chairman’s annual United Way message to employees.)

One of my colleagues was chosen for the CEO’s assignment. He was even physically moved to an office in the executive building. The six months actually was closer to eight. His normal work – a full-time job – was given to the two of us who remained. Most of that extra work fell to me.

The special project came to an end, and our colleague returned. Two or three weeks later, the entire department was called into a meeting, where my colleague received a special recognition for the work he had done for the CEO, i.e., a special bonus check.

For the two of us who had carried the load of the department, who had picked up the extra work, there was – not even an acknowledgement.

This is not unusual in corporate America, then or now. Gratitude always seems to be in scarce supply. Had we not done what we did, our supervisors would have had a major mess on their hands. As it was, no one said a word. I was disappointed. My other colleague was furious, and went to the head of the department. Nothing came of that, however.

Gratitude is always in short supply.

I’m not sure why. Thanking someone is not a big deal. Even recognizing good work should not be a big deal. But it is.

In Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, Christopher Smith, John Pattison and Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove say this scarcity of gratitude comes from forgetfulness, a kind of national or cultural affliction. I suspect it also comes from the disconnect between the blessings we enjoy in our lives and understanding who the source of those blessings is. We like to think of ourselves as doing it all on our own, but that’s rarely if ever true.  

But there’s something worse, the authors say. “Gratitude is perhaps the most important way we practice recognizing the enough all around us. If lack is the root of injustice, than gratitude is the root of justice.”

This seeming inability to express gratitude, this national, cultural and individual forgetfulness, plays havoc in our lives. We can do better.

For the past several Mondays, I’ve been discussing Slow Church. This week’s discussion is about the chapter entitled “Gratitude.” Next week, the discussion will be on “Hospitality.”

Photograph by Anna Langova via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Slow Church: Scarcity vs. Abundance

I grew up in what as then and what would be considered a solid middle class home. It was the almost stereotyped post-World War II American experience: father worked; mother was a stay-at-home. We lived in a suburb of 1950s tract houses. We Baby Boomers overran everything – schools, churches, the neighborhood. (It’s difficult to describe to a young parent today what Halloween looked like in the 1950s and 1960s.)

While we weren’t wealthy, we were also not deprived. We always had food on the table. In her later years, my mother talked about how important that was, because she grew up in a poor family in the 1930s Depression, and she could remember times of going to bed hungry because there was literally no food in the house. She was able to do something her older sisters could not – graduate from high school. College, however, had been out of the question.

My father came from marginally better circumstances. His father had been a railroad surveyor and then a small grocery store owner. They lived on the poor side of town, and 1930s Shreveport has a well defined class structure (my father called it a caste system), but they never lacked for basics like food. They may not have else much more than that, but they did have enough resources to keep the family fed.

Even for most of the poor in 2014 America, it’s hard to imagine not having food in the house. It does happen, though, even in a society as wealthy as ours. But it doesn’t happen on the scale that the nation experienced in the 1930s.

And yet, say Christopher Smith, John Pattison and Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove in Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, “…we live in a culture that is driven by an economy rooted in the myth that there is not enough.” This myth of scarcity preys upon our fears “that there will not be enough resources in the world to provide for us, and thus that we might starve or otherwise suffer from deprivation.”

For American Christians, they say, this creates an obvious and constant tension. On the one hand, our culture is based upon the economics of scarcity, and our consumerist society emphasizes that over and over. On the other hand, we know God’s promise to sustain us, his promise that he will provide for our needs.

Our usual response is to agree with God’s provision on Sunday and heed the culture the rest of the week. We’ve got both bases covered.

I have a confession here: this chapter of the book made me distinctly uncomfortable. And I think that’s a good thing. What I don’t need and don’t want is to read something that merely serve to reinforce existing behavior.

I don’t mean to imply, and neither do the authors of Slow Church, that we should sell our cars, and empty our closets and pantries. But what we can do is consider how we are using the resources God has given us. Are we building barns or building the kingdom?

For the past several Mondays, I’ve been discussing Slow Church. This week’s discussion is about the chapter entitled “Abundance.” Next week, the discussion will be on “Gratitude.” I do highly recommend this book, but it won’t make you feel comfortable.

Illustration by Karen Arnold via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

A Rebuke to the Culture

Thirty years ago, we still had blue laws (Sunday closing laws) in Missouri. Just about everytjing except for convenience stories, drugstores, and sports/entertainment events were surrounded by empty parking lots on Sunday.

The blue laws disappeared in a statewide vote, driven largely by a combination of powerful commercial interests and individuals hungry to find extra time to do grocery shopping, clothes shopping, and other activities that strained two-income families.

We’ve already lost Thanksgiving and I suspect Christmas is not far beyond. Thanks to the reach of electronic communications technology, vacation time, and even weekends, should be called “work release” time rather than days off.

The idea of Sabbath – a day of the week devoted to worship and rest is already coming to be something quaint from another era.

It shouldn’t be. We probably need it more than ever. Even people who don’t believe in God need a day of rest.

A Sabbath, say Christopher Smith, John Pattison and Jonathan Wilson-Hargrove in Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, is “an obvious rebuke to the culture—and even a church culture!—that prides itself on its busyness, scorns leisure as laziness and boasts that we’ll sleep when we’re dead.”

That sounds like modern American work life to me.

I knew a CEO who once claimed he could run a $16 billion corporation with five MBAs. When he was asked what would happen when they dropped dead, he replied, “Find five more.”

The Slow Church authors point to Exodus 16 as the first mention of Sabbath in the Bible, although you can find the first reference to a day of rest in the first chapter of Genesis.

Even God rested.

The Exodus reference contains three lessons, they point out. The Israelites are wandering around the desert, grumbling over not having enough to eat, complaining about starving to death. God gives them manna six days a week, with a double portion on the sixth day because God said the seventh day was a day of rest, and holy to him.

They Israelites learn the lesson of enough, the lesson of redistribution, and the lesson of Sabbath faith and discipline.

That’s an arresting idea – the Sabbath takes faith and it takes discipline.

No wonder we voted it out of existence in Missouri.

For the past several Mondays, I’ve been posting a discussion of Slow Church. Today’s post is on the chapter entitled “Sabbath.” It’s worth the price of the whole book. Next week, the discussion will be on “Abundance.”

Photograph by Lynn Greyling via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Work is a Sacrament?

Last week, I asked the question, is work a curse? While there are moments, and sometimes it’s longer than “moments,” when work can seem like a curse, the fact is that it is not. Like everything else, work was affected by the fall, and as a result our experiences in the workplace fall far short of the ideal. But work itself was created by God; the first example of work recorded in the Bible was creation itself. Work is a good thing; what a fallen humanity does to it can warp and distort it.

In the past two decades, another discussion about faith and work has arisen – and that is our tendency to divide work into “greater and lesser” or “higher and lower” forms. The ministry and the work of missionaries is viewed as “higher” or “greater” kinds of work, while the work the rest of us do is “lower and lesser.” While it’s not as common a view as it was 20 years ago, it’s still fairly common.

It’s also not Biblical. And such a view leads to distortions of its own, such as compartmentalize what you do in the workplace from what you do in church on Sunday. In fact, what we do in our jobs every day – all jobs – is worship.

In Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, Christopher Smith, John Pattison, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove expand on this idea of work as worship. They call work sacramental.

When I think of sacraments, I think of two: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. They are the two sacraments recognized by the Protestant church (including my specific denomination), because they are the two specifically established (or singled out) by Jesus.

But work?

It’s important to note that the Slow Church authors don’t specifically call work a sacrament. They do, however, refer to it as sacramental (and I would add just as worship is sacramental). They specifically quote Dorothy Sayers in The Mind of the Maker, saying that “seeing work as a consequence of the fall saps it of its sacramental value.”

Work is sacramental in that it is owned by God; everything in the world is God’s and belongs to God, including the work we do. And one of the things we are to be about is redeeming work from the fall, just as we are to be about redeeming culture from the fall, and redeeming humanity from the fall.

It is all part of the whole. Our Christian faith is a whole faith, because our God is a whole God. And he owns all of the whole.  

What can the church do to help us be about this sacramental activity called work? The Slow Church authors cite several things.

Help people recognize and prefer good work over bad work.

Explore the possibilities (and limitations) of work as worship.

Champion work-related justice.

Recognize the human resources within our congregations and leverage them in the reconciling work of the kingdom.

I’ve been discussing Slow Church here for the past several Mondays. This post is the second of two parts on work; next Monday we’ll take a look at the discussion on the Sabbath.

Painting: A Cotton Office in New Orleans, oil on canvas by Edgar Degas (1873); Musee de Beaux Arts, Pau, France.

Work is a Curse, Right?

It’s easy, perhaps too easy, to think of work as a curse. We all have days (weeks / months) when our work seems like a curse. When I’m in the middle of yet another online crisis at work, the internet seems to be blowing up on and it seems to be all aimed at my organization, and my boss sends an email questioning why I used a particular word in a Facebook comment, yes, work can seem like a curse.

What came first, work or the curse?

The image that immediately comes to mind: Adam and Eve have been caught eating of the tree of knowledge. God is not pleased. Adam is told that he will now work by the sweat of his brow. Eve is told about the pain of childbirth (another kind of work).

Work is a curse, right?

Actually, the answer is no. In the Bible, work came before the curse. The first work recorded in the Bible was the work of creation, God’s work of creation. “God saw all he had made, and it was very good.” Adam and Eve lived in the garden and their work was to take care of it.

Work was a good thing.

Work is still a good thing.

But it’s humanity – we humans – who continually screw it up. In Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, Christopher Smith, John Pattison, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove speak to the productive and protective elements of work, and they speak to where we usually get it wrong.

They point to Adam Smith (1723-1790), the “patron saint of capitalism.” Smith didn’t look at work for its inherent dignity, they say, but only for its usefulness. “The purpose of work is production, and the sole purpose of all production, said Smith, is consumption…Thus, work is a means to an end.”

The dignity of work disappears. The inherent value of work itself disappears. Work is only important for providing us money to buy stuff and pay for services.

It’s Smith and the Industrial Revolution that gives us what we know today as the pervasive division of labor. We do different things to enhance production. This is so common to us today that we don’t realize how radical it was in the 18^th century.

Increased production and improved manufacturing comes at a price, and the price includes alienation.

Smith wasn’t alone. Later, Frederick Taylor (1856-1915) came along to subdivide work into minute components, with even more alienation and fragmentation. The authors of Slow Church point out that Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management (1911) was the first business bestseller. It especially found a welcoming audience with – surprise! – Vladimir Lenin in Russia.

Today, Slow Church argues, we have McDonaldization, how we are to act and move in every situation. This has extended beyond the workplace to the home and to the church. (I can personally attest to the impact that business and business executive thinking has had on two different churches we attended in St. Louis.) (It was not a good thing.)

Should there be an alternative? And is the church the institution to point the way to an alternative?

We’ll consider those questions next week.

I’ve been discussing Slow Church for the past several Mondays. Today’s discussion is the first of two parts on the chapter entitled “Work.” I’ll conclude the discussion of the chapter next Monday.

Related: Jim Wood at The High Calling’s Mission / Work channel at Patheos has a similar discussion, Is Work a Curse or Inherently Good?

Photograph by Ian L via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

“Slow Church” on Patience

Earlier this month, I had a post on patience, one of the chapters of Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus by Christopher Smith, John Pattison, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. It’s a book that’s packed with insight; it’s forcing me to confront some of my own beliefs (and biases).

Here’s some of what the book has to say on the subject of patience. And the authors are quick to point out that by “patience” they don’t mean “passive waiting.”

“The effects of human restlessness have rippled throughout creation.”

“One of the key tensions created by technology is the tension between the goodness of work and the crushing consequences of overwork, or, in theological terms, between the goodness and necessity of work and our call as the people of God into a Sabbath life.”

“Western culture, in all its technological grandeur, has become obsessed with overcoming suffering.”

“Our call is to compassion – a word derived from the Latin meaning ‘to suffer with.’”

“Patience is how compassion is embodied in our lives.”

It’s an important book. I can’t recommend it too highly.

On Monday, my Slow Church post will be about work.

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

The Church and Wholeness

I’ve mentioned before that a large part of my career has been spent as a speechwriter, mostly in corporate communications with occasional (very occasional) stints in politics. One of my favorite books, one that had an enormous influence on the speeches I wrote, especially during the second half of my speechwriting years, was (and is) Eloquence in an Electronic Age by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, published in 1988

Jamieson argued that communications technology, and specifically television, was eliminating traditional political discourse. Television was shrinking our attention spans to 15 seconds or less, with the hallmark of the sound bite, and that this meant that political discourse, and by extension governmental discourse, was becoming increasingly problematic.

While her focus was politics and government, the world of corporate communications was not immune. The television news show 60 Minutes almost singlehandedly changed how corporate executives communicated and gave interviews. Everything became reduced to “three positive message points” and “bridging every question to the positive message point you want to make.”

Keep in mind all of this happened before the advent of the internet, blogs, and social media. The problem of civil and political discourse – being able to discuss problems and issues and come to some kind of resolution or consensus – is becoming something rare and seriously endangered. We appear to have a national government that no longer governs but remains in permanent campaign mode. Sound bites, like slogans, are the stuff of campaigns. They are not the stuff of governance.

A convergence of technology and changes in culture are at the root of our inability to govern ourselves. Life has become a no-holds-barred political campaign.

The church has not been immune.

In Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, Christopher Smith, John Pattison, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove say this: “Western culture has been shaped under the ever-tightening grip of technology and individualism, and the trend of modernity has been toward greater isolation from people and places. At the same time, we have been trained well to compartmentalize our lives and narrow our vision. …We reduce life to broad generalities. We approach people not as unique persons created by God but as generic categories: African American, Latino, female, gay, wealthy, homeless, liberal, right wing and so on. We use the labels most often with people who are different than us.”

Culture and technology is tearing us away from each other. The story of God, and the story of the church, is the counter-argument. As the church, we are the reconcilers. And it’s not only about helping people understand the promise of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, but about the wholeness of life grounded in faith. As the authors of Slow Church point out, “As the people of God, we locate ourselves in the ecological story of God reconciling an interconnected creation.”

They’re not taking the narrow definition of ecology as the natural environment, but the ecology of life as a whole. And this is hard. We’re taught to compartmentalize our lives. What happens at church may or may not have any application to where we work. Our political opinions and preferences may or may not have anything to do with our faith. How we choose to entertain ourselves may or may not have anything to do with what we believe. What happens in society at large or with world events may or may not have anything to do with what we’re taught in church or what we teach ourselves from the Bible.

God calls for reconciliation. Jesus was sacrificed for reconciliation. The church needs to be about the wholeness of that reconciliation.

I’ve been devoting Mondays on this blog to a discussion of Slow Church, which I believe is one of the most important books I’ve read about the church. This chapter is entitled “Wholeness.”

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Has Patience Become a Sin?

The first desktop computer I ever used was an IBM 386, delivered by a cheerful IT technician in 1984. I was mesmerized. Four years later, we bought our first home computer, an Apple IIGS, a few months before Apple abandoned the Apple II.

As impressive as those computers were at the time, the fact is that my iPhone today has more capabilities than those computers did. My iPad is far more portable than my laptop and can do just about as much. In fact, I have two iPads, a work laptop, a home laptop, and a home desktop. And my Kindle.

I’m wired.

And I’m socialized, too. Twitter (a personal account, individual and corporate accounts I manage for work, an an organizational account I manage). Facebook (a personal page and two organizational pages I manage). Google+ (personal).  And a bunch of other stuff I rarely have time to get involved with. And this blog, too, which I’ve been doing longer than social media.

At work, I’m usually living and operating on internet time. Fast. Sometimes frenzied. A crisis or two a day. One day we had six online crises happening simultaneously. The organization I work for has only recently began to understand a glimmer of what’s at stake when you operate in internet time. Many of the people I work with are doing a lot of their work they way it was done pre-internet, and even pre-email.

One of the effects of all of this technological capability is the end of patience. Our definition of fast has changed dramatically over the last 20 years. When I first accessed the internet, about 1993, I was amazed at what I could access in a few short minutes. Today, I am frustrated if anything takes a few short minutes.

Even the way we talk has changed. With the impact of television, politicians (and then the rest of us) learned to talk in sound bites. Now we talk in sound bits, preferably with a seven-second video.

This is a kind of technological madness. Ask my wife how much time she spends dealing with our sound system / cable access / television / internet. It’s quick, all right, when it works.

Our technology has made patience at best seem antiquated, at worst a sin.

In Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, Christopher Smith, John Pattison, and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove suggest something different.

“Western culture,” they write, “and increasingly global culture, is built on impatience. The inner restlessness of humanity is nothing new, bur for at least the last two centuries, the quickening march of technology and industrialization has formed us into a culture on instant gratification – which is another way of saying instant dissatisfaction.”

This impatience has permeated many of our churches, and it is the church that should be offering the alternative to it. This isn’t some ethereal theological discussion, but something that impacts us and our churches every day.

And the discussion is important. Patience, the authors of Slow Church point out, “is how compassion is embodied in our lives.” The less room we have for patience (or longsuffering, which is closer to the Biblical concept), the less room we have for compassion.

Compassion comes from rootedness, staying with the same local church body for the long haul, and not flitting from one church to another where our needs “might be better met.” It’s the continuity of being part of a local body where we Christians learn patience and compassion.

I’ve been devoting Mondays on this blog to a discussion of Slow Church, which I believe is one of the most important books I’ve read about the church. This chapter is entitled “Patience.”

Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.