We’ve been friends for a long, long time, and since the advent of the internet, he occasionally weaves in and out of my life. While we opted 30 years ago to start a family in a smaller town, he stayed single in the busy-ness of the city and connected to a variety of churches, causes and concerns that having children or plugging in to local church ministry or owning a business doesn’t always permit.
The events of the past few months meant that for his part, he had a lot more time on his hands, but for us, that did not necessarily follow.
He has been aggressively texting me about the issues of the day, and I have to pause here and say that while new forms of media usually bring with them new ways of sending messages and chats; to my way of thinking, anything over 100 words should be an email, not a text. It keeps it more searchable and easier to isolate individual sentences to which to write replies.
Some of these issues I grasp. Particularly in this debate about critical race theory, I know that we, the Church of Jesus Christ, need to think about the implications of everything we do. As I get older, I know I need to be careful how I frame what I say, and what jokes should be considered off the table. It’s not that political correctness is making these things wrong now, rather it’s a dawning that many of these things were wrong then, but the culture, even the Christian culture didn’t see it that way.
Hence talk of tearing down statues and re-naming streets. There are even people for whom their last name, their family name, has now, in the last few weeks, become a liability.
Think about how that would impact you.
Anyway, my friend texts me about these things and about the intellectual, scholarly and academic debates being waged by experts in the field. It’s hard to tell the players without a program, but I try to note the names and theories. Some of which are above my pay grade.
Because I don’t want to appear indifferent, I will reply, but my ratio of replies to his texts is approximately 1-to-8.
I will also occasionally send him the video links and article links to things he might be interested in. I do this with a entire basket of people. When I was producing Wednesday Connect weekly, I was online for a large number of hours and always saw things I knew would interest key people in my network.
He listens to these — a part of our relationship I cannot say is fully reciprocal, especially when some of his open on-screen showing a time of 1:44:00 — but admits to listening to many at double speed at 2:00 AM. In that case, I worry about his health.
By sending them, I’m feeding the beast, or more politely, perpetuating the conversation.
Two weeks ago, I explained that we had some friends dropping by at 7:00 that we hadn’t seen in person for a long time. While waiting for me to get back to him, he sent me seventeen texts, some of which were quite lengthy.
But then this exchange last week really did it for me. I broke silence and wrote to him.
“…My employee’s husband had to go to the hospital this morning so the day has been turned somewhat upside down…”
And he wrote back.
“I appreciate your concerns of the day, but I’m wondering if the church will survive the next 5 years…”
continuing on.
Couldn’t even leave the first part as its own sentence without launching back into the one-sided debate. (Key word in that sentence is, ‘but.’)
I think he would do well on Reddit. It strikes me as the best place to engage people on certain topics where there is equal passion. Plus you’re interacting with people who want responses.
I suggested this and he wrote,
“Ha! I can’t even convince you. Why should I start a blog?”
Apparently I’m a project.
I need to be converted.
I just don’t understand how someone can discuss the intricasies of Critical Race Theory and yet be indifferent — or even tone deaf — as to where this is landing. He claims he’s the proverbial voice in the wilderness screaming, “Paul, run! The house is on fire;” and my response consists of “Oh, that’s interesting.”
I’m sorry. These issues matter. Especially right now. And I do watch some of the videos and just completed the 6-part sermon series at The Meeting House with some diversions to Greg Boyd’s church, since it’s located in Minneapolis, where the whole George Floyd thing happened. Boyd’s sermons immediately following were extremely powerful.
But my friend would probably find things in them with which to disagree.
How people respond to these events is going to be somewhat personal; somewhat subjective. As long as they are aiming for a Jesus-focused response, we need to give them space in which to do just that.
It’s been almost a year since I did one of these. This is not the blogroll that appears here on the blog, but rather things I bookmark in my computer as I find them. If you read all of the various parts to this ongoing series of lists, it comes to several thousand. If you find something that’s a dead link let me know. Also, because the list is shorter this time, I’m including an updated list of the various sources I use to compose the weekly Wednesday list.
This is part two (see yesterday) of a two-part article.
Blogs and Books – It wasn’t Christian publishers who came up with using social media to promote new releases, rather the conversations simply started happening over the latest title or the newest author. For reasons I’ll get back to in the final point, the period was a golden age for non-fiction books and publishers were tripping over themselves to place new voices under contract.
The Internet Celebrity – The blog Stuff Christians Like launched Jon Acuff overnight. The blog with the weird name, Without Wax, introduced the world to Nashville pastor Pete Wilson. The Naked Pastor developed a cult following, especially when some of the characters in the illustrations turned out to be actually naked. John Shore, Bill Kinnon, Tim Challies, Skye Jethani, Zach Nielson, and others like them were must reading for their constituencies. The Pyromaniacs aka Team Pyro proved that graphics matter, with their first-rate images appearing throughout their articles and attracting new followers.
Discernment / Watchdog Ministries – The blogosphere in general, if nothing else, is all about being offended, so the discernment bloggers, the watchdog bloggers, those champions for truth and right doctrine (as long as it’s their truth and right doctrine) are a natural fit for social media.
I listed this last, even though it could have been first, because it sums up a lot of what was taking place in a very short time: There was an explosion of ideas. Conversations were flying fast and furious about church governance, leadership models and worship styles. That the average parishioner cared so much about what was taking place drove all us into a deeper consideration of what it means to be Christ’s church.
The standard comparison is that we are living in a time very similar to what happened when the moveable type printing press was introduced. Mass publication of printed materials was suddenly an option, and even more so when the presses were attached to steam power.
You can’t write about this without mentioning The Beatles. They certainly exploded quickly on the scene and were an icon of the rock music age. Their songs are forever identified with the musical style that defined the ’60s
Why did this happen? Music!
Thinking Out Loud 