For: The Institute of Contemporary and Emerging Worship Studies, St. Stephen’s University, Essentials Green Online Worship Theology Course with Dan Wilt
It’s true that we need to have a healthy interest in the culture. We need to be open to learning, growing and gleaning from the culture around us and yet, at the same time, not getting sucked up into the vortex of its ever changing values about who is in and who’s out, about what’s in and what’s not and about what really matters.
At times it becomes exhausting and quite frankly hard to keep up with. A line in a movie that one of my roommates watched recently, sums it up in a way for me. Although the quote has to do with dating, it indicates the changing face of interpersonal relating………..
Here’s the quote:
“I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”
Whilst quite funny – well I thought so anyway – for me it was quite telling of just how impersonal relating can become.
I do wonder if this kind of relating has had any affect on how personal or impersonal our worship of God is. And if we spend so much of our time relating to one another through technology, does this transfer into our expectation of how we encounter God?
I don’t have the answers but I have been thinking about this a lot in recent times. I remember really resonating with a speaker called Marva Dawn at a lecture I attended this summer. ….
She said something like this: “we have technologized our intimacy and intimatized our technology”
The problem, as she saw it, was not technology per se but how its particular paradigm has shaped our thoughts, values and ideals. She addresses this idea more deeply in a book called Unfettered Hope: A Call to Faithful Living in an Affluent Society.
Don’t get me wrong, I find technology very handy for my life! I also believe that we have to engage with our culture somehow in this way because God is moving and active in our culture and if we are not looking carefully, we might not recognise Him! We need to learn to look hard enough and also expect God to be present in our culture regardless of how fragmented and broken we think it is.
So taking all these things into account, I wrestle with how technology and its prominence in of our culture has affected our relationship with God, our relationships with one another and the body of Christ. I have also been giving thought to how this ever changing aspect of our culture has effected how we enter into worship of the living God, not just on Sundays, but throughout the week. Does it effect our expectation of God, how we experience God emotionally, intellectually.
For now I don’t have the answers. But I do belive that without realising it, our hearts and minds have been influenced by the culture around us. So how do I live personally with this tension? Well part of how I enter into these wrestles is asking myself often if I still have a heart that wants to engage with my God and with others in a healthy way.
For me, that means I want to be someone who dwells in the present, where God calls me to be most authentic and not be looking for the next best thing around the corner. I also recognise that a healthy interaction with my culture and my God means that I challenge and encourage myself and my community to let God define our ways of interacting and let God help us engage with our culture and speak truth into it at the same time.
