{"id":146,"date":"2014-04-11T23:40:19","date_gmt":"2014-04-11T23:40:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beta.dminlgp.com\/?p=146"},"modified":"2014-08-11T21:55:19","modified_gmt":"2014-08-11T21:55:19","slug":"lets-talk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/lets-talk\/","title":{"rendered":"Let’s Talk!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Murray Jardine\u2019s book The Making of Technological Society: How Christianity Can Save Modernity From Itself <\/em>got me thinking about my church.\u00a0 Let me describe for you what a typical Sunday morning service is like.\u00a0 About five hundred people swarm into our large building, most arriving within a minute before (and just after) the beginning of the service. \u00a0Most walk directly into the sanctuary, only speaking to the door greeters and those passing out bulletins, sharing a brief \u201cgood morning.\u201d\u00a0 Our services are exactly one hour with no room for error, as there is only half an hour to get one group out and another in.\u00a0 There are four songs played by talented musicians, a 20-minute (lightly humorous) sermon, an offering and communion, and a greet-your-neighbor moment.\u00a0 And then there is rush back out to the parking lot.\u00a0 I have stood in the lobby on a number of Sundays to watch people leave the service (manning an information booth on service opportunities that few take notice of). It is an amazing sight to see 500 people exit a building in a less than a minute.\u00a0 In little over an hour, hundreds of Christians have done their Sunday duty, most without ever saying more than good morning to two or three people.<\/p>\n

Herein lies a major theme of Jardine\u2019s book, the idea that \u201cwe must redirect our orientation at least somewhat away from vision and toward speech and hearing, and this can be done only by constructing local face-to-face communities whose people do indeed talk with each other more.\u201d[i]<\/a> Jardine suggests that at the heart of our modern Western society are two major issues: work and time.\u00a0 He describes the long history of changing attitudes toward work that led to the consumer and capitalist society we have today. This further resulted in our passion to work harder and longer, which is having devastating effects on our families and our communities due to the loss of humanity and morality.\u00a0 He reminds us of the importance of personal interaction in a quote from Leon Kass: \u201cWho we are to ourselves is largely inseparable from who we are to and from others; thus, our own exercise of dignified humanity will depend crucially on continuing to receive respectful treatment from others.\u201d[ii]<\/a>\u00a0 Here is where Jardine\u2019s analysis is most thought provoking and simple: The lack of face-to-face interaction within our neighborhoods (due to urban sprawl, closed off subdivisions, separation of workplaces and shopping centers from most homes, all resulting in longer commutes) and in our families (where working long hours provides less and less actual family time) have contributed to a moral and social breakdown.\u00a0 We have forgotten that who we are is not determined by what we do (work, earnings, accumulating of stuff) but by our relationships.\u00a0 And today, there is just so little time for those.<\/p>\n

Jardine\u2019s solution is very simple (so simple it is rather shocking at first glance).\u00a0\u201cFirst of all, I argued that in order to really recapture a sense of speech-based place, we will need to reorient ourselves away from our currently intensely visual orientation toward a more oral orientation.\u00a0 This is turn would required that people would spend more time actually talking to each other<\/em>\u201d (italics added).[iii]<\/a> Shocking isn\u2019t it?\u00a0 The answer, he suggests, is that less work and more thoughtfully designed neighborhoods will provide greater opportunities for interaction with others, and this will have tremendous effects on personal worth and dignity, on the health and functioning of families, on values and attitudes toward material possessions.\u00a0 This is because less work means more time for family, for neighbors, for community and for service.\u00a0 But in order to do this, there must be a change in both our attitudes towards work and towards our neighborhoods.\u00a0 Jardine writes: \u201cThus what is required is the formation of local communities that can put the biblical understanding of human agency into practice to develop an alternative to liberal capitalist democracy as it approaches its collapse.\u201d[iv]<\/a><\/p>\n

Where is it best to formulate these alternative communities?\u00a0 The answer to this is the Church.\u00a0 If the Church is going to lead the way in this charge, then it needs to a place that embodies the very idea of face-to-face interaction, where people actually talk to each other, where people take time for each other.\u00a0 Yes, a truly radical idea. And yet, as I look at my own church, I don\u2019t see this!\u00a0 I see instead a reflection of our disconnected culture. We have structured our worship services to accommodate our busy, modern, disconnected society, where we require no more than an hour out of one\u2019s busy week to worship without ever having to engage with anyone. \u00a0If our deepest need as God\u2019s creations is to \u201cimage\u201d the divine relationship and love of the Trinity, to find dignity and direction in our involvement with others, and if the key to fixing family and morality in society is finding \u201cspeech-based space\u201d for real interaction, then I see many of our modern churches as unable to provide a way forward for our dying and hurting society.<\/p>\n

My solution: Our churches should gather around tables of food on Sunday and celebrate Eucharist as the early church did, recapturing the Eucharist as a shared meal.\u00a0 How often do we sit down and eat a meal with others (even strangers) that does not illicit conversation and create connection? Yet, every Sunday, my church shares in the Lord\u2019s Supper \u2013 where we share the same cup and bread, symbolic of our deep unity and connectedness in the love of God, and yet we never say a word to those sitting next to us at the table.\u00a0 Frankly, we just don\u2019t have time to really enjoy a meal with each other!\u00a0 The Church is best equipped for creating connection and community that is so desperately needed for the individual, for the family, for the neighborhood, and for the society today. But only if the Church because a place where people take time to simply talk\u2026and care.<\/p>\n

John F. Woodward<\/p>\n
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<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [i] Murray Jardine, The Making and Unmaking of Technological Society: How Christianity Can Save Modernity From Itself <\/em>(Grand Rapids, MI: Bronzo Press, 2004), 236.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [ii] Ibid., 272.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [iii] Ibid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 [iv] Ibid., 279.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Murray Jardine\u2019s book The Making of Technological Society: How Christianity Can Save Modernity From Itself got me thinking about my church.\u00a0 Let me describe for you what a typical Sunday morning service is like.\u00a0 About five hundred people swarm into our large building, most arriving within a minute before (and just after) the beginning of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2,6],"class_list":["post-146","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-dminlgp","tag-jardine","cohort-lgp4"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1464,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146\/revisions\/1464"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.georgefox.edu\/dlgp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}