The “Self”.

Reinhold Niebuhr wrote that the self gains its substance through its connections to family, community, and craft. the industrial revolution largely destroyed workmanship as an expression of the person whose work it is. The connection now remains mainly in our hobbies. The connection of the person to his or her work place is at best strained. Survey after survey has found that work has become uneasy and unsatisfactory for many people. I found this interesting as more and more people go to school for what will make them money rather than what they truely delight in doing.

John Piper

Consumers Are Sovereign And Iron Man Is Lonely.

I have come to believe that all consumers are sovereign. That is to say that the preference and impulse of the average individual in America rules supreme. We the customer can match self-perceived need with a product and if the product fails to deliver we simply take our business elsewhere and with our culture rapidly changing as it does with every nanosecond, I can only imagine how difficult it must be for those marketing to our fickle nature.

I say this because this consumer mentality has infiltrated the church. Theology and sound doctrine are slashed in half making the Christian message affordable for everyone while the worship serves is customized for comfort. Meanwhile….

E-mail/internet,TV, video games,text messaging, and cell phones are ubiquities in our culture, (we are wired). One trend that I find disturbing is that in an effort to make the gospel accessible to the masses we have taken the advantage of technology (a good thing!) but have become more and more isolated from each other. As a result as I see it we are in touch with everyone potently, but we are known by almost no one in particular (Putnam thesis of the 1960s).

David Wells writes in his recent book “The Courage To Be Protestant”,

“There is a recent development called “affective computing” in which a virtual person is created by a computer. This person responds to the real person using the computer with expressions of understanding and sympathy, thus giving the illusion of human companionship”.

I recently took my son to see the movie “Iron Man”, ( a fun movie by the way), one of the interesting aspects of Robert Downey Jr. character was his increasing isolation from people yet close relationship with robots which displayed all the characteristics of a reliable friend, this by the way makes for a very lonely Iron Man. I don’t want to read into the movie to much but I did find it interesting that this seemed to be an underlying theme of the movie.

So in a culture where the consumer is the authority as well as increasingly disconnected to people and realationships, how should the church respond?

Beleive It

I have a point of view, You have a point of view. God has view.” Author Madeleine L’Engle, (in A Wrinkle in Time)

The purpose of this Blog is to share my point of view, interact with yours while we stumble towards Gods.