Currently reading: The Lord’s Work in the Lord’s Way and No Little People by Francis A. Schaeffer 📚
Finished reading: Uprooted by Grace Olmstead 📚
Enjoyed celebrating with my mom on Thursday at the opening for the ACC Faculty Exhibition
Traditional evangelical churches tend to emphasize personal piety and rarely help believers understand how to maintain and apply their Christian beliefs and practice in the worlds of the arts, business, scholarship, and government. Many churches do not know how to disciple members without essentially pulling them out of their vocations and inviting them to become heavily involved in church activities. In other words, Christian discipleship is interpreted as consisting largely of activities done in the evening or on the weekend.
Most American evangelical churches are middle class in their corporate culture. That is, they value privacy, safety, homogeneity, sentimentality, space, order, and control. In contrast, the city is filled with ironic, edgy, diversity-loving people who have a high tolerance for ambiguity and disorder. On the whole, they value intensity and access more than comfort and control.
Brad East, on the detrimental effects of the current online writing ecosystem to the actual craft of writing:
Substack is an ecosystem, and one of the ways it forms both writers and readers is to make every writer a digital entrepreneur hawking a product. Further, it encourages a relationship between writer and readership on the model of celebrity fandom. (After all, you gotta give the people what they want.) […]
[W]e are fooling ourselves if we don’t step back and see clearly what is happening, what the nature of the dynamic is. Writers are being co-opted by the affordances of newsletters, social media, and audio/visual recording and streaming in ways that corrode the essence of good writing as well as the vocation of the writer itself.
A writer is not an influencer. To the extent that participating in any of these dynamics is necessary for a writer to get started or to get published, then by definition it can’t be avoided. But if it is necessary, we should see it as a necessary evil. Evil in the sense that it is a threat to the very thing one is seeking to serve, to indwell, celebrate, and dilate: the life of the mind, the reading life, the life of putting words on the page that are apt to reality and true to human nature and beautiful in their form and honoring to God. Exhaustively maintaining an online platform inhibits and enervates the attention, the focus, the literacy, the patience, the quietness, and the prayers that make the Christian writing life not only possible, but good.
Brad can be strident when commenting on such matters. But his conclusion seems difficult to gainsay.
The massive growth and influence of cities in our time confront Christian mission with an enormous challenge. The first problem is one of sheer scale and economics. It is critical that we have Christians and churches wherever there are people, but the people of the world are now moving into the great cities of the world many times faster than the church is. Christian communication and ministry must always be translated into every new language and context, but the Christian church is not responding fast enough to keep up with the rapid population growth in cities.