by Tripp Fuller
April 19th, 2011
The Church and Her Practices in The Google Age
The Google age is about men and women who live in, and are molded by, a very different era than the Eisenhower, Civil Rights, Vietnam, and Baby Boomer eras. Those who walk here know the wilderness of unbelief. They are keenly aware that there are other options. They exist in the Matrix of belief and ambiguity. Ambiguities will not be left behind; they are the reality. As a result, these men and women exist both “inside” and “outside” the church. It may be that the goal is to find the answers (though many Google-Agers would dispute that). But the means, at any rate, is clear: one must know the questions … inside and out.
And the church? In my view, the emerging church is not about tearing down all existing structures: church buildings, denominations, and the rest. But it is about radical changes around us, and courageous responses within the church. When emergence starts happening around us, in ways and places we didn’t expect, our challenge is to learn to encourage and support it, to learn from it, rather than squelching it. Much has changed: the individuals are different; the communities are different; the ways of talking (and believing) are different. So it’s going to take some stretching on our parts. Theologies from the past won’t work as pre-packaged answers. The Catholic author Richard Rohr captures the shift in his description of spiritual practices:
One great idea of the biblical revelation is that God is manifest in the ordinary, in the actual, in the daily, in the now, in the concrete incarnations of life, and not through purity codes and moral achievement contests, which are seldom achieved anyway… We do not think ourselves into new ways of living, we live ourselves into new ways of thinking… The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.10
The Church and Her Theology After Google
The quickest way to convey a concrete picture of what this all means is to reduce my message to five theses:
(1) Theology is not something you consume, but something you produce. In the Age of Gutenberg, you read theology in a book; you heard it preached in sermons; and you were taught it by Bible teachers. In the Age of Google, theology is what you do when you’re responding to blogs, contributing to a Wiki doc or Google doc online (or on your own computer), participating in worship, inventing new forms of ministry, or talking about God with your friends in a pub.
(2) No institutions, and very few persons, function as authorities for theology after Google. Ever since Jesus’ (often misunderstood) statement about Peter that “on this rock I will build my church” (Mt. 16), the church has had issues with authority. The point is too obvious to need examples. The pastor standing up in the pulpit in the early 1960s was still a major authority.
Of course, pastors still stand up in pulpits today, and some still view themselves as indispensable purveyors of truth. But most of us who still speak from pulpits today are having to rethink our relationship with the audiences we address, since most people today shrug their shoulders at those who claim to be authorities in religious matters. (For many of us, scripture continues to be an authority, but the way in which it’s an authority has changed massively over the last 30 years.) Theology today means what some number of us find plausible about our faith and are willing to share. Today’s religious leaders are those who say things that ring true to us, so that we say, “Yeah, I think that person’s got some important insights. I’m going to read the blog or find a way to talk with him (or her), and I’m going to recommend to my friends that they do the same.”
(3) Theology after Google is not centralized and localized. Likewise, the church cannot be localized in a single building. We find church wherever we find Jesus-followers that we link up with who are doing cool things. This point is huge. Denominational officials and many pastors have not even begun to conceive and wrestle with what it means to work for a church without a clear geographical location.
(4) Similarly, theology after Google does not divide up the world between the “sacred” and the “secular,” as past theologies so often did. All thought and experience bears on it, and all of one’s life manifests it. Thus the distinction between one’s “ministry” and one’s “ordinary life” is bogus. All of one’s life as a Christian is missional. The great 15th-century theologian and mystic Nicholas of Cusa imagined God as a circle whose radius is infinite and whose center is everywhere. It only takes a second to realize that Cusa’s picture wreaks havoc on all geometries of “inside” and “outside.”
(5) The new Christian leader is a host, not an authority who dispenses settled truths, wise words, and the sole path to salvation. This last point is important enough that it deserves a section of its own.
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Endnotes:
10 These quotations have their own life on the web ( just Google them yourself).
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Endnotes:
10 These quotations have their own life on the web ( just Google them yourself).
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