It occurred to me recently that we may need a Luddite revolution in our attitude towards ministry.
Now, if you know who the Luddites were, you’ve probably already picked up an irony in the fact that I’m blogging about the need to become Christian Luddites. The Luddites were basically a group of tradies in 19th-century England. They saw the threat posed by the spread of industrial technology, and protested against it—even sabotaging local wool and cotton mills.
Now before you take an axe to your latest iMac, let me clarify: the sort of Luddite I have in mind is someone who is not opposed to technology itself, but who feels that the way we are using certain technologies is unhelpful and counter-productive.
Straight away I thought of three ways that I probably need to embrace the Luddite way. Here are some resolutions:
- When I need to communicate with an individual, I will speak to them directly, on the phone or in person. I will not email, text or Facebook them. Email is useful for mass-broadcasting information, but it is not adequate for building relationship or ministering to someone.
- As a paid minister of the Word, I won’t spend my day at a computer behind a desk and call that work.
- In public, I will seek to talk to people rather than listening to podcast sermons from Seattle.
In each case, the technology is doing the same thing to me: it is reducing the quality of my relationships. The email sent to 10 members of a Bible study group giving them details for an upcoming social event might seem efficient, and, in one sense, it is. However, the email does not provide an opportunity for the unplanned informal conversations that build relationship or give mutual encouragement.
The podcast sermon is also a far less relational experience than listening to a talk at your local church or fellowship group. The latter is delivered by someone with whom you are in relationship, or at least someone who knows your local context and community.
Of course, the reason why this matters is because ministry is always about relationships with people. As Paul writes to the Thessalonian church, he reminds them that his ministry among them was intensely personal: he was like a mother nursing a child (1 Thess 2:7); he was willing to expend everything he had for them (2:8); he exhorted them like a father (2:11-12); and now that he has been physically wrenched away, he desperately desires to see them again “face to face” in order to further his ministry amongst them (2:17, 3:10).
Ministry is about real relationships with people. So we need to ask ourselves, “Is technology working against that goal?” Any more thoughts as to the ways in which we might need to embrace a Luddite revolution in the way we use technology?
I love the irony of communicating this helpful truth but blogging it!!
I do agree with your thoughts though
It is tempting to reply with a comment on line – but i will chat to you about when next I see you.
So no computers next week on Tues & Thurs? What a revolution!
Trying to prove Tony’s point that the panel of bloggers here won’t all agree with each other, I’ll try and be a bit contrary here.
Actually, I only worked out how to use Facebook this week, and I can’t say it has any appeal yet. And I do not have a mobile phone (so maybe I am a Luddite).
But I keep a list of church attenders who want to be in a church email group. I make sure their addresses stay hidden from each other. And once or twice a week, I send a group email, which includes:
– reminders of coming church events in the next week (seeing as no one uses a diary anymore!),
– urgent prayer requests (with the level of detail appropriate to such an email),
– answers to questions arising from sermons (apart from personal private ones),
– and links to interesting articles on the web (often found at Sydneyanglicans, Challies and Between Two Worlds!).
I have got incredibly good feedback from this. People feel it’s a great way to stay in touch on stuff that might otherwise really clog up notices on Sunday or never gets communicated at all. They also feel like they are getting to know me (or perhaps my opinions) a bit more and staying connected with the other congregations in our parish family, and having a chance to read and learn from interesting stuff they might never otherwise notice.
And I think there’s some biblical warrant for this sort of thing from the example of Paul’s practice of writing letters to churches – letters which he sometimes instructed them to share with other churches (Col 4:16). Further his letters even went to churches he’d never visited, and to churches he could only be physically present with in very intermittently.
Yes, Paul loved to be with people personally. But he did not see an inability to be face-to-face as a barrier to having a real ministry to them by writing from a distance (which is all an email or a SMS or a webpost is).
And I suspect Gavin probably agrees.
2 John 1:12
to quote the lecturer i’m currently listening to (and also a sola panalist):
“all ministry is personal ministry”
back to listening…
Yes of course face to face is a more personal way to relate than facebook. The apostle John makes the same point in 2 John 12 about the impersonal nature of paper and ink. Thankfully, he didn’t go the luddite way of only communicating face to face.
Do you want some more irony? Over lunch I’d been listening to your excellent Sola Scriptura talk freshly downloaded from the Christ Church website to my ipod. I’m preaching the Reformation Solas at the moment and Andrew Graham (who I saw face to face – we regularly catch up) had recommended them. Has the quality of our relationship changed by my listening to your talk or reading your blog or posting this entry? I think it has. Lunch would be nicer, and I’m happy to find a time to have a coffee to chat further face to face. Even without a qualitative change to our relationship, your downloaded word would teach the Word to me & others.
Technology needn’t be the bogeyman the luddites feared – it needs to be a servant not a master, and used wisely. Sandy’s reply gives some great creative ways of doing that.
Think of it this way my facebook friend – it would have been great to be at the match and watch Chelsea beat Liverpool. Life being what it is I had to settle for using technology to be part of the action. Not as good as being there live, but better than not knowing that joy at all.
I do agree with Sandy that email has a certain usefulness.
As I mentioned in the post, email is very effective in the mass-broadcasting of information. However, my concern is that my way of using email etc. has led to a lower quality of relationships.
Thanks as well Ian for you reference to 2 John. Spot on.
Nothing beats face to face (1 Cor 13:12). But in the absence of that, nothing beats words. And when you have words <i>and</i> face to face, you’ve hit a winner. I would hope that they’re never in competition, although I did once work with someone who dropped notes in my pigeon hole in preference to talking with me. Creepy! No, not Tony Payne.
Nothing to add to the conversastion, just wanted to get the comments emailed to me…
One other thought – how much of this is generational? I got a facebook wedding invitation the other day – creepy & wrong or just the way 20somethings communicate?
I’d like to see a tighter definition of what you mean by ‘relationality’, Gavin, before I concede your point as carried. I think that perhaps you need to define and defend a particular take on ‘real relationship’. What kind of mediation is allowed? Is intimacy necessary to authenticity? Does ‘transformative power’ act as a criteria? And you would still need to cope with the reality of Australian teenagers coming to Christ after listening to a podcast recorded in Seattle. Perhaps you might explore the link between ‘fellowship’ and ‘relationship’ – recognising of course that the Asiatic churches collected a ‘fellowship [offering]’ for the Jerusalem church, whom they’d never met!
In the 1960s, Edward Hall developed a spatial theory of relationships, culture and communication. He proposed 4 spaces which we use to develop personality, culture and communication. These were: public (12 ft +), social (4-12 ft), personal (18” – 4 ft) and intimate (0 – 18”). I suspect that our public space has grown out and our intimate space retreated a little. But the point is that authentic relationship happens in a range of contexts and degrees of self-revelation – and this isn’t necessarily inappropriate. The goal of Christian fellowship is not that every relationship be an intimate one (apart from being unsustainable, is this even desirable?).
And even in those relationships where I have been granted personal or even intimate privileges, there are some modes of engagement which better suit different kinds of content. Authentic relating is not always pursued through maximising the use of available intimacy. There are times when a letter or card, by it’s very non-immediacy, communicates far more powerfully the value of a relationship. Now, email has a very different semiotic value to a hand-written letter, but these are cultural rather than technological values, and have nothing to do with the face-to-face element. Though one might argue, of course, that the human persona is better (re)presented in handwriting than type.
In other words, I’d like to see a little more thought on the subject before I’m persuaded!
I think it often comes down to which medium you use/prefer when given the time and choice. IF you’re always opting for the impersonal (email etc) then maybe you need to get out a bit more and spend some time with your people.
This doesn’t preclude the use of contemporary means (podcasts, blogs, facebook et al) in ministry. If approached prayerfully surely both have a valuable place in ministry?
Thanks for those last two comments.
When I get the chance to write a Christian Luddite Manifesto I might get a chance to dig a bit deeper. It would be great to explore what ‘real relationship’ means in the 21st century. My slightly facetious answer is that although it’s hard to define, we know real relationship when we are experiencing it.
To be honest my motivation in putting this post out there was my reflection upon the way my own ministry practice has changed over the last 10 years. Basically, the change has been less ‘face to face’, and more ‘face to computer’.
I have no doubt that any technology can be used for good, I just want to make sure we don’t lose sight of the relational nature of ministry. Theoretically technology can facilitate relationships. I’m just not convinced that it often actually does.
Thanks also to Michael. It certainly is generational. If there are any people over 40 reading this, then their response to all of this would probably be: “Yeah thanks, but isn’t that sort of obvious.” Also, what would I have given to be at Stamford Bridge on Wednesday night!
Gav, I think you may have set yourself up a little bit there. “Although it’s hard to define, we know real relationship when we are experiencing it.” This is precisely my case. When we are experiencing whatever we are experiencing, we really know it. But the question this begs is: is this thing which we are experiencing best described sufficiently and exclusively through the word ‘relationship’, in a way which marks out other experiences which lack this thing as ‘less relational’. I’m not convinced that you’ve hit on the right term yet, and that’s not an unimportant issue, because of the range of other functions covered by the broader semantic domain of that term.
I don’t mean to be unnecessarily critical or pedantic, but I think precision in our diagnosis of the problem is pretty valuable when it comes to this nebulous thing called ‘relationships’.
Mike
Would you say the idea of ‘mutual encouragement’ takes us further? Thinking there of Hebrews 10:25.
Well, certainly the ‘mutuality’ bit. I think this is obviously a distinguishing feature of local sermon over podcast. This leads to a really interesting feature of online discussion boards (even comment boards like this one). You don’t have to visit many sites (even the SydAngs will do) to see the heat really rising in the kitchen. The anonymity – or at least removal of face-to-face interaction – can be terribly destructive. And yet, given how many of us struggle to be *truly* gentle in person, the web ironically can provide opportunity for greater levels of reciprocity – time for the less confident or more introverted to reflect, consider, marshall, compose and respond out of the glare of interpersonal scrutiny.
Funny, though, how the old letter or email composed after the fact and at a distance remains more encouraging than the incidental, opportunistic feedback at ‘point of sale’, isn’t it?
Mike. Maybe we should catch up for a coffee sometime and chat about it face to face.
Hola, Solas.
I like where you’re coming from Gav … I find myself using email or sms when a phone call would be better. Thanks for the reminder.
Gordon’s hint about words and immediacy made me reflect on our relationship with God – his words are sufficient for us until we see him face to face, yet His Spirit in us makes using this relationship as a parallel to our relationships with each other intriguing/troublesome/spurious…
Keep up the good work!
I look forward to your various postings!
Gavin, you make some great points. Writing an email is definitely lower on the scale than phoning or visiting.
However, via the Syd Ang website, emails and facebook, I’m getting to know some people I would not be able to have contact with from out here in Bathurst.
Several of our young people at church enjoy communicating online, and we have had more in depth “conversations” via facebook than we had previously had face-to-face, which has then enhanced the face-to-face communication.
Via facebook, I have renewed acquaintances with over 20 former students. Where the opportunity presents itself, i let them know of my Christian faith and of God’s grace in my life.
Facebook has also given some additional contact with colleagues and has led to increased communication at work.
Two of my own children enjoy communicating with me via online chat, facebook and the like.
I think a minister can use the technology intelligently so that it increases his communication with his congregation. But we don’t want him to use it as an excuse to avoid contact with us, or as something to hide behind.
Great question Gav, and good to have some proper relational time with you yesterday!
I wonder if you’re not over-egging the pudding here? Let me be a bit difficult and suggest that writing can be an excellent way of fostering a relationship – at least it worked for Paul as he fostered his relationships with Timothy, Titus and Philemon.
And it works for the Lord Jesus Christ – His written word to us is even greater than a personal encounter (2Pet 1)
Perhaps the key to getting the balance right is to work hard at the benefits of both types of communication and, as David reminds us, not use one as an excuse to avoid the other.
As I am a technological distaster I find a phone call saves a lot of time instead of sending copious emails responding to misinterpretations,misunderstandings and misapprehensions related to the original email. I can also gain a great deal of information from the voice I am talking and listening to. We should never underestimate the value of a personal handwritten note ,so rare today!
I’ve really enjoyed this thread! And many of you guys I haven’t seen for ages, but good to be able to have the discussion with you, even from here in Adelaide!
Great comment, Warren! Last week, I spoke with a senior pastor I respect, who has just retired after a significant two decade ministry in the same place.
He is the first to admit that he’s not very ‘pastoral’ and he often said that as an (extreme?) introvert, he was often very happy to spend time on his own and not with others.
Two things stuck in my mind from his answer to a question as to how much time a senior pastor can spend in pastoral visiting when there is so much big picture work to do (preaching, ministry training, leadership with staff and key lay leaders, elders, parish council or board etc).
One part of his answer was this: do a lot of your visiting on the phone. A ten minute phone call to a congregation member feels like you’ve given them significant attention – and you should have (if you weren’t fiddling on your computer and only half listening!) Whereas a 30 minute visit to the same person feels rushed.
The other thing that struck me was how he explained that between the announcement of his retirement and his actual final Sunday, he realised there were about 200 people he’d like to thank, and that he had about 200 days before the final date.
So he set himself the goal of hand-writing one personal thank you letter each of those 200 days. This small discipline made what seemed like a huge task very manageable and meant that close on 400 people (seeing as many were husband and wife) got what I imagine was very memorable and encouraging letter from the men who’d been their Senior Pastor for 20 years.
I guess there’s no need for those of us who are pastors to wait till we retire before we hand-write another thank you letter!
Don’t you think you have done enough damage to the ministry by allowing women to function as Deacons with a preaching and teaching ministry to mixed congregations?
I know Sydney Diocese will not make women presbyters, but I feel a preaching diaconate is a sad departure from the Apostolic truth and pattern.
Now that is true ludditism…lets send the perpetrators as convicts to New South Wales!
The problem with Gavin’s argument is obvious. Gavin are you saying that our relationship with people should be more close and intimate than our relationship with God ? I mean we don’t see God face to face in general do we. The bible says to reach people by all means, “facebook ?” surely not. The Sola “revolution” is based on words in the scripture, that’s even more impersonal than email, let alone facebook. I suggest that Gavin rethink his career in ministry and turn to the more personal form of Facebook etc… I personally like the fact that I can encourage and be encouraged by people who know me for who I am- real brothers and sisters in Christ. If I have to do that by the internet- praise God, beats the letter writing in the New Testament- GROWw UP !!
I became a Greek to the Greeks , and a Jew to the Jews and a blogger to the bloggers.Surely there is a ministry in cyber-space.
Can I apologise for my previous comment, whichIi think is a little off topic…I should have read the previous blogs more carefully. Also please excuse irritating typos and spelling mistakes.
Alf, I’m not sure that either Gavin is arguing what you have suggested he is arguing, or that you have interacted with him as graciously as appropriate. The intimacy of our relationship with God is predicated on something other than face to face presence (blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe). He dwells in us and us in him, something not mirrored in inter-human engagement even in biblical koinonia.
However, I’m uncomfortable with you use of the ad hominem (‘Gavin should rethink his career in ministry’; ‘Grow up’). Brother, can I encourage you to apologise and then move forward with some more courtesy; or else refrain from posting.
I’ll try to be nicer, but as some you know I am active towards changing some elements in Sydney. I did try the gentle way once. I will try again.
Mike you quote scripture well and you are right. I hope people get this intimacy we have with Christ. A group of us are starting an online church, partly aiming to draw back disenfranchised evangelicals who really are wasted for their love, ability and desire to serve the Lord. Facebook has helped me to connect with long lost siblings in the faith overseas- it has been a blessing. Sorry about the spelling !
I think Gavin’s 3 resolutions are good ones.
After reading through the comments, I’d also like to point out that Mike is a prophet!
“The anonymity – or at least removal of face-to-face interaction – can be terribly destructive.”