Note: This post is an excursus within a series, “Technologizing of Worship Before, During, and After COVID: Epistemology, Eschatology, and Presence,“ part of a larger project suggesting a pastoral response to COVID and lockdowns in the church. Read more and subscribe here.
In the most recent piece in my ongoing series, I included this statement:
…Reliance on “online presence” may distract us as church leaders from modeling embodied fellowship practices for a younger generation of believers growing up with experiences of friendship that are highly “technologized.”
Online “Church”: United, or Merely Simultaneous?
In this post, not originally part of my October–November 2020 essay, I would like to develop this point further, because I find that this issue comes up repeatedly in my conversations with parents, fellow professors, and church leaders. Folks who fall into these categories are mostly older than I am (I was born in 1984). In my view, many of these older folks have not adequately reckoned with the differences that exist between their own experiences with digital technology in their adulthood, and the experiences of generations who have grown up with digital technology always being a part of their lives.
The older generations, having come of age in cultures of society, church and education that are formed by reading physical books and encountering peers and authority figures in physical space and time, are better equipped to transfer those educational, spiritual, and social habits into the digital realm and to cope with the shortcomings of digital media, than are younger generations. Put succinctly, we think the kids are fine (even perhaps doing better than we are with all this Zooming!), but they’re not.
Continue reading
think hard, think well 