The genius of the church at the turn of the age

I am a member of a generation of Christians who have lived through the impact of the digital revolution on church life. In my childhood the only significant use of technology in Christian gatherings was the amplification system, and then latterly an overhead projector with acetate sheets. From the close of the twentieth century the ingress of technology became ever greater in volume and intensity with major shifts in the life of the church being made possible through electronic communication and software designed to assist in worship. Letters gave way to emails which were gradually replaced with instant messaging, hymnbooks gave way to PowerPoint, and church advertisements in the local newspaper yielded to the power of social media publicity. The 2020 pandemic accelerated this technological dependence with the rise of live online services, Zoom prayer meetings and a host of other ways for Christians to connect with each other and their communities during successive bans on gathering. While the details of each of these developments could be debated, it is clear that local churches have engaged in a process of gradual incorporation of technological developments, allowing them to augment and in some cases improve their ability to serve God and one another effectively. Present and future technologies, however, may lead to other reactions from churches as well as opportunities for them.

The local church: partnering with Prometheus?

The early years of the 2020s have been politically and culturally fraught. Global events and leaders have come to dominate the consciences of people in every area of the world, with a foreboding sense abroad that our future is beset by challenges for which we are ill prepared. The gap between our generation and that of the 1930s now feels narrower than ever with racism, anti-semitism and the potential weaponisation of technological developments flickering on the horizon. High on the list of contemporary matters that threaten to undermine our self-understanding and our relationship to others is the advent of AI.

The breathtaking rise of a technology which detaches seeing from believing stands as a threat to the very concept of meaning in a world which has come to make most of its decisions on a bluntly sensory basis. Social media, which promised a place for us to share and delivered a forum for us to be shaped, can carry information and images that do not exist anywhere other than in a string of code, spawning dubious incarnations of people and places that bear no relationship to reality. As fearful as the nuclear bombs of the 1940s which stamped a new physical threat on the psyche of a whole generation, Big Tech has split the atom of human identity and no one is truly prepared for the cognitive radiation which will destroy truth at a cellular level within our societies and our souls. The fact that such things can now be written without a hint of hyperbole provides a hint at how near to the brink of new and fearful things we truly are.

How can churches relate to these kinds of developments? Undoubtedly our old habits of incorporation will bring some benefits to us here. AI will foreshorten some of the complex things that can get in the way of kingdom work, and vistas of accessibility to the gospel are currently opening which should warm the hearts of Christians. The new technology, however, brings weapons grade issues into our relationship with it. At this point in our history when we are witnessing the blinding flash of the AI bomb we have a fleeting moment to brace for the blast wave and find a way to emerge from this event in as strong a position as possible. This will mean applying the best Christians minds working in theology and technology to help us not to partner with Prometheus in ways that might subtly compromise our apprehension and heralding of the truth. The brave new world will demand bold new thinking on our very relationship to technological development.

The local church: foolishness incarnate

Away from the imminent threat that the AI revolution brings, however, there is a golden opportunity for local churches to serve and share the Saviour. The messianic promises of 1990s postmodernism are witnessing a kind of incarnation in the dilution and dissipation of truth in the real world, and what chimera is currently slouching towards Silicon Valley to be born is still hard to determine. What is clear, however, is that people have become more afraid than ever of being deceived while still buying into the very technology which holds their cognitive objectivity to ransom. Social media posts abound about the threat of AI to the truth, but these kinds of posts are the equivalent of cigarette companies providing health warnings on their packets – the medium undermines the message even while it is being delivered. There is an inexorable sense of inevitability in our society that we will not be able to know things in the future as we do now and, like those glimmering early days of dementia, people sense and feel this but are powerless to reduce its effects.

Into this complex world comes the simplicity of the local church, the embodiment of the glorious foolishness of the gospel amid the tottering wisdom of the world. Local gatherings of Christians carry no capital with the main players on the world stage, they are bereft of any inherent ability to sway public policy or change the course of global history, but the local assembly of ordinary Christians might just be the fine instrument God uses to rescue sinners from the moral and noetic effects of the Fall. The local church is in line with the odds-off operations of God in history, the sling that slays superior powers, the underdog that outlives an Empire. Rather than blind incorporation or assimilation, local churches at this point in history might counter the culture and capture imaginations simply by being what they are: living embodiments of a ‘foolish’ gospel which strips the machinery of human ‘wisdom’.

The local church: Truth embodied

How might such grand claims be realised? The answer to this is disarmingly simple: the local church springs from the genius of an eternal God who has ordained that the identity and integrity of his people will last until the end of the age, even our age and whatever aberrations may spring from it.

We might consider for a moment what could serve as an antidote to the disembodied images that will soon make fact and fiction indistinguishable. The platform of online life provides no safeguard that what we see is what is real, providing us with the receding horizon of being able to discern what to believe. In such an environment, the appetite among people in our societies for in-person discussion, tangible connection, and for claims that can be substantiated via the medium of flesh and blood living will increase. In many towns and cities the local church is uniquely placed to provide a gallery for the goodness and wisdom of God, to proclaim in-person the great truths that underpin reality and redemption and to bear real-world fruit from a gospel that can be believed by being seen in relationships and consciences undeniably transformed. The counter that this represents to unverified claims and indecipherable fakery is impossible to overstate.

What a tragedy if, at a point where the historic practices of gathered worship and embodied gospel living are most crucial, churches go with the zeitgeist into an online emphasis that eviscerates truth and connection and the apologetic of living worship.

Conclusion

The best way for Christians to stand against the tide of the truth wars is simply to be what she has always been, and to live as she was ordained to by the Lord Jesus Christ. To be biblical is, in the end, to be supremely practical, and the means by which God does his work is trans-temporal and trans-cultural. What an irony if, after the twentieth century churches’ addiction to relevance and early adoption, the way forward through the digital wasteland is simply to be what we were commanded to be 2000 years ago – living epistles, embodied heralds, gathered centres of meaning and ministry and mission. The future for our society looks ever darker, but what a backdrop for the seemingly anachronistic light of the local church to shine ever more brightly.