It sounds almost too obvious to say at this point, but personal, face-toface connections have an immeasurable impact on how we establish, build, and maintain relationships. While most of us know this already, it’s amazing how few of us practice it. The experience of virtual community can feel just as real as physical community, but the social, spiritual, and emotional realities do not provide the same kind of connections. This means that we must be discerning about the way we use information technologies to make decisions or build and maintain relationships in the church. We must ask how our media change personal interactions. We need to consider the message conveyed when we choose an e-mail or text message over a personal visit, phone call, or handwritten note. These may seem like mundane questions, but they help generate an awareness of the forces that unravel community.

Most importantly, we must recognize our unconscious tendency to be seduced by our virtual communities so that we can use them more intentionally rather than be used by them. Our subtle addiction to electronic community is not like an addiction to drugs, where the only solution is to stop using entirely. It is more like an addiction to food or money, where we must learn to regain power over something we cannot do without. On occasion, we may consider fasting from certain media or technologies as a spiritual discipline. This can be a very effective way to help us perceive media’s power and recalibrate our psyches. Ultimately, we must develop healthy relationships with our technologies. This means nurturing a conscious awareness of their power, our longings, and the way they both shape us, our faith, and our communities.

WHAT DOESN’T BEND, BREAKS

I was 10 years old when I met William Lo. He was a 60-year-old Chinese man and friend of my father. During his visits he would stay with us. I remember waking up every morning and looking out the window to see our Chinese friend in the backyard performing what looked like a slow-motion dance. He would sway and lean as though responding to the wind. His arms would trace controlled arcs in circular movements through the air. I later learned he was a master of an ancient martial art called tai chi and had been performing this two-hour ritual every morning for the last 40 years.

Every now and then, William would teach me a few simple techniques. The one I remember most vividly was how to respond if someone tried to push me. First he modeled the way by inviting me to push him as hard as I could. Eager to play and learn, I backed up and ran straight at him, throwing all my 10-year-old strength into his chest, only to find myself facedown on the ground behind him. It was as though I had traveled right through him.

As I got up, he said, “Now I’m going to push you lightly. Try to resist me with all your strength.” I stood my ground as he offered a gentle nudge. The next thing I knew, I was on the ground again. At this point he shared his secret knowledge: “When someone pushes you,” he said, “do not resist the force, or it will overtake you. Instead you must understand the force and cooperate with it. Only then will you disarm it.” That day William taught me how to relax my upper body in such a way as to absorb and deflect the momentum of an outside force. I learned that whatever doesn’t bend, breaks. It was a remarkably effective technique that even worked to disarm a schoolyard bully later that year.

William Lo’s wise counsel is also appropriate advice as we seek ways to respond to the forces of electronic culture. Instead of simply resisting, critiquing, or uncritically embracing cultural forces, we are first invited to study and understand them. Only then will we learn to use them, rather than be used by them. Only then will we regain our equilibrium and anticipate the powers that shape us.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Marshall McLuhan’s seminal idea was that the medium is the message. What are some common examples of media you use and how do they shape the messages that they communicate?

2. McLuhan’s Laws of Media are actually questions that help us evaluate the effects of a new medium or technology. Use these questions from pages 4-5 to evaluate a current technology, such as surveillance cameras or social networking websites.

3. Shane Hipps lists several paradoxical consequences of electronic culture: we become a tribe of individuals, we feel empathy at a distance, and we experience intimate anonymity. What are some ways you see these three phenomena in your church or neighborhood? What about in your own life?

4. How often do you participate in “virtual community” or write or read blogs on the Internet? How do you respond to the dangers presented here regarding the effects of these on genuine community?

5. What technologies or forms of media does your community of faith currently use that need to be evaluated?

6. Fasting from certain technologies or media for a time can help us “recalibrate our psyches.” What technology should you consider fasting from and why?

END NOTES

1 W. Terrence Gordon, Marshall McLuhan: Escape into Understanding: A Biography (Toronto: Stoddart, 1997), 226.

2 W. Terrence Gordon, McLuhan for Beginners (New York: Writers and Readers, 1997), 2

3 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, 1st MIT Press ed. (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), x.

4 Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), 93.

5 Ibid., 239.

6 Mark Lau Branson, “Forming God’s People,” Congregations, Vol. 29 (Winter 2003): 22-27.

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