a missional dramedy

This article is fascinating and has many implications for the church. The current church structure facilitates a consumer-friendly environment, allowing people to slip in the back at worship, relatively unknown, receive their goods and services, then leave without being forced to wrestle with the implications of the gospel in their lives. Essentially, our church has made consumers. Technology is changing culture, based on this argument, by changing the way content is produced. Through YouTube, wikipedia, facebook, and other sites, people are no longer told what to read or watch. Rather, they can control what they see and even produce content themselves. The article comments that this power used to be reserved only for big companies. Now, if a person has a story worth telling, it can be told and distributed where people will listen.

There are a couple of implications for the church. First of all, the consumer-driven approach to ministry where the content is controlled by the hierarchy will soon fail to connect with people…and this is a good thing. Consumerism in the church has not aided anyone in producing disciples. It has actually created a hurdle that many churches can’t clear. The fact that people now want and are able to be content producers themselves is a recovering of what the New Testament church (see 1 Corinthians) was like. The communities were smaller and everyone participated. They were able to exercise their gifts for the benefit of the body of Christ. They had something to offer, a story worth telling, and were able to distribute it to the congregation. We can create an environment that fosters content-producers. Sunday mornings can be a time of telling and retelling the story of the gospel and how people in the community have been woven into it. We can create an environment that allows people to exercise the full gambit of their gifts and talents to be content-producers, as opposed to only having space for them to watch children, pass an offering plate, and direct traffic.

A second implication, found in the article, is that it will be harder now to protect audiences from explicit content. While it is great that we can move from a system where the content is only produced by ministers and consumed by the congregation to a system where everyone is a content producer, it will be harder to facilitate how the story of God is being distributed. This problem will not be unique to us. This is the situation the apostles faced as the gospel was spreading and churches were forming. The epistles deal largely with the descripting of people’s lives that were controlled by the cultural narrative and the rescripting of their lives with the biblical narrative to make sure they were exercising and telling the right story. The opportunity and challenge to church leaders in this shift will be to keep a constant ear to the content being produced by the congregation and to “test the spirits” as Paul would say to make sure the content reflects the story of the gospel. This means that ministers will need to spend less time operating as programmer and CEO (free from this because there are other content producers in the congregation) and more time listening to the script the congregation is living by, descripting those elements that reflect the world’s values, and rescripting their lives with the gospel’s values.