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"Faith and the Digital Revolution"

It’s a remarkable time for people of faith. What’s so special? Not what’s happening inside our faith communities, but what’s happening outside in the world. There’s the economic roller coaster, the threats of terrorism and climate change, and of course, the continuing and accelerating wonders of digital technology. We are in the digital age—a digital revolution—and it is shrinking the world, giving voice to the voiceless and up-ending the powers that be. One of my friends was in Saudi Arabia during the Egyptian uprising; the saying was going around, “Nasser was poisoned, Sadat assassinated; Mubarek was Facebooked.” 

In the interview we saw with Father Jim Martin, he said the most frequent topic in America magazine is the digital revolution and how it affects our spiritual lives, how we consume information, but also whether or not we’re able to disconnect from the technology in order to connect with God more deeply. 

These changes are unique to our time. No people of faith have ever lived through these shifts; there is no map in the glove compartment, no app on our iPhones to show us the way, in spite of the thousand of apps that have to do with religion. We are the ones who are going to have to figure out what faith means now in the throes of the digital revolution.

But the gift of a faith community is this: we don’t have to figure it out alone. We have each other, and we also have the countless faithful who went before us. Because, even though no one else has experienced these particular changes, we aren’t the first to experience times of radical change. Bear with me as we take a trip down memory lane.

I am struck these days by how much we have in common with those who started the early Christian movement, or for that matter, Rabbinic Judaism. These traditions came to life in an age of globalization, courtesy then of the Greco-Roman Empire and its mammoth road-building efforts across Europe, Africa, and Asia Minor. Christianity would barely have made it out of Galilee at an earlier time.

That age of globalization, like ours, connected people in ways they had never experienced before: Roman citizens were bombarded with new cultures, new commerce, new foods, new philosophies, new religions. One historian describes what he calls “massive dislocations” going on then, the sense that everything was changing, that precious little was predictable or secure or familiar. New philosophies competed with ancient religions as people grasped for some “rule of life [that could] give them a sense of inward security and stability.” Varying religious groups and philosophical schools differed “in their recipes,” but they all offered their followers the same thing: resilience “against all the shocks and changes…, the shifting restless insecurity of human affairs.”

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

It happened again in the 16th century, when ocean-going ships took explorers to cultures never imagined, and moveable type unleashed a populist revolution. Suddenly, the world exploded as people realized things didn’t have to be the way they were. Ideas flew from place to place courtesy of printing. They flattened hierarchies and gave the voiceless voice. Despots in power didn’t stand a chance, and social structures, including the church, were up for grabs.

Roman roads, moveable type, and now the digital revolution. Connecting people in unprecedented, unsettling, unpredictable ways.

We’re not the first to go through massive change, and it helps me to look back to earlier times for pointers. How did people of faith deal with all that change? There’s a lot we can learn from them.

First, they figured out what was essential from the past and what wasn’t, keeping some things from their historic faith, and letting go of others. For early Christians, if Gentiles were going to join, they had to figure out what was essential to the faith. Astonishingly, though they kept the Torah, they let go of dietary laws and even circumcision as being necessary to the covenant. In the Reformation, when everything else was changing, they decided that the Bible alone was going to be their rudder, but they let go of the hierarchy that had led the church for over a millennium. Whether or not they made the right choices is not ours to decide; but the radical changes they made were breathtaking.

I wonder how we will discern what is essential and what we can let go of? For me, the sound of organ pipes lifting our voices to heaven is a powerful means of communing with God, but in the end, if my grandchildren never hear the Widor Toccata or sing my favorite hymns, that doesn’t mean they won’t know the love of God. I love the Zen saying, “Never confuse the finger pointing to the moon with the moon.” Like our forerunners in times of change, we can appreciate the past without worshiping it.

Second, our earlier counterparts had to figure out how to connect with the culture that was changing around them. When the Apostle Paul went to Athens, he debated in the synagogue; but he also debated with philosophers in the city square, citing their poets along with his scripture. Fifteen hundred years later when John Calvin went to Geneva, he translated the worship service into French and even used the new media: one visitor noted an astonishing innovation: everyone had hymnals in their hands made possible by moveable type.  What would it mean for us to keep connecting with the changing world, and not run from it? If we know God’s voice, then we can discern its presence in a thousand different places without being threatened. Moreover, our faith may be just the thing that helps someone else get through the massive shifts of change.

There’s an urgent conversation going on right now, about justice and values and the meaning of human life, and that conversation is going on in the city square of commerce, and politics, and international relations. And it’s taking place not only face-to-face, but over the Internet. I hope and pray that people of faith are part of that conversation.

In times of massive change, people of faith have work to do. First, to choose what’s essential from the past; and then to choose how to connect what’s essential with the new world around us.  Ready or not, the digital revolution is here, and our work is cut out for us. Today, the globe has never been smaller; the pace of change has never been faster. But oddly enough, we’re not alone. We’re not just surrounded by a digital “cloud;” we’re surrounded by a “cloud of witnesses,” long ago people of faith who have been here before. We may be in uncharted territory, but God can still guide the way. Our part is to be openhearted and, with every tweet, text message and Facebook posting, to look for that next digital step along the journey.

Conversation with Christine Chakoian

Daniel Pawlus: If you’d like a printed transcript, CD or DVD of the message you just heard from Christine Chakoian, we’ll tell you how to place an order at the end of the program. Or you can visit our website at 30goodminutes.org to watch the video again or read the text anytime.

Now, let’s talk with Christine Chakoian. Chris, it’s good to see you, as always.

Christine Chakoian: It’s good to see you, too.

Daniel Pawlus: I want to know, is technology a new god for people, a new kind of god?

Christine Chakoian: That’s a great question. I don’t think it’s a new kind of god but I think it is a new kind of addiction. We get so trapped in our devices that we end up looking at them more than we look at the people across the table from us.

Lillian Daniel: Have you had any issues in the church that you work with around the introduction of technology into the life of the church or worship or that kind of question?

Christine Chakoian: Yes. I remember Tom Long wrote a book called “Worship Wars,” that talked about the difference between those who really love the traditional organ and worship service and those who were introducing things like the screen and electric guitars and things into worship. We’ve had a little of that. Before I came to that church apparently there were some edges about that. But it’s been great. We have kind of a traditional service in the morning. Occasionally we will have electronic. Most of the time it’s the pipe organ. But then we have a Sunday evening service at five o’clock that really incorporates not only screen, but global music and acoustic music.

Daniel Pawlus: So to this idea of distraction, I guess, I wonder if we can dig into it a little bit more because all of this technology can be a good thing, right?

Christine Chakoian: Right.

Daniel Pawlus: But as we’re coming together in community in church, where is the role of silence that is played in that? You talked about respecting the past, right? So we didn’t have some of these things previously and we want to embrace them as the best we can moving forward. How do you balance those two?

Christine Chakoian: It’s really an important time for us as a people of faith to provide space, sacred silence, for people to remind them to breathe, to remind them that the people around them are part of the family of faith.

Lillian Daniel: I think so often people make sloppy assumptions about generations in all of this and they assume that the younger generation wants all the technology in there and the older generation doesn’t. I find it doesn’t fall out that way and in our congregation it’s the young people who really resist the introduction of technology because they say, “We listen to PowerPoint presentations all day in school, all day at work. Could we have a place where we have silence?”

Christine Chakoian: Right. Exactly. We’ve even started to expand the silent time a little bit between things in worship. Having an instruction, an invitation, a welcome to do that allows people to set aside that incessant contact they have will all the demands coming in.

Daniel Pawlus: That social connectivity. I was saying to Lillian, from fifteen years ago when this was all beginning to pick up, my concern then—and it still is now—is are we just going to be talking to digital versions of ourselves? The technology is so fluid now. What is the excuse that people are going to use to actually come together as human beings? Because you don’t really have to, you know, if you don’t want to any more, especially as that relates to church. I’d love to hear what both of you think about that.

Lillian Daniel: The phenomenon of people saying, well, I couldn’t come to church but I watched it on the computer and it’s not the same.

Christine Chakoian: It’s not the same, but it’s a tool. Technology is a tool and if you’re able to say the most important thing about being together is to have that sense of community. For someone who can’t be there, it is a way to have community. Our daughter just graduated from the University of Chicago and she is now in Korea doing a year of mission work there teaching English to underprivileged kids. We Skype all the time, and, frankly, I talk more with her now while she’s in Korea than I did when she was in Hyde Park! So it’s a tool. It can connect people, but it can’t create relationships in that same way. It can’t sustain them constantly. If you have no other choice, it is so much better than nothing. Some of our homebound are delighted to have it. But that face-to-face, that touch is huge.

Lillian Daniel: It’s interesting you mentioned Tom Long because Tom says that every fifty years preaching has a nervous breakdown.

Christine Chakoian: That’s great!

Lillian Daniel: And that we think nobody is going to want to listen to somebody talk in church and yet the tradition continues.

Christine Chakoian: Oh, it sure does. You know, we talk in our faith about a “living word.” And I really believe that. The word isn’t dying any time soon. It may have different ways of coming across, but it’s still alive and well.

Lillian Daniel: Thank you for bringing the word to us today.

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