OMG DWHTGTTA

The meeting was boring.  Another attempt by management to rearrange something that would only make us less productive as we spent time on their pet project instead of focussed on our customers.  Did I mention that I was bored out of my mind.  Braking the monotony, I was thrilled as a friend shot me a text on an old Zaurus.  It was 1999 and texting was not very popular yet.  Email had just really caught on and the web was just becoming ubiquitous.  I loved the digital age and was glad to be distracted by this text.

But, to my horror, the screen read “OMG DWHTGTTA!!!” What?  Did I miss something?  My first thought was that the message was garbled.  The technology was new and sometimes when email traffic passed through different servers a message could be garbled, maybe texts had a similar issues.  I did not know what to do, so I waited until the break and asked my colleague.  He condescendingly explained that the text was not garbled.  It translated as “Oh My Goodness Do We Have To Go Through This Again.”  “Oh.”  I replied.  Apparently, I was not as cool as I thought.  

To this day, I still text in complete sentences and am incredibly uncool as a texter.  So there is a part of living in the digital age that I am missing.  I am of the generation with one foot in pad and paper and one foot on an iPad.  It is at times a peculiar place to be.  Thank goodness for search engines.  At least I can google (look up) OMG and DWHTGTTA to find out what they mean today so that I don’t look ignorant in front of my colleagues.

The analog to digital shift is minor compared to the demographic shifts in America that have occurred in the past forty years and that the church needs to understand.  Like someone looking at a text they don’t understand, the church often struggles to understand the cultural changes in its surrounding.  Even worse, it at times wastes decades in denial, condemning and/or judging before seeking understanding.  For instance, I wrote a blog yesterday about Laura’s and my involvement with our daughter Kate’s soccer team.  Yet, less than fifty percent of children born in the United States this year will grow up in households with both parents and significantly more children will grow up in poverty than when I was born (1972).  Is the church getting the text?  Can we read the cultural text and respond as the people of God or will we continue to deny, condemn, or judge?

Things taken for granted in the church of the past can not be assumed in the church of the future.  We must orient our churches to the mission fields, the community beyond the congregation.  Churches must meddle in people's daily lives or else the church will abrogate this cultural responsibility over to our TV sets and peculiar expressions of human sexuality found there in.  Churches must teach marriage classes, parenting classes, provide services for single parent households, and provide a community oriented approach that will benefit every child in the community if it is to be relevant.  And, ministries of compassion and benevolences that were often treated as after thoughts must become central to the mission of the church.  Our congregations must transition from social clubs to missional outposts as James Logan recommends in “How Great a Flame!  Contemporary Lessons from the Wesleyan Revival.”  

Although I am afraid that the church and United Methodism specifically is struggling to read the cultural text we are receiving, I hope we ask the question I asked of my colleague to the one who is sending us the text.  My faith and confidence is that God will guide the United Methodist Church.  And, God will raise up people to help the church and specifically the United Methodist movement into the digital age and into the missional transition that is needed.  I believe that this work is already begun in the Texas Annual Conference.  But although the Conference can guide and inspire, it will take direct local action by each local congregation to make a difference. 

The underlying question is what do we do as the church to bridge the chasm?  How do we preach a message written in a time in which world travel was inconceivable to one in which data streams world wide in fractions of a second?  How do we love in a world in which families with both parents are uncommon?  How do we provide compassionate engagement in essentials of real life for a generation that does not have a moral or ethical grounding?  In some ways, we are more like the churches of the Bible than at any time in American history as we struggle to evangelize a nation that has forgotten its faith, or at the least does not know how to text it yet.  In other ways, the cultural changes occurring in the world are so profound that we need to reexamine what a culture of grace looks like today.  

What incredible responsibility and opportunity lies with those who have their feet in both worlds to bring the good of the old into the new.  Don’t loose hope.  God will be with us in this journey.  Start by looking around you.  What do you see in your daily life?  Who in your direct line of sight needs you to share the love and healing grace of God with them?  If we start there, we'll be amazed how far God can take us and what through us God can do to transform the world.

So, I hope this blog is bacn (pronounced like bacon, digital media that you look forward to looking at later).