Short Attention Span Faith

That's the title of a really interesting article in Relevant magazine this month. I'll keep my thoughts on the topic to myself (for the moment). But here's just a bit of it...

"The thing the Church must think long and hard about is whether modern communication technology is making things too painless and too easy. Facebook is making it easier to get news out to vast social networks (like church groups). Twitter allows Christians to more readily keep tabs on their congregation's daily life. Cell phones make it easier to schedule prayer breakfasts and Starbucks devo meetings. But is easier always better? Just because something can be done, should it be?

Take Twitter. Does it really have any compelling purpose? Some have suggested the 140-characters-or-less mandate of Twitter might actually improve the quality of our communication. The logis is thus: The bite-sized requirement forces people to be more concise writers and to learn to use words with a newfound economic precision. When you have so small a space, you can't rely on throwaway words. It elevates our diction, supposedly. It forces us to be better writers and more-to-the-point communicators.

This may be true, but we also have to ask ourselves this: is there anything in life that is simply untweetable? Are some things too big and complicated to reduce to 140 character bursts or installments? Can the Bible and the Gospel be properly communicated in a micro-blogging paradigm? Pastors everywhere are voraciously adopting Twitter and rapidly gaining thousands of 'followers,' but these are questions it's imperative they ask themselves. There's always a danger that the Church-by embracing such things as Twitter-is simply catering to (and propagating) the lowest-common denominator, no-attention-span stew of technological trendiness.

It's important to seek out the sacred in the secular, but it's also equally critical to recognize when the secular is interrupting the sacred in our lives- to dare question the assumption that 'new' and 'cutting edge' always means better. The Christian must at least consider that technologies are not benign-that they may be good for some things or bad for others, but they are not neutral."

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