Techno Gnostics

…there will always be natural limits to the humanity and size of our churches. The optimum size of human communities that are bonded by face-to-face relationships, we are told, is around the magic number of 150 to 200. So as soon as any human community goes above that number, whether in the direction of a megachurch, with its tens of thousands, or a megacity with its tens of millions, it requires coordinating in ways that are other than face to face and fully human – whether lightly through the interconnections of the social media or more heavy-handedly through authoritarian political control. The nature and impact of that form of coordination then become critical.

For better or worse, these different ways of bringing and holding people together have their own identifiable dynamics that in the end will always determine the quality of the larger community. Modern megacities have reached a size that creates intrinsic problems of their own, and there can be grandiose hi-tech forms of the church that have similar problems. They will appeal to the techno-gnostics who lionize the brilliance of disembodied video images and abstractions and disparage what St. Francis humbly called “Brother Ass.” But they will never prove to be the wave of the future. The neighbourhood parish church is not just the church of the past but the church of the future. Scorned and overshadowed though it may be at times, it will never be outmoded while humans are humans and have bodies.

Os Guiness in Impossible People

To Obey or Not Obey?

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The chickens are coming home to roost. The church has experienced weeks of ‘online church’, we face (pun intended) the possibility of forced masking in worship as well as vaccine passports for worship services. Look at the Bill of Rights. Our liberties have been stripped from us. Our right to refuse medical treatment is under threat, our right to freedom of thought, conscience, privacy and religion is imperiled. Our right to peaceful assembly is gone. As are the rights to freedom of association, movement and freedom from discrimination.

The time for decisions is here. The trouble is, our collective Christian minds are creaky and stiff from disuse. Our body, feminine, soft and nurturing in form, but lacking the complementary male strength and roughness of virtues such as courage due to a matriarchal dominance of the church (often in spite of male leaders), is frozen in a semi-recumbent position. What will we do? Well, the women of both sexes will bleat on their social media platforms about doing the right thing and rail at any Christians who awaken enough from slumber to question whether we are in fact in the beginnings of a living totalitarian nightmare. “Obey the Government! Romans 13!” exclaim these newly minted experts in theology who, with their theological position, could no doubt justify yellow stars with the word Jude written in fancy lettering vaccine passports.

Since our minds are seized shut from lack of use and no call of action will get us to actually do anything, we’ll resort to one of our favourite feel-good pastimes. We’ll sing. But we’ll avoid the old hymns of the faith. It’s a bit hard to sing “Stand up for Jesus” when that might require backbone. We’ll no doubt sing lustily some inane and trite modern evangelopop. How about “Who the Son sets free, Oh, is free indeed”? But we’ll do it from our living rooms wearing a mask hoping the State will set us free once the population has been compliant enough and buckled under the State’s loving#kindness.

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