On the first night that I gave that talk, I had students sketch the Media Tightrope image and place themselves on the spectrum: were they towards the Thoughtless Consumption end of things or Retreat/Isolation? I then had them put that in a bowl as an offering to the Lord that they would be willing to move if God called them to do so.
I looked over the sketches later that night. It was about what I thought it would be. About ten on the Retreat end of things, about ten put themselves in the sweet spot of Thoughtful Engagement and Humble Abstinence and the other 130 nominated themselves for Thoughtless Consumption. I think this is fairly typical among white evangelicals, regardless of age.
Sunday morning I gave the "take home" charge. How were they going to leave the weekend and implement genuine changes? I offered two keys that the Spirit uses for transformation in our lives: Scripture and Community.
One of the functions of media in our culture is that it "normalizes" things. It teaches and re-inforces what "normal" behavior is. Even sub-cultures that celebrate being abnormal use media to reinforce and help create the standard deviation. So Goth kids and Gap kids and Hip-Hop kids are all consuming various forms of media to help them understand how to navigate their particular sub-culture.
For the Christian, we've been given something that is to teach us what normal is. It's called the Scriptures. The Scriptures are to be our "normalizing media." It teaches us what it means to live life, to become more fully human.
Given that 130 out of 150 students at our conference were in thoughtless consumption mode when it comes to media (and I think this is typical), guess whose messages about normal they're/we're more likely to internalize?
God has given us a book to teach us and to normalize us. He knows we need something to help us, so he gives it to us. And woe unto us if (for example) we are looking to Grey's Anatomy for instruction on how to live out our relationships with one another rather than obeying the Biblical call to submit to one another out of reverence for Jesus Christ.
We have got to find a way to internalize that book. It's not always easy. It's not always straight forward. But we have got to find a way to write it in our hearts and in our minds and to get The Story into the very fabric of our being so that we will have an accurate and true understanding of what normal is.
Otherwise, our Christian communities will not have much of the vibrancy and light that they were intended to have. And our lives will be just as stale as much of the rest of the world.
2 comments:
great post!
As I was reading I was trying to figure out what you meant by "media". Are you meaning everything on tv, radio, internet, and in books? And for a minute I felt overwhelmed realizing that this could relate to EVERYTHING. That you should look at every article, every tv show, every peice of "media" with an eagle eye and hold it up to scripture. And then I realized that we should actually be doing this with everything... period. Not just media but even with events and people in our lives that shape what we think... we should be holding those things up to scripture. I was a bit overwhelmed.
But then I realized that I should actually be relieved that we even have something to measure everything else against. It's a relief that God gave us a way to know what is true and what isn't and to have something solid and physical that we can learn to live by.
jenn,
great thoughts, thanks for chiming in. I think, too, that we need to realize that this is a learning process. so initially i had a really hard time learning my times tables. but now i don't have to think very much to recognize that 7x7 does not equal 53. the times tables have become deeply ingrained in my mind.
so, too, with scripture. initially it will feel like a great deal of work to measure everything by it. but as we internalize, digest, soak in this Story, it instinctively becomes the framework through which we view/experience all of life as you so correctly express.
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