Cape Town: Turning Points of Christian History

This week I gave a lot of my attention to following the events of Cape Town, South Africa, where thousands of Christians gathered for the Lausanne Movement's third Congress on World Evangelization. Similar events were held in 1974 (Lausanne, Switzerland) and 1989 (Manila).

A word to those readers who find the basic ideas of Evangelicalism and evangelization rather monstrous. I know. We have lots of other common ground. Feel free to skip these kinds of posts if they irritate you!

I'd been invited to go to this event and work behind the scenes as a volunteer but with my ministry account now $5000 in the red an expensive plane ticket didn't seem like a good purchase. Even plans to join a group convened at our local seminary to watch and discuss some of the videos together (for free!) didn't quite work out when a major cyber-attack restricted bandwidth too much for the videos to be uploaded on schedule.

I had to laugh when I read Andrew Jones' description of how that got resolved:

"Our problems were solved by two Indian cousins from Bangalore who were here as volunteers in the IT department. They came to connect printers and ended up stopping viruses. In fact, they have already solved the problem and we are back on track. Shout out to our two geeky heroes: Unisys Global Services employee Vijay Kumar and Pastor Daniel Singh who has just got figured out why he got a doctorate in computational biology."

The week-long conference is generating a lot of buzz in my world and also generating a heck of a lot to read - and now, to watch. Without my seminary pals across town to process this with it's been more difficult to pick and choose which parts to pay attention to.

Here's a glimpse. Two videos providing an overview of Christian history, through Lausanne eyes.  I've embedded them below. There are a few statements I'd question, others on which historians disagree. History can be a slippery topic. But overall I'd say they did a good job.

Might be a good tool for you Perspectives coordinators out there... show one week 7, as a review of lesson 6, and the second week 8, as a supplement to lesson 7. Or, an instructor could build a lesson around these videos, freeing themselves up to teach stuff they do not cover and/or do more discussion / Q&A.

Turning Points, Part 1: After a glimpse of the opening of the Congress, this video traces in two segments the growth of the church from Pentecost to the present in the face of many obstacles. Key movements, nations and figures are presented in this sweeping review of the expansion of Christianity up to the taking of the gospel to China.

Turning Points, Part 2: This video picks up the history with Boniface taking the gospel to Germany and extends to the present time and the Cape Town Conference.


Cape Town 2010 Opening Session - Turning Points, Part 1 from Lausanne Movement on Vimeo.


Cape Town 2010 Opening Session - Turning Points, Part 2 from Lausanne Movement on Vimeo.

Hitting the Trail

My part of Denver is riddled with bike trails. This section of the High Line Canal Trail is is currently my favorite. I don't ride my bike, though, I venture on foot. Yesterday was a full, full, day, and when I stopped to catch my breath I realized a walk along the canal was just what I needed. So I grabbed an apple, my camera, my MP3 player and that's where I went. It was a bit of a gray day - unusual here - but still beautiful.

Bridging Long Distances

So, the "phone" thing. Aaaaaaaggggaaaaain. Are you tired of hearing about me being handicapped by a fear and hopeless procrastination about making phone calls?

I don't believe I am as bad about this as I used to be, actually.

Working from home has helped. I packed up my stuff and left the office environment back in February. This, and the six-month sabbatical with which I began, have given me more energy for everything - including taking social initiative. I'm getting out as much as ever before, maybe more. I usually get those two hours a day of people-time that I crave. (Yes, I'm a mild extrovert). And that requires a certain amount of phone calling. I've enjoyed many of those calls. Enjoyed, too, my contact with people who are willing to communicate and coordinate plans through other means. Even when getting on the phone makes more "sense."

Because making phone calls is still a hard thing. Spent a good chunk of today intending to call a stranger - but new ministry contact - in Michigan, and am now wondering what I'll say to explain why I didn't call. I had said I would! The truth - that I was scared - seems rather laughable. I can't imagine saying that to someone I've never even met.

Tomorrow, I have a call scheduled with the man I've asked to be my supervisor. He works in the home office in Florida. Lovely man. I'm not afraid to talk to him. But I'm a bit afraid he's going to say "I'll supervise you, and the main way I see us staying in touch is over the phone."

That would be like telling me, "I'll mentor you, but I want to do it all in Spanish." 

Aaaarrrgghhhh, sometimes my weakness seem as if they will be my undoing!

Writing

"There's nothing harder to estimate than [the value of] a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments - moments of sustained creation - when his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on."

From "Security," by E.B. White, December 1938. Republished in One Man's Meat pp. 13-14.

Incoming

On moving to the country to become a subsistence farmer - well, half-time subsistence farmer, half-time subsistence writer - E.B. White says, "It seemed to me that I should have a desk, even though I had no real need for  a desk. I was afraid that if I had no desk in my room my life would seem too haphazard."

"The desk looked incomplete when I got it set up, so I found a wire basket and put that on it, and threw a few things in it. This basket, however, gave me a lot of trouble for the first couple of weeks. I had always had two baskets in New York. One said IN, and other OUT. At intervals a distribution boy would sneak into the room, deposit something in IN, remove the contents of OUT. Here, with only one basket, my problem was to decide whether it was IN or OUT, a decision a person of some character could have made promptly and reasonably but which I fooled around with for days - tentative, hesitant, trying first one idea then another, first a day when it would be IN, then a day when it would be OUT, then, somewhat desperately, trying to combine the best features of both and using it as a catch-all for migratory papers no matter which way they were headed. This last proved disastrous. I found a supposedly out-going letter buried for a week under some broadsides from the local movie house.

"The basket is now IN. I discovered by test that fully ninety per cent of whatever was on my desk at any given moment were IN things. Only ten per cent were OUT things - almost too few to warrant a special container. This, in general, must be true of other people's lives too. It is the reason lives get so cluttered up - so many things (except money) filtering in, so few things (except strength) draining out. The phenomenon is difficult for me to understand and has not been explained, to my knowledge, by physicians: how it is that, with a continuous interchange of goods or 'things' between people, everybody can have more coming in than going out."

"Incoming Basket," by E.B. White, August 1938. Republished in One Man's Meat, pp. 9-10.

E.B. White on New Media (c. 1938)

In the same tradition as Ann Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea and various writings of Wendell Berry, E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat explores the costs and side effects of modernization on our society in the last century or so. Among the more haunting bits of prescience are his observations about how journalism and entertainment - and the technologies that diffuse them - were, even then, making profound changes in how people see the world. He wrote in a 1938 essay:

“Lately I haven’t had time to read the papers, as I have been building a mouseproof closet against a rain of mice. But sometimes, kindling a fire with last week’s Gazette, I glance through the pages and catch up a little with the times…

“The news of television… is what I particularly go for when I get a chance at the paper; for I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky…"

“It must have been two years ago that I attended a television demonstration at which it was shown beyond reasonable doubt that a person sitting in one room could observe the nonsense taking place in another. I recall being more amused by what was happening in the tangible room where I sat than by what appeared in the peephole of science… Since then I have followed the television news closely.”

“Radio has already given sound a wide currency, and sound ‘effects’ are taking the place once enjoyed by sound itself. Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images – distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals.” (italics mine)

White was writing in a day when millions of Americans had never made a long-distance phone call. We've come a long way since then. But our global connections sometimes seem quite costly:

“When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, they bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.”

Politics and Religion on Facebook

"In what may be the first comprehensive study of its kind, a University of Colorado Denver Business School student has revealed the top reasons for Facebook unfriending, who is unfriended and how they react to being unfriended," I read in Science Daily, following a friend's tweet about it. 

"After surveying more than 1,500 Facebook users on Twitter, [PhD candidate Christopher] Sibona found the number-one reason for unfriending is frequent, unimportant posts.

'The 100th post about your favorite band is no longer interesting,' he said.

"The second reason was posting about polarizing topics like religion and politics.

"'They say not to talk about religion or politics at office parties and the same thing is true online,' [said Sibona].

"Inappropriate posts, such as crude or racist comments, were the third reason for being unfriended."

>> See Top Reasons for Facebook Unfriending

Not surprising findings, are they? I have yet to unfriend anyone, but I'm uncertain if others have unfriended me. I've been known to block certain people's updates from appearing in my Facebook stream (at least for a time, in hopes that their latest distasteful rant or enthusiasm will ebb). Certainly I hide all the game updates.

It's those politics postings that are most likely to get under my skin; I don't want to hear about your politics. On the whole I'm much more interested in religion (of any flavor), though I may cringe on occasion. So, I suppose, I'm taking offense at your politics and expecting you to be OK with my religion. Hardly sounds fair, does it?

If only politics weren't such a battle. So much blood and ink poured out over causes that I tend to think matter little. But I have at least a few atheist and agnostic friends that would say the same about religion. I know many people who are careful to avoid politics and/or religion discussions in most contexts, regardless of their feelings on such matters. Others seem to write only about one of those topics or the other. It's their beat.

I'm not sure who I write for, at least in this social media environment. I tend to be haphazard instead of deliberate about such things. But as I am a professional religious person - I've been working for Christian organizations since the mid-90s - it turns out that a good 80% or more of my almost 500 Facebook friends are ministry contacts and tend to be devout evangelical Christians. Some are pretty rigid in their thinking; others, more flexible. All of them - as far as I know - are human.

I didn't set out to use Facebook as a way to stay in touch with business colleagues but I haven't stopped it from happening. The same is true of my (smaller number of) Twitter followers and I think of my blog readers, as well. This means the things that I do (or in which I am implicated) online may have a fairly direct impact on how my professional colleagues see me, and sometimes that is uncomfortable, especially since other contacts in each environment are using the same tools in ways that are purely personal. 

In posting on Facebook or similar contexts I guess we just have to ask: For whom are we writing? Whom will we lose or offend, and is that a price we're willing to pay?