Culture is Changing!

I was talking with a family member the other day and while we were discussing some business opportunities, she mentioned something that really hit me. She said that when it comes to doing business the culture is changing. People are not going to stores in person as much anymore and instead shopping online. It is hard to have a “Mom & Pop” shop today, because you compete with direct sellers from the internet, and the fact that people just do not really go out to shop anymore. It is just easier to sit in the comfort of your home without the worry of salesmen/women bothering you, not having to worry about packing the kids up or going out in bad weather, and you save the gas that it would take to drive there.

It all made sense to me, as my wife and I shop online much of the time, for the very reasons just mentioned. But then I started to think about the church culture and how that is being reflected in today’s Christian life. Now you can listen to sermons live via the internet from the comfort of your own home or you can just listen later. You can chat via text, IM and Facebook with your friends without ever seeing them in person. You can play video games on the internet with people all over the world from the comfort of your own home just as easily as you can attend an online church. The culture has certainly changed.

George Barna in his research has stated that if the current trends continue in the direction they are then the church is going to lose nearly half of its life within the next 15 years. This is astonishing. He will say a lot of it is because people have been and are being hurt by the church today in a variety of ways. I think, though, that we can certainly add that the culture is changing in this form as well. In this case it is not for the betterment of the church or the Christian life, because we are designed for community. Not just IM, text and email community, but face to face community. There is something much more intimate when you are together with the church family instead of hiding behind a computer screen, and I think we are losing this aspect of our church life.

There is a danger of too much individualization, and this leads to less and less community. The question becomes how do we manage the two, as there are certainly great aspects of the internet age and what it has allowed us to do, but we don’t want to make this gift a curse by losing the body of Christ, as we are called the body?

We need to find ways to build the body through discipleship and regular interaction within the body of Christ. How do we do this in today’s changing culture? This is also a challenge because we cannot just tell people to turn their computers off, because they won’t. There needs to be some new creativity in bringing the Church community together and not just on Sunday. We need each other, yet we are isolating ourselves from each other.

Ephesians 1:18, “He is also the head of the body, the church; He is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that He might come to have first place in everything.”

1 Corinthians 12:13-14, “For we were all baptized by one Spirit into one body—whether Jews or Greeks, whether slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. So the body is not one part but many.”