Stories change our lives.
We live in a storytelling culture, but we are experiencing a seismic shift in the way stories are told. The church was at the forefront in developing the skills required for print. We are known as the people of the Book. We valued reason, discourse and teaching based on printed words.But society has moved from print to electronic. It is now a culture based on images and visualization, sound and movement, experience and emotion. It is immediate, global and transient.
Where is the church in all this?
TV programmers are planning a game show using people involved in real life divorce actions. Divorce as entertainment. Another makes a game of sexual provocation to test the fidelity of committed couples. Still another makes a comedy of dysfunctional couples raising children outside of marriage and unmarried moms raising teenage daughters.
In the real world, unmarried mothers in this country are five times more likely to be poor. One-quarter of this nation’s children, many of them in single-parent families headed by women, live in poverty. It’s no laughing matter that 1 in 4 deaths each year in the US is related to alcohol, tobacco or illicit drug use. 18 million people are addicted alcohol. This culture fosters addiction.
We’ve allowed the most pervasive and persuasive power in history – the media - to be employed in ways that are corrosive and destructive.
When the culture trivializes our values and emotions, telling us we are too old, too fat, too ugly or too inadequate unless we buy the products that "will change our lives", that culture is toxic. It distorts life’s true meaning and purpose. It is especially harmful for those who live in the margin: the poor, those without power, the disabled, the elderly, those of ethnic heritage or women. For these folks, our culture is a culture of exclusion.
But it is not enough merely to critique the culture and remain aloof. We must become reengaged in the culture.
Jesus connected with people wherever they congregated – at the community well, the market and the street. He told stories that led to a new understanding of the transforming love of God. Through Jesus, the story of God’s love was shared through song and par-able, act and symbol, in a language that people who were overlooked, excluded, demeaned and afflicted understood.
It was a story told in the language of the street.
That story has not changed. But the context, the tools and the circumstances in which the story is told have changed radically. The language of the street in our day is the language of the electronic culture.
We must go to the street again.
Where else ought we be, but in the places where heartache and alienation, insecurity and isolation, exploitation and oppression prevent people from becoming what God intends us to be? We are called to be where God is, transforming life and learning from what we see and hear. We are called to give voice to a transforming vision of how life can be, how meaning is possible and how we are all children of a loving God, no matter who we are, no matter what circumstances we face.
Engaging the culture is an act of ministry.
It means creating messages that speak to the concerns of people today – concerns of the spirit and concerns of everyday living. It means being in dialogue with people in the church and the culture in a way that reveals the humanizing perspective of Christian faith and God’s grace. It means creating alternative visions of the world, holding before ourselves images of what we can be if we only understood ourselves as God’s children. It means telling stories from the margins that reveal the transforming love of God at work in the hard places and hard times.
We are called to be the agents of transformation. God has given us the technologies so that we can find our voice. We can help the church find its voice and sing its song. It is a song about love, which burns like the bush that Moses saw, a bush that was never consumed, and a love that is never quenched.
