Jeopardy champions should lead the Church

The Church is a place where people often seek out answers to lifes great mysteries. What is often forgotten is that life's great mysteries are mysteries because no one knows the answer. Not even the church. However, that has not stopped us in the Church from giving answers. This may be why people come to the Church, we have given answers in the past. 

What is obvious to many is the answers the Church has provided no longer are sufficient. And they are not sufficient in that the answers are incorrect. Let us remember we are talking about "answers" to mysteries so who is to say if they are right or wrong or both!. What makes the answers no longer sufficient is that answers are now a dime a dozen.

A simple internet search will provide you a million answers to even the deepest mysteries of the world. Again, these answers may be right, may be wrong or may be both right and wrong, we are all grasping at straws here. But that does not diminish the fact that there are millions of answers. 

We can begin to see the sunseting on the age of the answer when you attend a trivia night at a local pub. What makes these nights so interesting is the fact that everyone knows that the answers can all be found online. The draw to trivia night is part nostalgia and part novelty. Nostalgia for the age when answers were power and novelty to the reality that answers are much easier to come by than once was the case.

And so with the age of answers coming to an end, we are here to witness the age of the question. One might be able to see now why the Church, which has set ourselves up for so long as a place for answers, is in trouble. The Church if it is going to be helpful for people into this new age, we need to put down the answers and pick up the question. Move from Trivia Night to Jeopardy. 

As you know, the point of Jeopardy is to craft the question to the given answer. This really is what Jesus did all the time. When someone came to him with a situation (an answer) Jesus gave them a question. The parables are nothing if not questions in story form. The question "who is my neighbor" is asked in the parable of the 'Good Samaritan'. "How we should forgive" can be found in the parable of the 'Prodigal'. Jesus would have been a Jeopardy champ. 

When answers are easy to come by, it is the question that begins to have greater importance. Have you ever wanted to know something and knew that it had to be out there but did not know what to type into the search bar in order to call up the answer? The answers are in search of the questions. We in the Church need to remember that all it is a trivial pursuit to give answers to a world that already "knows". Can we recapture the ability of the Jesus (the original champion of Jeopardy), to find the questions? 

When the Church is busy copying and the world needs 3D printing

The copy machine is one of the most amazing machines invented. The ability to take something and then rapidly replicate it with little difficulty and very inexpensively would blow away the monk scribes who hand copied sacred texts. The Protestant movement was able to spread so quickly in part because of this new machine that made rapid copies. 

And perhaps because of the role the copy machine made in the Church, it might be argued that no other machine in the world best describes the Church. 

For as long as I have been associated with the Church, I have seen the Church function like a well oiled copy machine. We copy programs from year to year. We copy other churches who do things in worship or in mission. We copy the business world in our leadership approach. We copy the nation state when we set out to conquer others with and forcefully convert them to our side. We copy the music industry by making some really cheesy music. 

And it is through these means of copying that the Church was able to do a great number of things. I love that the church is able to copy the best of things in order to further the spread of love. There is nothing wrong with copying, in fact it has been said that the best artists steal and copy.

With all the energy it takes to be a copy machine it exposes the fact that copy machines are not able to do anything new. It literally cannot do anything other than copy, and sometimes the copy is of less quality than the original. Copies of copies of copies of copies eventually look horrible. The Church, as a copy machine, understands that we cannot keep making a copy of a copy and we begin to hear voices call out that we have to do things differently. What the Church seems to be looking for is a new original in order to make clean fresh copies of that original. 

What would it look like for the Church to embrace an awareness that making copies is not as essential as it once was thought. The internet is now the greatest copy machine ever made and there is no way the Church can copy better than the internet. What the church needs is not a new original to copy, what the church needs is a new machine. 

Could we shift from a copy machine metaphor to a 3D printer metaphor?

A 3D printer is a machine that requires someone to create something new and print it. When you print from a 3D printer you see the raw material (plastic, carbon fiber, metal, even biocompatible material!) literally transformed into something new. For instance take plastic coil and turn it into a cast! 

As powerful and seductive as the copy machine is, the Church was never called to copy, the Church has been called to transformation. 

(I understand that a 3D printer is also making copies of digital files. All metaphors break down at some point, however I would still offer up the metaphor and philosophy behind a 3D printer as a more vibrant metaphor that of a copy machine.)

The Human Being is on the Endangered Species List

In case we all have forgotten, we are all human beings. By that I mean not only that we are all created in the image of God and should therefore endowed with rights and anytime those rights are violated it is an injustice for all. 

It also means that we are human beings as opposed to human doings. 

As much as we value productivity, efficiency and mastering skills in order to "crush it" in life, these values drown out the value of being. And human being is in jeopardy of extinction to be killed off by the human doing. 

We do not value those things that are not instantly productive - such as taking a class on Shakespeare if you "know" you are going into business. We do not value the face to face time that we once enjoyed because it takes too long to get to the point in a conversation when we can just send texts and exchange data. We do not value sitting and being still, and when you do you are either sick, inefficient or lazy.

But we are not robots fueled by solar power. We have to take time to rest and recharge - but even that is too much being for us. And so we take our food to go, we answer email while sitting at a stop light, we check instagram when we are in like to get meat at the grocery store (assuming we don't order our groceries online). All of this makes us feel guilty when we step back into being. Guilt follows us everywhere we go tellus us that we are either growing or dying, that we need to work hard in order to prove that we are valuable or at the very least not a slacking freeloader. 

For as much as we need human doings in the world, we need that many human beings. You are more than a doing (like a robot or a computer or a car) you are a being.

Help save the human being.