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Brett McCracken: I think the church is an absolutely critical piece in our any hope we have of reclaiming meaningful life in this digital world. And I think it it does several things that are direct kind of counters to the formation that often happens in digital life. So one thing that’s happening in digital life is we call it the post truth world, right epistemology is crumbling because of not knowing what to trust online, and you have one person saying this, another person saying this, and that happens all day, every day, online, and we’re losing our sense of certainty and truth. Well, a church can provide hope in that area, because the church is a place of transcendent truth, right? It’s a place where we build our knowledge, we build our lives around the transcendent truth of God’s Word. And so the church can be a great place where people who are feeling the shakiness of a post truth world, who are longing for certainty, something to build their lives upon. The church can be that place for them. I think another thing in the digital world that is frustrating and hard is just how ephemeral and fast moving it is, and how, you know, what was blowing up the internet one week we forget about the next week. You know, the internet is just so ephemeral, and it just creates this very kind of fickle, fragile way of living in the world where everything is just disposable. And I think the church provides this kind of entry point into a much bigger picture, right? An entry point into transcendent reality, a world that existed before you were born and will outlive you, an institution the church, which is an eternal institution which will still be standing when social media and smartphones are in the ash heap of history. And so the church offers truth. The church offers transcendence. I think another big thing the church offers in the digital world is community connection, where the digital world is forming us to be isolated, to be lonely, to have these kind of human relationships that are actually very abstract and where we’re not truly known by people behind their avatars. You go to a church, and you have an opportunity to really be known and to know and to have meaningful human community where you bring your whole self, warts and all to the table, and you can’t hide behind your avatar in the way that you crop your picture on Instagram. And that’s a good thing for our for our health, is to have this transparent experience of human community. And the final thing that I would say the church offers is a sense of mission, purposeful mission. So social media can offer people outlets in mission, in a way, because we like to be activists on social media. We get really animated by injustices that we see online and politics and things like that. So you see the good human impulse to want to solve problems in the world, to want to kind of fight for injustice. You see that every day in the digital world, but I think it more often than not, it brings people grief because they actually can’t affect change through a tweet or hashtags. You know, it’s there’s an intangible sense of purpose online, whereas a local church, I think, can channel that good impulse for mission, for actually bringing order out of chaos and and helping solve problems in a real, tangible, doable way. Every church that is healthy, I think, is involved in the local level with real problems that they can help solve and real injustices that they can help, you know, address. And so that’s another way where I think the church is going to play a pivotal role in this digital world where people are just finding that it’s just frustrating, their sense of wanting to do something purposeful and to effect change in the world is more an illusion than it is a reality. But in a local church, it can actually become a reality in a beautiful way.
