Faith Works: Understanding the importance of face-to-face communication in an electronic age

I was talking about agoras, marketplaces recently, and how Paul and the early Christian church would communicate the good news of God’s love made known in Jesus Christ through simple everyday personal interactions.

Paul, and Priscilla and Aquila, and most of the apostles as they moved out from Israel, did their initial evangelistic work through face-to-face encounters. Tentmaking on the edge of the market plaza was a setting where you could sit and work and talk to passersby.

Obviously, Paul and Priscilla and Aquila did not compete with reruns of “Friends” pulling people home to watch TV or potential customers walking around head down viewing TikTok videos on their phones. Talking to each other was pretty much all they had.

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Jump ahead in the history of evangelism, and we can make interesting connections between the invention of movable type and printing press technology and the Protestant Reformation (cheer or boo as you are so moved). Sailing and navigation technology combine with improved machining of materials for buggies and coaches to put populations as well as goods on the move. Did all of this change how we both teach rising generations about the faith of their ancestors or present the Gospel to new audiences and different cultures? Of course it did.

Then we get internal combustion engines, airplanes and interstate highways: all drawing closer to our time, while speeding up the pace of change. Television follows radio, cellphones replace landlines, and then there's the internet. (Gasps for air.)

So I asked last week, “Can our apps be at least a part of what saves us?” The pace of change, and the impact on faith communities of all sorts, has some wondering if we need to think very differently about how we use technology, even as even small rural congregations have raced to embrace screens in the sanctuary and learned how to stream services.

It’s a mess. But did church leaders think that after Gutenberg complicated how information was shared? Did pioneer preachers dread the influence of national radio broadcasts into parishioners’ homes? (Yes, and yes.) Religious faith in general and Christianity in particular has dealt with many such transformations over the past 2,000 years. We talk about Dark Ages, not because all human advancement stopped in the Medieval period but because many leaders, secular and sacred, thought the fall of the Roman Empire would mean the end to effective communication and illumination … which is not, in fact, what happened.

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Now we seem to be entering an age of not darkness but of too much illumination, a light beam of so much information pouring over us that it blinds us. We do need sunglasses; the future or even the present is so bright, we have to wear shades. Or at least filters, like eclipse glasses to allow only a certain amount of illumination through.

The problem with those filters, though, is who decides what is important information? How do we know which authorities to listen to? Because we cannot learn or even internalize everything that’s pouring out over us. And I don’t even know how to use all the apps that are on my phone as it is.

This is where a community of trust comes in. We need to start identifying what a trustworthy network of leadership and mentorship and teaching looks like, especially around faith. And I think technology can be part of that.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he is setting up some thoughts, but is still open to input. Tell him where you turn for trustworthy information at [email protected] or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Faith Works: Communicating face-to-face in an electronic age