Thursday, July 9

"MUNDANENESS" Is Ruining the Ministry & Churches


Why? Because the habits of our culture have promoted the banal and encouraged the trivial. As a result, it is nigh on to impossible for many ministers today to think deeply about the text of Scripture. If they cannot think deeply then they'll not be able to preach deeply either. Listen to what T. David Gordon says about this in his very important recent book, Why Johnny Can't Preach: The Media Have Shaped the Messengers--

Our inability to read texts [he means to ponder deeply the implications therein] is a direct result of the presence of electronic media. The sheer pace of an electronic media-dominated culture is entirely too fast. . . . We become acclimated to distraction, to multitasking, to giving part of our attention to many things at once, while almost never devoting the entire attention of the entire soul to anything. The close reading of texts would be an antidote to such a pace because such reading is time-consuming and requires the concentration of the entire person. . . .
When the poet stares at that which the rest of us merely glance at, he invites us to take a longer look along with him. It is precisely this longer look that is necessary to cultivate a sensibility for the significant.
Here, the shift of dominant cultural media has been profound, because television, in contrast to poetry, is essentially trivial. Because its pictures must move (and indeed, even camera angles must move, on average less than every three seconds), it captures best those things that are kinetic, that have motion. Yet few of the more significant aspects of life involve much motion: love, humility, faith, repentance, prayer, friendship, worship, affection, fear, hope, self-control. Most of what is significant about life takes place between the ears, as we make sense of life, of our place in it, and of our failures and successes, our joys, our sorrows, our fears, our loves. This world of the mind and soul is essentially a linguistic world, a nonkinetic world; a different world from the world of rapidly changing images.
I think Gordon was right when he offered that "Mundaneness is . . . part of the curse of Genesis 3." We have to fight the pull of culture through self-discipline, the discipline to rule out those influences which war against our soul, which demean the profound, which even prejudice our hearts and minds against anything deep and most beneficial. Faster is not better in most areas of life.

Look tomorrow for what Gordon says would make a difference?

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