Analog Church: Why We Need Real People, Places, and Things in the Digital Age

I read this book as it may have been on some past year's short list, and I thought a book about Church would be helpful in my new role. This book looked at technology and its use and then offers some reflections on how in a church setting it can help or hinder. I appreciated that this was coming from a minister in Silicon Valley, somewhere close to technology, and not some rural, remote church that may not have the resources, skill or access to implement some of the things in the book. 

This is not an anti-tech book, instead it puts technology in its place and frames its use, and also its limitations. Today, technology allows us to have speed, choices and individualism, but this advantage hasn't been a boon for our characters:

The speed of the digital age has made us impatient.
The choices of the digital age have made us shallow.
The individualism of the digital age has made us isolated.

And the church hasn't been immune to these pulls. The analogness of church can be a strength for a world caught up in these changes. Church can be a place

To gather when the world scatters.
To slow down when the world speeds up.
To commune when the world critiques.

Marshall McLuhan came up with the Four Laws of Media, and in the last one, when media is pushed to the extrem a paradox is presented, in that it subverts the thing it sets out to achieve. We can see this with phones that allow us to connect with more people, especially with social media, but instead, in real life, you have people glued to screens, not paying attention to the people right in front of them at restaurants or at family gatherings, as they are on their devices.

Kim points out a story when they were doing video sermons, he was asked to look into the camera to "connect" with the people who weren't even in the room.

Putting technology in its place, Kum says, digital informs, analogue transforms. "If the goal is to inform, video away! But if it is to transform, then we must lean into analog approaches as much as possible." With sermons, we need to move away from entertaining to engaging and change those from watching to witnessing. "When a sermon is delivered via video, no matter how dynamic and gifted the communicator may be, the sermon is inherently a watching experience, not a witnessing one."

Coming from an IT background, and in a post-COVID world, I was already on board with most of what was said in this book. There is something about the embodiment of believers that you can not get through digital medium. I have said that virtual church isn't church. It is not a spectator sport. You don't participate when you watch footy on TV, you spectate. I don't understand why it is different with a sermon via a screen. Yes digial talks and podcasts are helpful, but it is not church. There is more to the embodiment of believers than individually absorbing a talk. Kim calls it an exchange not of information but of presence.

He draws on the Greek word for church, ekklēsia, and defines what the New Testament means as "almost always a group of people who gathered regularly to worship, share their lives with one another, and learn and live the way of Jesus together." The bible talks a lot about how we are to care for "one another" about 50 times, and you can't "one another" people online. You need to be present in the flesh, the gather. By its very nature, the church is analoge, it isn't about communication but communion. Another thing done together to represent the one body.

On the Bible, Kim points out that there is a lot of shallow thinking, instead of deep work, happening because of technology. Because of our short attention spans, people are reading less, and Christianity is kinda a bookish faith. What he encourages is for Christians to stop reading the Bible like Dawkins does "in bite-sized morsels, detached from the epic and beautiful scope of the entire narrative arch." We should spend the time to read it. In trying to understand the Bible, "The secret ingredient is 'slow'". There is even a chapter on how to read a book.

I appreciated this book for how it explained the use of technology in how it can appropriately be used, and ways that might cut against a bigger purpose. My current church has some digital tools, but for the most part, it is analogue. Weekly sermons are not uploaded, the idea is we have a small sample so people might get an idea of what they are like, but if you want to hear them reguarlly you have to come. We don't have a building, so every week to the tech is set up, and so sometimes the clicker might not work, or the sound might not be perfect, but people love it. They love the community, and so they come every week to this slow-paced event in a (sometimes very cold) school hall, because they know how to "one another" each other.