Newspapers and Churches

In the late 80s I was a student in the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida. The buzz in our journalism class was that something had to be done about newspapers. The world, some of our professors told us, was about to change and they feared newspapers would be left behind.

Their words seemed odd to me because we were meeting in Gannett Auditorium. Gannett was the publisher that had triumphantly introduced a national newspaper called "USA Today". Technology had finally risen to the point where a national newspaper could be printed and distributed overnight. It seemed to me that newspapers had arrived at a whole new level; but the new technology was about to throw a menacing monkey wrench into the machinery.

One professor, trying to embrace new fax (!) technology, believed one possibility for the future would be blank sheets of white plastic which news consumers would place in fax-like machines in their houses. Every morning the news/fax machine would print off a newspaper, cutting printers and paperboys out of distribution process. The white plastic could be washed at night and reused in the morning. When my professor floated that idea I thought it was cool, but I doubted that I (or most of the people I knew) would bother to wash ANYTHING every night. The idea turns out to have been too limited because technology would soon stick the fax machine in the basement with the typewriter and the adding machine.

I was listening to a podcast of the Tony Kornheiser Show recently. He was lamenting the fall of newspapers. Kornheiser used to be a columnist but now makes his living in the broadcast media. Anyone who listens to him knows his heart is still with print media, even though his wallet has migrated to broadcast. Kornheiser commented that more than a decade ago one of his bosses at the Washington Post refused to take the threat to newspapers seriously. The newspaper industry was too "fat and happy" to worry about the impending downward trend.

The news bosses are now wide awake to the collapse of newspapers under the weight of free and instantaneous news-like reports on the internet. The entire industry is wishing they had taken time to think more creatively about the future of newspapers while they had the luxury of greater cultural clout.

I suppose you knew I was about to bring this around to the church.

The church in America has been fat and happy for generations. We've lived with the "build it and they will come" mentality. We thought we could stand on the street corners and shout about truth. We thought people would overlook the anger in our faces because we had cornered the market on where to go when people looked for meaning in life. When people wanted to get married or buried they came to the church. When people wanted to raise good kids they endured the bother of Sunday morning worship and stewardship emphasis Sundays because they felt that it would be good for the family.

Christian prophets have been shouting about a cultural change that is marginalizing the church. They've protested that the church has been drifting in the lazy river instead of the River of Life. They've protested that the church has been inwardly focused, even in her attempts to be outwardly focused. The church has evangelized for God, but also for the sake of growing bigger and feeding its own overblown machinery.

The change has already happened in many areas of the country. If you look closely you can see it happening here in East Tennessee as well. We're in that spot where we will wish, in future years, that we had thought more creatively about how to be the church while we still had some cultural clout.

I'm not predicting the death of the church. I'm not into alarmism (alarmism will kill us all!). I'm simply predicting that we will regret our myopic habit of making life better within our walls without regard to the community in which we live. The church doesn't exist to make life better for its members (though that is a byproduct of doing church well). The church exists to be a sign of the reign of God according to the actions and life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. The church exists to heal the community and to share the peace, grace, and justice of God--all as an act of worship to God. We don't share God as information alone, we share God in relationships that demand our time, our energy, our patience, our grace, our kindness, our long-suffering, our self control, and our love.

It's past time to think about how to do this right here in East Tennessee.