… Or, The Church is Not a Smartphone
The oft-rumored, much-speculated over, hotly-anticipated Googlephone is finally here in the form of T-Mobile’s G1. And few people seem to care.
It’s not that the G1 is a bad phone. It has almost everything the iPhone has and, in some cases, more. But therein lies the problem: The iPhone has been done; releasing a similar product won’t make much of a splash in the smartphone market. That’s because the smartphone market, like so many other tech and media markets, is an industry of cool (a phrase I proudly borrow from Lester Bangs in Almost Famous).
I define an industry of cool as an industry or market in which cool–that hard-to-articulate, I-know-it-when-I-see-it quality we are all drawn to like moths to a flame–is the defining commodity. The iPhone was cool because it changed the game; it took aim at BlackBerries and Palm Treos and made them look like handheld Commodore 64s that were content to improve incrementally while mainting the status quo. The iPhone raised the bar (bar = consumer expectations), and in an industry of cool anything less than a bar-raiser won’t generate much buzz. Doing what has already been done isn’t cool. Good enough isn’t good enough in an industry of cool, which is why the G1 isn’t the biggest, baddest, most talked about gadget on the planet right now.
Lucky for all of us, church is not meant to be an industry of cool. (It’s not meant to be an industry at all, but let’s focus on the cool part today.)
Here’s what I mean: When you plan a service, sketch out a video idea, or dream about new means of ministry, you’re not under the same pressure that Google and T-Mobile are under. You’re not called to chase cool, to try desperately to outdo (or at least keep up with) what you did last week or what the church down the street is doing. (By the way, if you set these expectations for yourself, your audience won’t have any problem adopting them and judging you against them. Churchgoers as consumers? Yuck.) I’ll say it again: church is not meant to be an industry of cool.
If you’re under the impression that you need to chase cool, my guess is that your life and ministry are an endless cycle of stress, pressure, approval-seeking, disappointment, late nights working on the next big thing, and an ever-growing budget spent on gadgetry, applications, guest speakers, pyrotechnics, petting zoos, and human cannonball insurance. That doesn’t sound like life to the fullest to me.
What if, instead of trying to raise the bar each week in a cutthroat industry of cool, we opted to become an instrument of grace. Rather than ask ourselves if our latest worship service was the biggest and best of all time, we could ask questions closer to our purpose as ambassadors of Christ in this world: “Did we communicate the grace of God this week? Did we encourage/challenge people, regardless of how close to or far from God they might be, to draw near to Him, seek Him, connect with Him this week?”
Not only does that seem to echo why the Church exists in the first place, it also seems like a sustainable approach to ministry. Trying to outdo yourself and everyone else from week to week or month to month does not. Let the smartphone makers play that game and we’ll see where it gets them. In the meantime, all we have to do is communicate the grace we’ve found to the people with which we intersect.