He saw a young stamper. It’s purpose was to stamp pieces of metal and make them flat. The man was curious.

“What are you doing?” asked the man.

“I’m stamping. I’m a stamper.” said the machine proudly. “I stamp pieces of metal and I make them into perfect rectangular flat pieces. Every day, every hour, non-stop, I stamp metal into flat pieces.”

“How long have you been doing this?” asked the man.

“Well I stamp at a rate of 2 pieces per second,” the stamper said. “I’ve been doing this for 70 years. So that means I’ve stamped 4,402,944,000 pieces and counting. Over four billion and a half pieces to date.”

“Non stop?”

“Yes.”

“70 years?”

“Yes again”.

“You mean to tell me you’ve done nothing in your entire life except stamping metal into rectangular pieces?? Your entire life?? NOTHING except stamping?!” exclaimed the man.

The stamper looked at the man confused. “What do you mean nothing except stamping?”

“Well… isn’t that boring? I mean, what about art? Music? Hanging out with friends in the mall. Enjoying a piece of steak. Don’t you have a life?”

Now the stamper was beginning to get angry. “But this IS my life. And what’s wrong with it? I really enjoy it. I can’t wait to stamp the next piece of metal. I’ve been on a perfect streak for the past 3 billion stamps. No irregularities. Perfection in every output. I can’t wait to get to five billion perfect stamps. That would beat everyone and set the record for the longest running perfect stamping machine. It’s going to be AWESOME!”

The man stared in disbelieve. He knew he would never be a stamper in his life.

There once was a machine who visited Earth.

He saw a young man painting. This machine was curious.

“What are you doing?” asked the machine.

“I’m painting. I’m a painter.” said the man proudly. “I get inspiration from nature and I paint what I feel in my heart. I’ve created some amazing masterpieces in my life. They were AWESOME. But not always, some days, I could go on for months in frustration, trying to find inspiration.”

“How long have you been doing this?” asked the machine.

“Well I produce 4 pieces a month,” the stamper said. “I’ve been doing this for 70 years. So that means I’ve officially pushed out  3,360 pieces and counting. Over three thousand pieces to date. I’d probably add another thirty thousand pieces I threw away. Those were ok. But they just didn’t have it.”

“That’s it?”

“Yes.”

“70 years?”

“Yes again”.

“You mean to tell me you’ve ONLY created three thousands pieces?? Your entire life?? Why I could create that in 28 minutes!” exclaimed the machine.

The man looked at the machine confused. “What do you mean?”

“Well… isn’t that inefficient? I mean, the way you create your paintings is so chaotic. You need inspiration. You waste ten times more pieces than you create. You go months and months without output. It’s crazy! There’s no perfection.”

Now the painter was beginning to get angry. “But this is the way I do it. And what’s wrong with it? I really enjoy it. I can’t wait to paint the next masterpiece. Yes it’s going to be frustrating. Yes I’ll produce a lot of duds to get there. Yes it can go months and months before I find inspiration. And yes, there’s going to be a lot of pain. But when you get there, when you find that one RARE moment of clarity, understanding and truth, it’s going to be AWESOME!”

The machine stared in disbelieve. It knew it would never be a painter in its life.

Unfortunately it is just not true. Everything is inter-connected. Not only that. Some things have a heavier weighting than others. There is even a top-down dependency. Your relationship with God defines your relationship with your spouse, which in turn defines your relationships with your children. What happens in your house impacts your productivity at work. When you start to see things in this way, you realize that if you focus only on the trees, you loose sight of your direction. You need to climb above the trees to see beyond the forest.

Therefor our focus must be toward God. If we do not focus on God first, then we impact everything else that God touches. And God touches everything. God is not an equal and independent piece of your life. It is the highest and ultimate piece that affects everything else around it. 

Psalm 37:4

Delight yourself in the LORD
and he will give you the desires of your heart.

What we learn here is that if you focus on the LORD, he will make sure you have everything else. But wait, it goes deeper than that.

Psalm 37:23

If the LORD delights in a man’s way,
he makes his steps firm;
though he stumble, he will not fall,
for the LORD upholds him with his hand.

If you focus on him, even if you do the wrong thing, he will take care of you. By delighting yourself in the LORD, no matter where you go, right or wrong, He will guide you back to the correct path. How amazing is that? I needn’t worry whether I’m doing it right. God will be with me through the best and worst of times. Every time I stumble, He will be there. Helping me to get back up again.

Think about it.

I don’t even need to worry if I’m doing it right. I don’t need to second-guess what God wants me to do. I only need to delight in His presence.

Average lifespan:
     fly : 25 – 60 days
     pet mice : 1 – 2 years
     pet dog : 10 – 12 years
     human : 70 years

God on the other hand is the alpha and the omega. He IS at the beginning of time. He IS at the end of time. He IS in fact independent of the dimension of time.

For the sake of argument, let’s make a statement that God’s age is 70,000,000,000,000 trillion years (that’s seventy trillion trillion years to you). Can it be that God has advanced so much in learnings, growth and advancement that we cannot possibly understand the context of his decisions?

Let’s make this less abstract. Can a fly, who only lives to be 60 days be made to understand the secrets of the universe, and the purpose of life? How rudimentary will you have to structure this knowledge in order for the fly to understand, given its limited brain size and life time? Suppose that fly could learned to write and capture thoughts on paper and pass its knowledge to the next generation. Now it gets better. New flies spend 1/3 of their life learning from the previously gained knowledge. And the remaining 2/3 of their life can be spent advancing the fly civilization. 

Unfortunately, not all lessons can be transferred.

Knowledge can be transferred through remediation. But wisdom can only be gained from personal experience. We all start as babies, learning human interaction, starting first on basic human needs of warmth, food and water. Then we advance to the insatiable need for love and acceptance. And throughout all this we learn self-control, empathy, sympathy, compassion and more. Along the way, we hopefully become selfless. We learn to think beyond just ourselves, and to extend that sphere to our family and to the greater society. But then we die and our children starts the cycle all over again.

This is why history often repeats itself. We never learn from the past, what cannot be transferred from the past. Knowledge can be transferred. But wisdom cannot. You can write a book about wisdom. But you cannot transfer wisdom before the moment of value crystalizes. The moment of value is the single point in time when a piece of knowledge transforms into a piece of wisdom. For example, try telling a smoker that smoking is bad for him. He will agree with you. He knows it is cancer causing. He understands he will die from it one day. The knowledge is easily understood but it has no value to the smoker. However one day a doctor informs the smoker he has 6 months to live. At that very exact point in time, the moment of value rocks his world. Wisdom emerges from the ashes of knowledge. This very same knowledge – smoking is bad – suddenly take on a different dimension of value, context and impact. It is now wisdom.

I often wonder. Am I doomed to repeat the mistakes of my parents, my grand parents and my ancestors? Is this inevitable? It seems like it. And I suppose my children will have to go through their own process of discovery as well. 

Now let’s revisit our relationship with God with this new context of time, knowledge and wisdom. I just finished reading 1 & 2 Kings, and 1 & 2 Chronicles and its the ultimate story of learning and relearning, cycle after cycle, again and again until finally God called for respite and the Israelites were taken captive to Babylon to recover for a new beginning. That is God’s context when He deals with us. He looks at time far longer than we do. He take multi generations into account. He also knows we “forget” easily and we are trapped in our endless cycles of learning and relearning. It is inevitable. It is the nature of our human limitation. We are not masters of time. God is.

Perhaps with this new understanding, we can learn to take peace from God’s “not now”. Not for our forefathers. Not for our children. But for ourselves. For after all, wisdom is what we take with us beyond this life. It is not transferrable. It is not replaceable. It is meant for us. For God intended we discover it, on our own time, in our lifetime.

In the early days, large web portals dominated. AOL, Yahoo, MSN were the ultimate portals, controlling your web experience from the moment you “dialed up”. All that changed when Google came. No matter how much content a Yahoo could produce, it could not effectively compete against the rest of the content in the world. Google leveled the playing field by making it easy for any user to find any content created by anyone. Google became the ultimate “portal” because it owned no content but gave you all content. So what’s next?

We now reach the latest chapter in this most interesting saga; the world of real-time. This is the buzz word of today. Twitter was the catalyst. With the hundreds of applications built around it, you can now see what people talk, reference, share or connect in real-time. Twitter is like instant messaging (IM) on steroids, capable of one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many discussions. You can access Twitter via the iPhone, the Blackberry, a Windows client, a Mac client and many other channels. In other words, it is everywhere and because of its ubiquity among mobile devices, it is the fire hose of real-time thoughts of millions of people everywhere, all the time and on almost any topic. It captures the zeitgeist, the spirit of the moment. It is the “collective mind” of the Internet generation.

All this brings us to the following question. What biases does the Internet medium portend for us?

Shane Hipps believes it is in the NOW. What happens when real-time streams, that is, the instant access to anything and everything becomes a fire hose of non-stop data? I say data, because there is a switching cost for the mind to convert data to knowledge. The more data you consume, the more your mind has to filter out the “noise”. One single stream of noise may be controllable but what happens when you have a multitude of real-time streams? Voice, email, SMS, Twitter, Facebook, and IM are all integrated into your smart phone. You are connected all the time. You are reachable all the time. And you multi-task across multiple data streams all the time, in real-time.

We become “multiplexers”. We accept all data streams and constantly flip from one to another. One moment I’m talking to you, next I’m checking my email, next I receive a phone call, next I’m twittering my thoughts and then back to you again. Multi-tasking is at its height because technology has finally removed the barriers of time and distance to produce, consume and communicate information. But as with anything, there comes a cost from this incessant switching of attention.

We are slowly becoming a generation of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) consumers. We are being trained to absorb quick shots of tiny information but to accept many streams. Our mind is becoming a champion of information juggling. The cost to us is that our minds begin to resist concentrated focus on any one subject. Don’t believe me? Try focusing on doing one project today but shut down your information streams of voice, email, Twitter, and Facebook from both your personal computer and also your mobile phone. Many us have become information addicts. When forced to do so we are unable to “shut down” and let our mind relax. Have you ever been on a flight and the moment the plane touches down you reach for your mobile phone to check everything? Look around you at your fellow passengers as well.

If the Internet is the ultimate “medium”, then its impact on the message is the bias for information to be as short, simple, and easy to digest as possible. Anything that requires a dedicated thought process without interruption is at risk. How does this impact our relationship with God? It impacts our connection with the Holy Spirit. It impacts our worship. It impacts our focus on the presence of God.

It’s already begun. Witness the start of a small but potentially disrupting trend of tweeting during sermons. This is becoming quite the hot topic of the day in the church circles. I’m still torn between the benefits of having a back-channel to discuss the sermon and creating an interactive session between the pastor and the congregants. However, if the Lord is “speaking” to me, is it possible that I am so distracted by the other competing streams that I’m missing out on His presence? Are we so purpose driven that we’ve forgotten it’s truly about the presence of God and listening and hearing His will? 

This is the “struggle” of the Internet generation.

P.S. During the making of this blog post I was simultaneously chatting on IM, reading incoming emails, visiting my Facebook page and checking tweets. But I sure tried hard to focus only on this article.

This carries important ramifications as society moves toward the most influential and impacting medium of all time: the Internet. What does it mean when content consumption happens within the context of a virtual, online, time and space warping medium? What about the gospel? What biases does the Internet carry for the great word?

Let’s start with a simple example from Shane’s book.

The boy is sad.

Now look at this picture.

Both convey the same message. The print statement invokes the part of your brain that processes words and logic in a sequential left to right progression. The picture on the other hand, invokes the emotion section. 

If you look at only the print statement, you are consuming this content from your logical left-brain. You are more attuned to wanting to find out why the boy is sad. Is he sad because he misses his dad? Is he sad because he got punished? Questions swirl as you seek to find the answer to the question, “why is the boy sad?”

On the other hand, your subjective right-brain looks at the picture and feels a strong emotional connection. Something horrible must have gone wrong. How do I help this boy? What can I do to right the wrong?

In both situations, while the message is the same, each medium creates an inherent bias. Print-based messages invoke greater logic and analytical exposure. It is rational, objective and is able to look at parts in sequential order and create understanding from the integration of smaller parts. Picture-based messages on the other hand, completely bypasses the need to be logical. Instead it is intuitive, holistic, subjective and looks at the whole.

Shane illustrates this point with another example. In the early days of medieval church, reading was not prolific. Most people did not have access to the bible. The church was more graphical in nature. You see stain-glass windows in churches illustrating the gospel. There was a bias for action-oriented messages that could easily be conveyed in a picture. Jesus healed the sick. Jesus cast out demons. Jesus hung on the cross. Jesus rose from the grave.

Unfortunately this had the effect of downplaying abstractions such as a case for the renewing of our mind and spirit; the epistles of Paul for example. How do you explain the concept of redemption by grace and not works? How do you illustrate the new covenant? The letters of Paul were seldom taught because stain-glass windows or illustrated prayer books could not convey its subtle meanings. It was not until the Printing Press and the Protestant Reformation came that the theological reasonings of Paul’s letters became a cornerstone of our Christian understanding today.

The print medium too has its problems. Over reliance on linear reasoning led to the false believe that the gospel could be established and propagated through fact and reasoning alone. It created a bias toward the mind and in turn downplayed the role of the Holy Spirit.

So what does this mean for the Church in the age of the Internet? Stay tuned for part 2.

The Medium Is The Message
Shane Hipps expounds on Marshall McLuhan’s work with both his presentation as well as his book “Flickering Pixels”.

Culture, Context And Missions
Alan Hirsch explains the efficacy of missionary work with regards to culture and context.

Countercultural Vs. Relevance
Gabe Lyons talks about the church’s obsession to be relevant to today’s culture.

The Case For Grace
Ted Haggard and his wife makes a surprise appearance and talks about their experiences in fall and redemption.

Engaging the Unmentionables
Gateway Church’s success in engaging the gay, atheist and non-Christian groups.

The Evolution of the Gospel
The current interpretation of the Gospel and its impact on Church today.

Faith, forged through fire, becomes stronger.
Faith, forged through trials, becomes sharper.

Faith, begins as a mustard seed.
Faith, builds upon hopes come true.
Faith, is the unit by which God measures us.
Faith, in accordance to grace, seals the promise made.

Faith, in the Lord, leads to 
Faith, in the spirit, leads to

Faith, in one’s mind, leads to
Faith, in one’s words, leads to
Faith, in one’s life, leads to
Faith, in one’s destiny.

I wonder, if Judas had actually understood Christ’s purpose. Jesus on many occasions before his death had already warned his disciples of what was to happen. Jesus even said, “You know that after two days is the Passover, and the Son of Man will be delivered up to be crucified” (Matthew 26:2). After Jesus’ death, Judas became remorseful and threw back the 30 pieces of silver to the priests. Then he went and hanged himself.

This is the absolute IRONY. Judas’ betrayal of Jesus, no matter how bad, could finally be forgiven by God through Christ’s death. His very act and acceptance of 30 pieces of silver paved the way for his own redemption! It’s a shame he never understood it. It wasn’t too late. All he had to do was *believe* Jesus is God, ask for forgiveness and repent. Salvation would have been his.

A significant change took place after the Pentecost, when Jesus sent us God’s gift, the Holy Spirit. After that it was no longer necessary to set foot on the temple to worship. The Holy Spirit resides in us. We are the temple. We are the church. When two or more persons gather together to worship God, regardless of location, God is with us. 

Given this context, it is obvious to me that church, on the Internet is no more different than church, in the real world. As Christians we come together to a physical building to worship God, to have fellowship with each other, to learn from one another, to pray for and support each other. So the question then is, can we expand these four activities through the Internet? And if so, what will it look like?

For purposes of this discussion, I will make a distinction between the two separate concepts of the word “church”:

Church (place) = The physical place for Christians to publicly worship together.
Church (body) = We, the Christians, the people. 

New Movement

I believe we are at the verge of a new movement. The evolution of cars went from horse carriages, to motored horseless carriages to cars as we know today. In moving from the old to the new, there is always a “bridge”.

When the Internet “came” in the late 1990s, many Christians started putting content on the Internet. Bibles, messages, sermons etc. were digitized and the text was made available on HTML webpages. Then it became a bit more sophisticated. Gospel Communications, an early adopter of the Internet, created BibleGateway.com and made the bible searchable and cross-reference-able. But they more or less stopped innovating and the site has been the same for the most part of this decade.

Then there’s prayer networks. Most of what you see today are nothing more than glorified HTML web forms that take in a prayer request and then forwarded as email to a group of people who will then physically pray together in a building somewhere for your needs.

In other words, church (place) activities on the Internet, despite being a perfect fit for virtualization, is still nothing more than a “copy” of its physical real-world version. We are still living in the horseless carriage phase.

Today

So what do we have today? Well, we have Christian social networks (ZoeCity including) which do no more than emulate their secular equivalents. Yes, we at ZoeCity are also guilty of this. We have prayer networks (as explained above). We have resources for worship in the form of MP3 or iTunes audio streaming. There’s IHOP (International House of Prayer) and they video stream a 24/7 worship movement. There’s also bible study through online bible references (as mentioned above). Certain ministries have gotten more sophisticated as they move beyond TV and radio into the Internet but again it’s either straight video or audio streaming.

In every single one of these examples, we see many of the four activities of the church (place), in various phases of the horseless carriage mode. Instead of video streaming through a cable network to your TV, it’s streaming through an ISP to your computer. Instead of reading your physical bible, you’re accessing it on a webpage. There has been no true innovation of what the Internet can truly extend to today’s church (body), which is already the perfect medium and consumer for virtualization.

The Internet has revolutionized many industries and activities because of a few specific characteristics. It has extended the limitations of time, space and scalability. Let’s examine this.

Time and Space

The Jewish festival Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) was a specific day of the year (time) where the High Priest of the Jewish faith would ask forgiveness on behalf of the Jewish nation at the nation’s Temple (place). When Jesus came, He displaced this act by being the true mediator between man and God. On His death at the cross, the veil or curtain that separated the room of the most holy was torn, signifying that man and God are once again re-united. Later in the Pentecost, this act was completed with the release of the Holy Spirit.

So here we are today, no longer bounded by time and space. Yet, most Christian’s concept of the church is to assemble on Sunday morning at the church (space) at a specific time (morning worship service) to worship God. Wow. Are we not back to the past? How are we different? First let me say that I fully support my local church and I believe 100% in going to church (place) on Sunday for corporate worship. However, it’s time we expand the benefits of church (place) beyond the four walls and extend its reach from the physical into the virtual. 

The Internet is the greatest enabler of breaking past time and space. For the first time ever, people can come together and collaborate and communicate with each other at little to no cost. Our engineering office in Malaysia works with our Seattle office through an amazing round-the-clock development cycle. And when needed, they even work together at the same time and communicate real-time through Skype. Time and distance (space) has lost its barriers in the 21st century.

Scalability

When I write this blog, my message is made freely available to the entire planet to anyone with unrestricted access to the Internet. The distribution of opinions (publishing) has been democratized and all voices stand equal to those who wish to access them. Not so very long ago, a similar focal point in history had also democratized knowledge. The Printing Press broke free the word of God from the strict control of the Vatican. All of a sudden, with reasonable resources anyone can print a bible and everyone can afford to own a bible. The monopoly of opinions was broken. Martin Luther, the father of Protestantism, out-published the Roman Catholic church and started the Reformation movement. It is widely accepted today that it could not have happened without the democratization of knowledge, using the Printing Press technology.

Isn’t the Internet an even greater enabler of knowledge? Are we not on the verge of another movement in God? Where the Printing Press broke the financial constraints of publishing, the Internet broke the time, space and scalability constraints of publishing. 

Tomorrow

So then, the question is this; what will the church (space) look like tomorrow? How will we worship God, have fellowship with each other, learn from one another, pray for and support each other through the Internet? Let’s examine the typical constraints of a senior church pastor today. As congregations grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to connect with and stay in touch with every single member. How many people can a pastor keep up with today through church meetings, phone calls and home visitations? How many more can this pastor affect through email, newsletters, blogs and twitter? Is corporate prayer restricted to prayer night at the church (space)? Can corporate worship expand beyond the worship band on Sunday morning? Can a pastor impart his wisdom of the Word beyond just sermons (and its digital manifestations of podcast, mp3 downloads or video streaming)? Is there a better way?