Church as Screen Time and Pastor as Parasocial Personality

Just a quick riff on a couple of news items coming out this week:

• First, the introduction of the hologram pastor.
• Second, research published in Pediatrics suggests that childhood obesity in pre-school age children is directly linked to dislocated familial attachments facilitated by too much time in front of the television and too few communal meals with the family.
• Third, a second unrelated research project coming out of New Zealand suggests much of the same conclusions with regard to teenagers. Teens with more “screen time” have significantly lower attachment to their parents and peers (HT: Kara Powell).

There’s a fascinating sentence in the last summary:

“However, it is also possible that adolescents with poor attachment relationships with immediate friends and family use screen-based activities to facilitate new attachment figures such as online friendships or parasocial relationships with television characters or personalities,” the authors write.

I’ve written about this before, calling it the “mediation of experience.” If “screen time” inhibits our social interactions and relational attachments by replacing the real thing with “parasocial relationships” with unreal characters can the same be said to be true of other instances where we replace real live relationships with unreal characters or personalities?

Obviously I think the answer is yes.

One of the problems with the prevailing mode of church in America is that it has turned the pastor into a celebrity personality, complete with a performance-oriented and technologically mediated relationship with an audience. Once the church reaches a certain size, the pastor’s interaction must occur as a performance by a character through media. Cultural expectations about church structure coupled with assumptions about the virtues of media nearly require this. The trouble is, the character that pastor portrays, in my experience, in never quite the real thing. Some pastors try very hard to “be themselves” on stage, but others intentionally slip into a very different persona. But even for the pastor trying to be genuine, it’s very difficult in my opinion – perhaps impossible – to avoid some level of acting when you’re a preacher on stage, largely because of the entertainment-based expectations we currently impose upon the notion of what it means to be a “good preacher.”

One of the bizarre side-effects of this mediated relationship between the pastor and congregation is that, because of the high level of mediated exposure to the preacher, many in the church (most, in the case of very large churches),  actually feel a personal connection to the pastor that doesn’t actually exist. They don’t really know the pastor, in much the same way they don’t really know Oprah or Dr. Phil. They only know your stage persona. This is greatly magnified in those churches who embrace the personality-driven church model and use a charismatic pastor’s performance skills as a means of growing the church.

Hence, the church gathering becomes just another version of “screen time.”

Now consider how “screen time” becomes literally true in the proliferation of video venue churches, where many congregations only interact with a version of the pastor that is literally unreal. Now replace the video screen with hologram which remains unreal, but magnifies the level of illusion.

Moreover, much like the teens in the second study cited above who talk to each other about the fictional characters they’ve mutually engaged as relational surrogates, church members will often interact around the pastor’s persona. In this way a false persona can become a means of false social relationships. This is akin to kids talking enthusiastically about what “happened” to Hanna Montana in the latest episode (nothing happened…she doesn’t exist!). In celebrity-driven churches much of the social energy occurs around the campfire of a false persona.

Does it matter? Is there harm being done by moving church toward just another version of “screen time?” What are the consequences of this to discipleship? Perhaps, like the studies above, the consequences are spiritually obese, socially disconnected and disaffected Christians.

Technorati Tags: Church, discipleship, Media, Mega-Churches, Pastors, Teenagers

Reading Blog: Knowing Christ Today, Chapter 8

(This is the 9th and final installment in my series on Dallas Willard’s latest book, Knowing Christ Today. Previous Entries: Intro | Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 | Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7)

Pastors as Teachers of the Nations

Of all the chapters in Willard’s latest book, this final one surprised me the most, starting with the seemingly outrageous title, “Pastors as Teachers of the Nations.” Isn’t that arrogant? Imperialistic, even, in a post-Colonial sort of way? Still, it is the logical conclusion of Willard’s line of thought regarding the central importance of spiritual knowledge in general and knowledge of Christ in particular:

“Who is to bring the knowledge that will answer the great life questions that perplex humanity? [...] The primary responsibility to teach falls upon those who self-identify as spokespeople for Christ and who perhaps have some leadership position or role in Christian organizations.”

He makes it clear that he is not speaking exclusively to those who hold official leadership positions, but he is speaking especially to them and in so doing he addresses Jesus great comission to”make disciples of all nations,” and says something perhaps challenging to us pastors:

Above all, perhaps, we must not think of the task as making adherents to a particular brand of Christianity now current. If we do, we will then lose the cosmic viewpoint and see the task only in terms of religious organizations and political realities. Jesus, however, did not send people out to make Christians or start churches as we understand them today. He set them to make disciples (students, apprentices) to him and, supported by his presence, to teach them all that he had taught by word and deed. That is a very different enterprise!

Here Willard stresses, again, the central importance of genuine knowledge for teachers of any kind, but particularly Christian teachers. It is not enough to know about Christ, or scripture, or theology proper. Our task is to know Christ and make him available by that knowledge to others. This, of course, means that we must actually be people who possess such knowledge of Christ and be able to demonstrate it; and this leads to another challenging point – Willard says we should ask for and expect no priviledge accoriding to title, but rather be ready to demonstrate the truth of the knowledge we profess:

True spokespeople for Christ need no special advantage and seek none. It is one again – but now on the worldwide stage that comes with “globalization” – a question of the God who answers “by fire” (1 Kings 18:24).

Are pastors really ready and willing to be tested in that way? Being willing to have one’s knowledge tested and demonstrated as true in real life speaks to a level of confidence we don’t often see in Christian leadership. Instead, what we tend to see is endless defensive bickering and accusations aimed at belittling the competing dogmatic thoughts of others (usually other Christians). Entire ministries and churches are now built on that foundation. Willard has something to say about that as well:

It is not knowledge, but nervous uncertainty, that makes people dogmatic, close-minded, and hostile – which spokespeople for Christ must never be. Paul wisely said to his young pastor friend, Timothy” “The Lord’s servant must not be quarrelsome but kindly to everyone, an apt teacher, patient, correcting opponents with gentleness. God may perhaps grant that they will repent and come to know the truth” (2 Tim 2:24-25).

Of course, because we live in a time when all religious thought – and the status of Christian leaders along with it – has been relegated to the scrap heap of mere opinion, pastors will have to repeatedly, and under tremendous external opposition, present the basic tenets of Christianity as knowledge and be ready to defend and demonstrate it. This is largely not the case today, where pastors as seen as teachers of what Christians are supposed to believe, not of what is known and can be known as true by anyone through fair inquiry.

Finally, all this discipleship is an activity that happens not in the church, but in the world – for that is where people live their lives and that is where God is at work. Raising people up to serve in the church is ultimately a dead-end. “Discipleship is for the sake of the world, not for the sake of the church.” Willard ends the Chapter and the book with this exhortation and encouragement:

The most important thing that is happening in your community is what is happening there under the administration of true pastors for Christ. If you, as a pastor, do not believe that, then you do not understand the dignity of what you are supposed to be doing. Whatever your situation, there is nothing more important on earth than to dwell in the knowledge of Christ and to bring that knowledge to others.

Questions:

1. What’s your reaction to Willard’s claim that pastors are to be the “teachers of the nations?”
2. How do you feel about the idea that our claims of knowledge about Christ must be testable and provable as true?
3. What other thought or questions are you left with as we finish this book series?

Technorati Tags: Books, Christianity, Dallas Willard, Jesus Christ, Knowing Christ Today, Pastors