Reaching the digital generation

Russell Rook and Sarah Doyle consider yesterday, today, forever

W

e could learn a lot from Mr. Gutenberg and by that we don’t mean Steve Guttenberg of Police Academy fame. The year was 1450 and the man was Johannes Gutenberg, a German goldsmith who invented the movable printing press. This man imagined life differently, invented the most significant gadget of his day and transformed the world, almost in an instant.

It was with his truly remarkable movable printing invention that Gutenberg made his name. Until this point in time, every book in existence was the work of a scribe, usually a monk, who had painstakingly etched each and every word by hand onto expensive parchment and bound the copies between wooden boards. The end result: it took years to copy out a book, and that was without the illustrations. Illiteracy was the norm, accuracy was dubious and mistakes were handed down and multiplied throughout the generations. Gutenberg changed all this - with the power of the printed word, he lifted his culture from the dark ages and watched as a world of new possibilities sprang into life.

His predecessor of the photocopier was so revolutionary, its significance mirrored the invention of the alphabet and the development of language. As it sparked a cultural revolution, it radically transformed the way people worked. By 1501, there were more than a thousand printing shops in Europe and more than 20 million books were circulating and in the hands of the masses. All of a sudden, knowledge came closer to the hands of the people as printed books were sold for a fraction of the price. Previously, those dedicated scribes in the Church had held the keys to learning, but now study was accessible, ordinary folk no longer relied on being read to, but learned to read instead. Education was revolutionized; inventors could share discoveries, doctors could circulate their case-histories in books and the scientific revolution was unleashed. The doors of social debate and critical thinking were flung open as books became part of people’s lives. The press marked a paradigm shift in the way that information and news was transferred in Europe. The fields of science, art, religion, politics and literature were all transformed by printing and a new democratic world was born.

Mr. Gutenberg is a role model for us all, particularly when it comes to the power of imagination and the courage to pursue a dream. Perhaps the inklings of such an invention are not resting at the end of our finger-tips. Men and women like Mr. Gutenberg are once-in-a-generation, dare we say once-in-a-century phenomena. However, for the purpose of this article, the real hero of the story is the church… and yes we did say “church”.

The Church and the Printing Press
It was the followers of Jesus that grasped the potent possibilities in Gutenberg’s device. The church did not stand back aghast and denounce the new technology as demonic. Agitated monks did not form threatening bands of flying pickets, or travel throughout Europe to protest outside the continent’s printing presses. Our predecessors were not luddite technophobes helplessly ordering the reversal of this industrious tide. On the contrary, these early adopters waded into the wash and rode the wave of innovation towards a whole new day. And what’s more monks rested their weary hands, recovered from their repetitive strain injuries and invested their spare hours elsewhere, more prayer anyone?

So what does this history lesson have to teach those of us in the digital generation? Well firstly without this invention, you and I would be in a different place today. Prior to Mr. Gutenberg gaining his patent, books were expensive and a scarce resource – it was said that ‘man would give a cartload of hay for a few sheets by St. Paul’, but within 50 years of Gutenberg’s machine going into production, almost 40,000 editions of the Bible had been printed throughout Europe. Indeed, and here’s the crux of the matter, Gutenberg’s press put the word of God in to the hands of the people like never before. Martin Luther, John Calvin and their followers embraced and used Gutenberg’s gadget for all of its worth. The Reformation spread with the same astonishing rapidity as printing itself –it could not have done so without it. As their ideas and works were re-produced at high speed, so their thinking and following could gather momentum, escalating into the single largest revolution of the means by which we know and experience God and His Church. As these theologians seized their own day, they changed the Church and transformed the future.

The digital generation - an opportunity for the church to take hold of God’s future
In the past, some Christians have waved red flags of caution as technologies flash into new corners of being. The emergence of rapid cultural shifts combined with a suspicion of the unfamiliar has left the Church fearful that the innovative threatens a religion rooted in tradition. Or rather, as new trends explode around us, we develop an arrogant indifference and insist that a transcendent message needs no assistance in its delivery, especially from worldly mechanisms or methods which might detract from our message. Of course, the downsides of technology are real – progress and danger often walk hand in hand and we cannot be ignorant to these. Yet, we live in the communications revolution. We can either seize the opportunities ahead of us, or stubbornly protest and call for our quill so we might scribble out another tract. You see, it’s not just that the digital generation calls us to speak to them in a new language. More than this, these first generation millennials are the way in which God will reform the church, reach the world and renew creation.

It sounds simple, but the essence of our job is communication. To see young people won and re-captured by the Church, we need to use the language of today. We hold bridge-building tools to join God’s dynamic truth with the fluctuating, moving landscape ahead of us. As young people take their communities beyond buildings and into the virtual world of internet networks, new Church movements are imagining experimental forms of social activism, neo-monasticism and new types and styles of community and worship. Gutenberg’s spirit lives on in our 24/7 media culture of broadcasts and pod-casts, uploads and downloads. And while people access information, knowledge and community through mediums unimagined 500 years ago, through it all they continue to search for an authentic reality in a virtual world. One question remains: will we take hold of the unimagined possibilities of our time in the same way as those Christians who came after Gutenberg?

Writers:

Russell Rook is the Director of ALOVE, The Salvation Army for a new generation, a member of the Spring Harvest Leadership Team and the Chair of YOUTHWORK the partnership.

Sarah Doyle is a journalist for Youthwork magazine, a writer for The Church Urban Fund and a volunteer youth worker at St. Andrew’s, Chorleywood.

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