the Rubicon - BY REQUEST - Reaching the digital generation

We 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:  After 18 years working with TSA, Russell Rook recently started work with Chapel St a change agency working with churches and communities to bring about regeneration through the delivery of community services and social enterprise. He also works as a writer and speaker and is the chair of the Spring Harvest theme group. Russell helps to lead his local corps, Raynes Park Community Church, is married to Charlotte, a professional cellist and has two sons Joe and Toby.

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.

Thank you and welcome

Changes ahead

Over the next few weeks we will be easing into some changes on theRubicon. You will notice these initially in connection with our weekly bloggers.

For the past year or so you have been able to catch Doubletake (Stephanie Hung, Australia) on Saturdays, Ragamuffin (Jay Davis, US) on Mondays, Deeper Shade of Grey (Gordon Cotterill, UK) on Wednesdays and Vox Populi (Rick Zelinsky, Canada) on Fridays.

We want to say a huge thank you to Rick and Jay. Coming up with interesting, provocative and challenging pieces on a weekly basis is a lot of work and their other work (the day-job) is becoming ever more demanding so they’ve decided to step back from weekly blogging.

While Stephanie is retiring the Doubletake column she will be sticking around. She has relocated from Australia to Canada and will now be writing book reviews for theRubicon which will appear once or twice a month. If you have any suggestions for books that you would like to see reviewed, please send in your ideas (otherwise, we’ll continue to pick books that we find interesting!).

Starting on Saturday we are expanding our roster of bloggers. In addition to Gordon Cotterill, who will continue writing Shades of Grey, theRubicon will be joined by Danielle Strickland, Australia (JustThinking), Eric Himes, US (Future Army Dictionary aka FAD), Dion Oxford, Canada (The Concise Oxford) and Vadim Hurin, Eastern Europe (From Russia with Blogs).

Our bloggers will appear on Saturday, Tuesday and Thursday but over a two week period, which means you will have to check out theRubicon every day in order to see who is going to pop up!

Design and format changes are also in the works as we move theRubicon to become a global SA portal.

So… stay tuned as we up the ante on theRubicon.

theRubicon Team

Election season on theRubicon

“We are so used to thinking of spirituality as withdrawal from the world and human affairs that it is hard to think of it as political. Spirituality is personal and private we assume, while politics is public. But such a dichotomy drastically diminishes spirituality construing it as a relationship to God without implications for one’s relationship to the surrounding world. The God of Christian faith created the world and is deeply engaged in the affairs of the world. The notion that we can be related to God and not to the world – that we can practice a spirituality that is not political – is in conflict with the Christian understanding of God.” (Glenn Tinder, Can We Be Good Without God?, Atlantic Monthly, December 1989)

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t is election season in North America! Starting this Friday (September 19) and continuing for the next couple of months, theRubicon will be running a weekly commentary on the Canadian election written by a political insider out of Ottawa.

Although this election may not be nearly as gripping as the American Presidential race, the common themes of democratic values, the use and abuse of power, the tension between church and state and the interplay of faith and politics… these are universal in relevance and interest.

So, Rubicon readers, watch for it every week starting this Friday.

And remember, as Tip O’Neill once famously said: “All politics are local.”

theRubicon Team

We’ll be back

theRubicon has:

a) gone fishing

b) headed to the beach

c) is slacking off

d) succumbed to the deeply-rooted laziness and lack of discipline that courses through our veins.

You choose the explanation you like best.

This means that we will not be posting from Monday, August 25 through Saturday, August 30. We’ll be back, suntanned, well rested and ready to go, on Sunday, August 31.

In the meantime, feel free to browse through theRubicon’s recently improved archives and catch up on some great material you might have missed over the last couple of years.

Even better… write something yourself and send it in. We are always in need of good material.

Surfs up!

theRubicon team

Site change

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e’ve overhauled an oft-neglected feature of theRubicon. Take a quick look at our article depository either by visiting the “Archives” tab at the top of the page or by clicking here. It is now easier to see any of the 420 posts and 1,378 comments that have appeared on this site in the past two years.

theRubicon team

Near and far

I want my efforts to be worth it | Vadim Khurin

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t so happens that while reading a good book, listening to an insightful sermon, or attending an inspiring conference, I become filled with the decision to change.  I get the desire to become a visionary, so that in all my thoughts and actions I strive toward something that is really important.  I want to reach those targets and goals that are meaningful, so that I could be prepared to live and die for them, if needed.  That is what I want.

After a while, I realize that I am simply consumed by work, which has absolutely nothing to do with my vision. The items on my daily to-do list are often unnecessary but extremely time-consuming. Some of them, of course, are important things.  But think about it for a moment: replacing kitchen lights does not seem to be as vital as, for example, spending two hours in a deep study of the Bible, attempting to grasp the meaning of the prophetic verses.  Minor tasks suppress our lives by their number.  They are like termites.  When you look at one of them, you hardly become concerned.  Yet when there are many of them, they simply gobble down your life, your time and your strength without leaving any crumbs behind.

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Digital hiccups

theRubicon has been off-line for the past 18 hours or so
due to a database and coding error.
We’re back online now.
Thanks for your patience.

theRubicon team

Birthday time again

T

oday, theRubicon is marking a birthday. It’s been a year since we re-launched with a new design. And next month, we will be marking the second anniversary of the initial launch of theRubicon in March 2006.

Since our redesign and re-launch last year, we have received over 100,000 hits from 12,500 individuals (unique IPs); 1,600 websites and blogs have linked themselves to theRubicon. We have also received interactive participation in the form of comments from all over the western world and even Russia, Pakistan, Asia and Africa.

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Store of stale wisdom is refreshed

… quotes in play

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n mid-December we realized the collection of pithy quotations we run in the left sidebar was getting worn. So we asked you to send us some of your favourites. We were inundated. In fact, you sent 377 quotes, which amounted to 44 pages of ideas, calls to action, admonishments, encouragements and some slaps in the face.

Each submission was one that when weighed and sorted, tipped the scale in favour of enduring value; but some of them weighed more than others. In fact, there were entire short stories, anagrams and even condensed sermons.

We had to slice and dice: it was easy to pitch the long submissions – they simply don’t work in the space-starved format in which they get presented here on theRubicon. Others were pulled from the final list because they were too obscure, repetitious or didn’t seem to fit with the ethos of theRubicon. It was tough to trim those that remained, but we managed to get the list down to 132… all of which have now been posted to the left sidebar quotation pane.

Thanks for your help, sorry we couldn’t use all of what you sent and take a moment to read what comes up when you visit; there’s a lot of good material in Random Quotes and surprisingly few from the usual trinity of Winston Churchill, Oscar Wilde and William Booth.

theRubicon team