A Different World

So I sat down for breakfast with a friend last week. He had never heard of text messaging. In fact, I’ve come to find out, that this guy doesn’t read the newspaper or magaizines- ever! He doesn’t have a tv nor does he ever watch movies.
I have another friend, he’s a family member actually. He has NO idea how to do ANYTHING on the Internet; not even open a web browser.
When talking to these people, and others with similar situations, they usually say things like,” I don’t have time for that stuff”, or,” I don’t need to know all that’s going on in the world; it’s too negative.”
But in the information and communication age, these individuals have declared themself obsolete. The entire world is communicating and sharing information in completely different ways than them and they’ve chosen self-imposed isolation, yet wonder why they are not connecting with people any longer.
They are starting to wake up and are realizing that they now live in a completely different culture than they did even 10 years ago and everyone around them speaks a different language.
I met a family this past weekend. They were self-professing ministers of the Gospel of Jesus Christ- and I don’t doubt at all that they were.
The mother and father of this family were, at least in their very late forties. They had 7 kids. The youngest was 18 months and the oldest was “around 30″ (a direct quote from the ‘around 30′ year-old). All of the kids, except the baby, were older teens through late twenties. All of them still lived at home and none of them were married. They actually all travel around with their family in one vehicle doing distribution work.
Don’t get me wrong, these people were VERY nice and appeared to love the Lord with all their hearts, but at some point mom and dad lost complete touch with reality.
The husband refered to the wife when asked a question. The children refused to give their ages and only said,” old enough to know right from wrong”. They only spoke very cryptically- all members of the family giving the same responses for similar types of questions. The children (aka adults) responded to every request with “sir” and “yes-em”. They all stood in a group, even in a row and never ventured far from each other- always standing up straight with hands nicely folded in front of them or behind their backs and with permanent smiles on their faces. It was quite different.
Did I mention that they all wore matching shirts, pants, and boots- all of them?
Once again, my intention is not to tease this family. They in fact helped us tremendously with a ministry project we did yesterday, but they were definitely outsiders in a very modern world.
While the world around them looks and communicates differently, it will have a very hard time interacting with this family so that they (the family) could share the Gospel with them in an effective way.
Even the Christians in our church were very perplexed by them, and the people in our community whom we hosted for a dinner looked upon them suspicously-probably worried that we wanted to make them just like the ‘matching clothes family’.
Jesus was very clear that we are to be in the world and not of it. But so many Christians take part in ‘sectarianism’ and remove themselves from the world completely in order to avoid becoming ‘of it’. Sadly such sheltering and naivety leads to the inabillity to share the Gospel because those who behave in such ways can no longer relate to the world or communicate with it.
So the question is,” How do you keep yourself pure, while allowing yourself to be in the world?” And, “What technology and communication shifts can you ignore, and which ones do you need to be fully abreast of so you don’t become missionally impotent?”