When Everything Changes: Life in America Today

My friend Gail cherishes her childhood memories growing up in Washington State:

I grew up at the foot of Mt. St. Helens. I was a child at her beautiful feet. "The Fujiyama of the West," they called her; and there were untold family trips to her forest campgrounds. My grandfather taking me for visits at Spirit Lake Lodge ... playing with "pummy stone," the floating rocks left from some long-ago eruption ... campfire nights at camp, gazing across the lake at the mountain's luminous shadow in the midnight.

These memories are more than pleasant recollections to Gail. They are part of her family's spiritual heritage and shaped her Christian identity:

By the time I was in college and director of our church's summer camp, I had a spiritual relationship with that mountain. I hiked her surrounding hills, just as my daddy had in his Scouting days ... the same trails, the same waterfalls, the same glimpses through shoreline trees. I thought of St. Helens as "my mountain."

Though Gail knew that all creation was God's gift for us to love, she was grateful that God, knowing the limits of our hearts, "Ordained for each one spot should prove / Beloved over all," in Rudyard Kipling's words. Indeed, Gail thought of St. Helens as "my spot, my most beloved place on earth":

Clearest in my memory after all these years is night upon summer night, when all the campers were finally in bed, sitting on a log gazing as the Orthodox gaze at the beloved face of their icons, praying ... to God, to Jesus, to the Spirit, all somehow "iconned" in the glowing shape of that magnificent shadow in the darkness. In my memory even now, with Spirit Lake shimmering blue-green at her feet, it is still the most beloved and beautiful place on earth.

Every one of us has been shaped somewhere. Some, like Gail, are stamped by a single place, but most of us are shaped by a landscape of relationships and experiences, traditions and institutions. Whether or not we feel uniformly positive about them, their familiarity gives us a sense of security. We know how to navigate the terrain. And we also know that disorienting feeling whenever a major event shifts the landscape of our lives for good or ill: we get married, or lose a job; a loved one dies, or we have our first child. What was once so familiar has changed dramatically, and our whole orientation needs to adapt until a new normal emerges.

But every now and then, in the course of human history, something happens that hits everyone at the same time—as if a tectonic shift is shaking the earth beneath us. The early Christians experienced this two thousand years ago, when the Roman Empire built its vast road system, connecting far-flung people with unprecedented ease. Now we're feeling it today as the Internet highway connects us all, rearranging everything we found familiar. And like any change that shifts our recognizable terrain, it is unsettling.

In the spring of 1980, Gail remembers, Mount St. Helens began to tremor and steam. She followed the story from her new home in New York. Then one night, she had a dream:

In my dream, I saw the mountain from my accustomed vantage across Spirit Lake; but instead of being graceful and snow-capped, she was low, gray, and ugly.... It left me wondering—until a week later, on a Sunday morning in May, when the mountain exploded: blowing out some 1200 feet of her summit and destroying everything living on and around those slopes, burying Spirit Lake and the trails I had hiked and my father before me, burying them forever under 150 feet of mud and ash.

The next day, I remember weeping inconsolably as I watched the nightly news, the first photos coming in from the blast area; until in mid-sob one particular aerial photo flashed for a split second on the screen. It was a distance panorama of the mountain itself—and what made me gasp was the shape—the exact outline I had dreamed a week before.

Like the shifting plates of planet under the Cascade Range that caused Mount St. Helens to erupt in May of 1980, spewing fine coal over hundreds of miles and changing the face of the mountain—now and then, it feels as if the foundation of the earth is moving. When it does, not only we ourselves, but also everything and everyone around us shifts as well, and the earth moves, and the people tremble (Ps 99:1).

Such is the disorienting force of technology, shifting the earth beneath us. Everyone is unsettled—the whole world, and every single human institution in it. The result is a social volcano that transforms our landscape, leaving a new reality in its path. What was once so familiar has changed dramatically, and our whole orientation has to adapt until a new normal emerges.

Half a century ago, it wasn't a geologist but a communications professor who saw proverbial steam rising from the volcano of technology. On May 18, 1960, CBS news reporter Alan Millar introduced a professor at the University of Toronto: Marshall McLuhan, who was studying the effect of mass media on behavior and thought:

Television has transformed the world into an interconnected tribe he calls a "global village." There's an earthquake and no matter where we live, we all get the message. And today's teenager, the future villager, who feels especially at home with our new gadgets ... will bring our tribe even closer together.

The world has gotten smaller fast, thanks to all our "gadgets." Now every place on the planet feels like our own neighborhood:

We know what it's like to go on a safari in Kenya or to have an audience with the pope ... But not only is the world getting smaller. It's becoming more available and familiar, to our minds and to our emotions. The world is now a global village.

Later McLuhan wrote: "So rapidly have we begun to feel the effects of the electronic revolution in presenting us with new configurations that all of us today are displaced persons living in a world that has little to do with the one in which we grew up." He prophetically called ours "the Age of Anxiety." And that was before the Internet exponentially accelerated the pace of change. In The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen sum it up this way: as the reach of the Internet expands, "nearly every aspect of life will change, from the minutiae of our daily lives to more fundamental questions about identity, relationships and even our security."

The early Christians who experienced the unsettling impact of Roman roads knew this kind of upheaval, and in the chapters ahead, we'll learn from them. But let's start by looking at the broad scope of disorienting change that we're experiencing now.

Technology's Impact on Daily Life

I remember growing up in a quiet suburban home using a rotary dial telephone, listening to songs on a stereo record player, and watching color television for the first time. Then, when I was in grade school, my class took the train downtown to Chicago to see an amazing new invention: the computer. It filled an entire room.

Fast-forward to today. Schmidt and Cohen describe today's breakneck advances in technology:

Hundreds of millions of people are, each minute, creating and consuming an untold amount of digital content in an online world.... Think of all the websites you've ever visited, all the e-mails you've sent and stories you've read online, all the facts you've learned and fictions you've encountered and debunked. Think of every relationship forged, every journey planned, every job found and every dream born, nurtured and implemented through this platform.... This is the Internet, the world's largest ungoverned space.

Because we're immersed in it every day, it's easy to forget the before-and-after impact of the Internet on our lives. Pause for a moment to consider how many people who are alive today remember:

• storing photographs in boxes, addresses in books, and files in folders instead of digitally archiving them online;

• writing on a typewriter instead of using spell-check corrections and cut-and-paste edits on a computer;

• going to a teller at the local bank to take out cash instead of putting a card into an ATM machine or getting change at the store; or

• researching in libraries instead of running Google searches.

And then there is the impact on our closest relationships. When my Armenian grandmother came to the United States from Turkey in 1910, she knew that she would never see her aunts and uncles and cousins again. A century later, when our daughter went to South Korea for a year to serve in mission work, we trusted that we would see her every week as we caught up over Skype.

Technology's Impact on Institutions

Technology is changing more than just our personal lives. It is impacting every institution that contributes to American culture.

Think about how the business world is being pressed to adapt. No field is exempt—from corporate headquarters to hospitals, colleges to cafeterias.

Retailers are feeling the heat. The suburb where I now live is home to the first shopping mall ever built in America: Market Square, constructed in 1914. It sits right across from the train station, so people going to or from work could stop by the store and pick something up. That was a radical idea at the time, but over the years, clusters of shops in strip malls and indoor malls popped up all over America. Then in the 1960s and ' 70s, big-box stores like Walmart and Target, Barnes and Noble, and Toys"R"Us began to catch on. Local businesses were overwhelmed by the large chains' competitive prices and expansive stock. Then came the Internet and e-retailers like Amazon.com, Alibaba, and eBay.

The entertainment industry is working to keep up too. In 1960, television viewers had three channels from which to choose. In 1992, Bruce Springsteen released the hit single "57 Channels (And Nothin' On)." A little more than twenty years later, cable and satellite TV now provide hundreds of stations, and viewers can pull up virtually any show on demand. Only time-sensitive programs like sporting events and awards shows require real-time viewing. The music industry is shifting too. Radio stations are being replaced by listener-directed options. Time's Victor Luckerson reports a huge new competitor in the burgeoning field of music streaming:

Tech giant Samsung just rolled out an Internet radio service called Milk Music exclusively for owners of the company's Galaxy line of mobile devices. The new music service, which is powered by the Internet radio platform Slacker Radio, boasts 13 million songs and 200 different radio stations. Listeners can customize a station to suit their own taste based not on categories such as genre, overall popularity, and currentness.... Milk Music will compete with industry leader Pandora Radio, which has more than 75 million monthly listeners, and Apple's newly launched iTunes Radio, which had attracted about 20 million listeners.

The corporate and manufacturing sector has had to adapt. Alan May, a senior executive whose career has included roles at three major global corporations, offers this perspective:

As I started my career in the early '80s, the "global" perspective of most business leaders was limited to accessing raw materials abroad, exporting finished goods to new markets, or manufacturing offshore to capture the perceived value of lower wages. Over the course of three decades, globalization has advanced in a quantum leap.

Products are often designed by employees in locations throughout the world, with components sourced in dozens of nations, then assembled in yet another location for eventual delivery to world markets. Just look at any automobile, computer, or home appliance. There is no such thing as "domestic content" in a globally interdependent supply chain of designers, producers and distributors.

Talent itself is now increasingly global, with companies tapping into "human capital" pools across the world. Look at Chinese manufacturers as they focus on making advanced products that require legions of highly educated workers; even the former "low wage" havens are now pressured by even lower wages in southeast Asia and Africa.

The fuel for expanding globalization will continue to be the availability of information enabled by the Internet. Instantaneous news, data, and social interaction has largely eliminated national boundaries and placed an entire generation on a global platform.

Educational institutions are also making adaptive shifts. For years, U.S. News and World Report has ranked colleges and universities. Recently it added a rating system for online education. This year the top two online bachelor's degree programs are Central Michigan University and the State University of New York College of Technology in Delhi. I had to look to see if it was Delhi, India, or Delhi, New York (it's the latter). Tied for third place are Pace University in New York, and Pennsylvania State University—World Campus. Just as missionaries went abroad a century ago to bring schools to the farthest reaches, now the Internet is making American higher education accessible to people around the globe.

Governments and nonprofits are changing too. For generations, well-established organizations like the Red Cross and the YMCA have helped unreached people deal with natural disasters, climb out of war, receive health care, and get an education. But now technology has enabled millions of individuals across the world to link together for common causes. Strangers who are passionate about an issue—whether saving the whales or funding cancer research—aren't waiting for an authority to do something. We've seen overseas movements like the Arab Spring and girls' education in Afghanistan and local causes like the Tea Party movement and those who press for gay marriage. The Internet will continue to equip people to join hands with like-minded strangers. According to Harvard's Corporate Social Responsibility Initiative, the past two decades have brought an explosion "in the number, diversity, reach and influence of civil society organizations and networks"—all "supported by unprecedented communications capacity via the Internet and global media."

As global connections continue their rapid advance, no one is spared from their reach. Schmidt and Cohen warn:

Many old institutions and hierarchies will have to adapt or risk becoming obsolete, irrelevant to modern society. The struggles we see today in many businesses, large and small, are examples of the dramatic shift for society that lies ahead. Communication technologies will continue to change our institutions from within and without.

The question for church leaders isn't whether we need to adapt. The question is: Why should we expect religious institutions to be exempt?

Technology's Impact on the Church

Since 312 CE, when Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, the church has played a leading role in Western society. But in recent years, the authority of the church has waned. Scholars have variously called this a post-Constantinian, postdenominational, postmodern, or even post-Christian age. What happened?

It's not that Christians are in the minority in America now—far from it. But the landscape around us has changed dramatically. For example, our society doesn't give points for—or even expect—churchgoing the way it used to. Not long ago, young families could be counted on to bring their children to Sunday school every week. Now in many parts of the country, it's entirely optional. Once, up-and-coming professionals were expected to list their leadership at church on their resume. Now it's considered a private matter.

This trend has been edging up as Americans have become increasingly individualistic in their spiritual practices. It shouldn't surprise us. For the first time, we have a generation free to choose entertainment from over five hundred television channels, unlimited YouTube videos, or movies on demand; a generation that can learn from traditional schools, online classes, or an amalgam; a generation that might shop at the corner store, the mall, or e-retailers; a generation that can choose whether to visit with friends in person, on Facebook, over Skype, or by text, phone, or e-mail. It's no wonder we're approaching faith in our own individual way too.