Worship & The Web
“Digital Liturgies” — Introductory Reflection
Life Before Smartphones
Have you ever seen the home videos of teens made around their high schools in the early 90s? All the students are interacting with each other, talking and laughing, and you can see most of their faces because their eyes aren’t staring straight down at their phones. I’m guessing you have seen it because it had a viral moment on the internet. You might have even watched it like I did and thought, “Man, the world was so much better before smartphones!”
That was the thought I had before I swiped my thumb along my smartphone to watch the next video of my favorite YouTube chef incorrectly describing the plot of Top Gun while candying walnuts.
A Challenging Challenge
I’m excited for our church to engage with Digital Liturgies by Samuel D. James together, but I expect many of you will experience reading this book in much the same way I do (reading it for the second time now). In the pages of this book are descriptions of habits, actions, and ways of thinking that are going to sound exactly like you, and you will not always like seeing yourself so clearly.
Some of our high school students and adult leaders just finished up a 21-day challenge designed to build some better spiritual habits in their lives. Part of the challenge, among other spiritual practices, was to limit screen time to 90 minutes per week. This would equal 15 minutes per day with one full day off, but it could be broken up any way you choose. As one of the adults who went on the journey with the students, I was struck by two things; 1. How refreshing it was to not have my life dominated by online content and 2. How quickly I fell back into old habits when the 21 days were over.
The disconnect between what I felt and how I reacted is precisely what this book wants to draw our attention to. We rarely consider how profoundly our lives have been shaped by the digital environments that we engage with constantly. As James notes in his opening story about his introduction to Facebook as a young man. “Instead of [Digital/Social Media] being a diversion that I stowed away in the corner for occasional use during the doldrums of offline life, my online activity became the most consistent, the most regular, the most habitual thing about me.”
I suspect, and statistically speaking, I know, that that statement is true for far more of our congregation than it is not true. I challenge you to really consider that. Is there an activity or habit that you engage with more consistently than digital/social media? If the internet is even top 5 on your list of most consistent habits then you better understand exactly how it is shaping you.
What is Liturgy Anyway?
The word “Liturgy” seems to be misused quite often when I’m around people from non-denominational Christian circles. Multiple times, I’ve been at retreats where someone asked us to do a liturgy together, and what they meant was they were about to lead us in a pre-written call-and-response style prayer time. If you’re confused about the word, don’t worry, I’m not from a church tradition that used it either.
Liturgy is simply the order of the worship service. If you’ve gone to church anywhere, you followed their liturgy through the service, whether they or you knew it or not. And whether you knew it or not, everything that happened in the church service was communicating something about God. For better or worse, the more often you engaged with that liturgy, the more it shaped you as a worshipper and as a person… whether you knew it or not.
Digital Liturgies is hoping to show us that every aspect of our online lives is communicating something to us. The more we blindly interact with it, the more it shapes us as worshippers and as people. “This is the story for many of us. It’s a story about technology, yes. But more deeply, it’s a story about worship.”
