Nerds have a fascinating place in our cultural landscape, some cultural analysts claim that they are a kind of mockery of autistic people. Other cultural analysts have claimed that they are a form of anti-Semitic ‘blackface’, that is a racist caricature of Jewish people. But in the 21st century the term nerd has become shorthand for someone who has a strong interest in computers and technology.
Which leads me to a question. Have nerds hijacked the missional Church conversation? I began to wonder this over the Christmas break. I noticed how little I used computers when I was not working. I find blogging , podcasting and email helpful when it comes to communicating with people in my ministry duties, but in terms of personal interest, frankly to relax there are tons of others things I would be rather doing. I have friends that salivate as they see the Apple logo, however I don’t think I have ever taken much notice of a Mac store let alone walked into one.
Thus I began to think there must be a lot of other people like me out there. That is those who do not have an interest in spending half their lives online. But the problem is these days that the more interested you are in all things techie, the louder your voice has become, to put it in the vernacular, if you are a nerd it is much easier for you to get your opinion out there.
So the other day when I read Dan Kimball write on his blog
“Could blogging, twittering, Facebook etc. be addictive – and if so, can it actually get in the way of mission? The answer may be obvious, but when we spend time doing something, it takes away from time we could be spending doing something else. So do the hours we can spend on blogs, twitter, Facebook and even reading about missional things on blogs take away too much from the time that we could actually be on mission and spending with people in real life?”
It made me wonder if the missional church conversation has become dominated by nerds. The people who I have met and who I know who are the most naturally missional and gifted in sharing their faith, tend to be highly social, highly extroverted people, who’s idea of punishment is being shackled to a computer away from interacting and loving people, to be blunt, they are not nerds.
Now remember I am painting here in broad and general brushstrokes. But perhaps, a lot of the angst that is surfacing around the ‘fruitfullness’ of missional church is due to this phenomenon. That is the missional discussion tends to stay in the realm of the ‘abstract’ and the ‘theoretical’ because it is discussed ad nausem by nerds online, and the voice of the actual practitioners is sidelined, due the fact that they spend a lot of their lives offline, getting ‘face time’ with people. Therefore the online discussion regarding misisonal church does not include the natural feedback loop of the practitioners who test the theories in the real world.
Dunno, Just a thought….
