During a time in which many churches have been forced to switch over to online services, a book called Analog Church might seem irrelevant. But author Jay Kim’s book is incredibly timely, as he carefully addresses both the challenges and opportunities churches face in this digital age.
To talk more about the obstacles churches face in this new era, SOLA Council member Steve Chang interviewed Jay Kim over Zoom. They discussed the downsides of the digital world, the importance of community and the local church, as well as what type of service Jay is planning for his church, once they can meet again.
We hope this conversation helps facilitate discussions about the importance of incarnational community within our local churches. You can find the audio here.
An edited transcript of their conversation is below.
Steve Chang: One of the things that you talked about at the beginning of your book is that the digital age is giving people speed, choices, and individualization. But you write that it is leading people into impatience, shallowness, and isolation.
I think a lot of people intuitively understand the downside of the digital world. But I can you dig down deeper into how prevalent and how dangerous all this is?
Jay Kim: Generally speaking, most of us feel the ways in which digital technologies are rewiring us to experience life. Speed is the value of the digital age. Everything is faster, faster, faster.
You’re trying to check your email at a cafe and the page is loading slowly. You get that slow-burning frustration and maybe even anger. Then you realize, “Oh my gosh, this is magic” — to sit in a cafe, have a cup of coffee, and yet still be connected to all of this. But we just take it for granted. If it’s not fast enough, then it’s not good enough. That is making us incredibly impatient, and we’re losing our aptitude for the long games.
Also, all of the choices [we have] are making us incredibly shallow. Why would I linger with anything for any length of time when I know that I have an endless array of options before me? Because I have so much choice, there’s no need for me to dig down deep and to excavate into the depths of anything because the moment something is not to my liking, then I can just move on to a billion other choices that are offering the other options that maybe are more to my liking.
Finally, everything in the digital world is customized, and the scary thing now is we don’t even have to do the customizing ourselves. Computer algorithms are customizing our digital experiences for us. So many of us have had that really sobering and sort of frightening experience of having a conversation with a friend about a particular automobile that you were interested in buying. Then the next time you’re on Facebook, you’re scrolling and there’s an advertisement on your Facebook feed for that car that you were just talking about, and you’re like “Oh, my gosh, what is happening? The machines are listening to me!”
Our digital experiences are being curated in such a way that the entire experience is crafted to suit my personality, my preferences, my liking, my interests. And what that’s doing is it’s making us incredibly isolated. And that’s not just conjecture. The increase in anxiety, loneliness, and depression is running parallel with the rise of the Internet and the digital age.
These are things we have to really pay attention to because, as I talk about in the book, impatience, shallowness, and isolation stand in direct opposition to the life of discipleship to Jesus, which is a patient work, it’s a deep work, and it is, by its very nature, a communal work.
As we learn to follow Jesus together and to be shaped into the image of the risen Christ, we have to pay attention to the ways in which the digital age is counteracting the stuff that we absolutely need to become followers of Jesus, which again, is patient and deep and communal.
Steve Chang: In the book, you quote Dallas Willard saying that discipleship is about Christians becoming apprentices. Are there different types of discipleship? Jesus limited his group to 12 people.
But when we look at the life of Paul, he went to a place like Ephesus or Antioch he spent a few years just teaching and then he left. Do we need to have that deeper relationship with everyone at the church? Do we have to have a deep relationship with the speaker?
Jay Kim: When we look at Paul and his life, it’s twofold. One, he certainly does travel. He goes from place to place, teaches, and gives rise to Christian movements.
But Paul was about building community. When you consider what is happening to the communities of faith in those places where he enters and exits, the reality is their lives of journeying with Jesus are still patient, deep, and communal. Paul doesn’t leave individuals and individual homes — he leaves communities of faith in cities and towns. And that’s crucially important for us to recognize.
Part of why Paul wrote some of his letters was that these communities of faith would continue to journey patiently and deeply in community. And it is communal. How many of Paul’s letters are strewn with encouragement and indictment about how community is being done appropriately, how it’s being done inappropriately, and how they need to course-correct?
Yes, Paul would enter and exit communities. But the communities that he left behind continued to journey with Jesus patiently, deeply, and communally. When you look at Paul himself, especially when you look at his later pastoral letters to Timothy and to Titus, you realize that even Paul himself in his journeys was discipling [others]. He was pouring his life patiently, deeply, and communally to a select few.
Steve Chang: Let’s say the Internet had existed during the life of Paul. If I was in Antioch while Paul was there, I would still want to stream Paul’s messages after he left because he was part of that community and he was a gifted communicator.
The tension that churches have right now is that local pastors are having to compare themselves to match what is on the Internet. What do you say to people who love their local pastors but they’re just not as good as Tim Keller or David Platt? What do you say to the Christian and to the leaders who are tempted by that?
Jay Kim: If there was Internet, Paul could have Facebook-lived his letters and we all would have watched. Tim Keller has been doing these little talks on Facebook live, and they’ve been incredibly helpful and thought-provoking. And of course, of course, why wouldn’t I do that?
So the best way I can respond is to highlight a dichotomy that I think we’ve lost.
I would argue [what Tim Keller is doing] is one particular thing — that the gospel preached in the life of [the entire] faith community. The other particular thing is the local church in its context. In our day and age, we’ve mixed the two together.
One of the reasons for that is because we have misunderstood what the sermon is in the context of a local church. So again, going back to the life of Paul, we don’t know how long it took him to write each specific letter. But most scholars would agree that for most of the letters, based on the language, the care and caution with which he words specific things, and the density of theology in many of his letters, he probably had a scribe who was writing while he was speaking.
What it tells us is that it’s very likely that Paul’s letters are carefully crafted, incredibly deep, and [contain] the highlights of his thinking. He’s writing to communities of faith who are trying to figure out what it means to follow Jesus in the first century, ancient Near Eastern world, which would have been a really complex and complicated and new idea for them.
Here’s a parallel example. I preach most Sundays. But the way I wrote my book was very different than the way I preach to my church.
The book is the result of an extended time studying, writing, rewriting, thinking, and praying. Certainly that happens with the sermon on a week-to-week basis, but it doesn’t happen with the same level of intensity and depth.
That’s not to say the sermon is any less important or any less potent when the Spirit of God is moving and acting in the midst of the sermon. What it does mean is that in exchange for sort of the incredible intellectual depths that I pour into the book, when it comes to the sermon, what I am doing is I am trying to excavate deeply into the heart of my community and our people. So I’m speaking very specifically to the people who I know are sitting in the seats, people whose hands I can shake, people who I can hug, whose facial expressions I can see, whose stories I know, on a very specific level. So there are two different things happening when we watch Keller give a lecture on Facebook Live versus when we are speaking, communicating, and preaching to our people.
Thomas G. Long talks about how the sermon is not simply the gift of the communicator, but it comes alive when the preacher and the congregation gather, to speak, to listen to lean in and to embody the ideas together. We have to create that sort of understanding.
To pastors who are feeling the brunt of comparison, I would just encourage all of us by saying you’re not Tim Keller, unless Tim is watching this (Hello!). So one, don’t try to be, and two, ask the question, “Who has God called you to be?” And who are these people, this congregation and community that God has called you to shepherd and to serve and to lead and to speak to them in a way that Tim Keller actually never could? Because he’s not called a shepherd and to lead and to serve that particular community.
Steve Chang: In the book, you talked about growing up in the Korean church and how you ate mu-kuk (Korean radish soup). It’s been said that the average immigrant church tends to have more community because that’s where immigrants do life together and so they embody what you say in The Analog Church so much more.
But there’s also been this tremendous pressure in evangelicalism to leave the immigrant church and to go to the multicultural church or the majority culture. On the one hand, we’re saying experience community, and on the other hand, saying, be this other thing. Can you speak into that tension?
Jay Kim: I grew up in a Korean American church and yet I’ve spent almost my entire local church vocational ministry life in non-ethnic churches. And so I definitely feel the dichotomy.
Ethnic churches, for a variety of reasons, have a sense of community and communal belonging. And that can get ugly too sometimes. The church where I grew up actually had a split, and I was just a kid, but I do remember how ugly that got because of how beautiful it was when we were together.
I don’t have a lot of wisdom to leave there, except just my longing [for that type of community]. When I juxtapose that with my experience in serving and leading in non-ethnic local churches, it is at the very top of the list of what I most long for. Ethnic churches have that gift that they can impart to more majority evangelical churches that don’t have that, and I have not figured out [how].
But I think the breaking of bread is the thing that I come back to the most. There’s a reason why I mentioned mukuk in the book. If you grew up in a Korean American church, you know exactly what I’m talking about. You can smell the soup I’m smelling in my mind, right?
[In the immigrant church], it wasn’t like a get in, eat your food with your two or three friends, and then get into your car and go home. These were long extended meals, and I could get up and go talk to anyone in that giant fellowship hall. There were a dozen and a half adults in the room who felt like uncles and aunts to me. They would ask me how I was doing and joke with me, all those sorts of things that just felt so much like family.
I don’t know the solution. I don’t know how we get there. But when I read the New Testament, what I do know is that Paul is adamant that Christians are a family now. He does not mean that as just a poetic metaphor. He means that in a disruptive, everyday way. You’re supposed to live every day like you are family. And that actually is going to cause disruption to your daily activities and the way you think about the way you live and are in the world.
That’s not something that majority churches and evangelical American churches lost. I think it’s something we’ve never had, at least in my experience, and it’s something we need to capture and recapture. Ethnic churches have that as a gift that they can offer to churches like mine.
Steve Chang: You’re going to be stepping into a church that has a multi-site, multi-campus. Those are the kinds of churches that have video venues that oftentimes don’t have as deep a community and the push to be digital is greater. What are you gonna fight for?
Jay Kim: When we get back to in-person gatherings, we will fight for as much embodied presence as possible. This church that I’m going to has been moving away from the video teaching model and putting live communicators at their locations. Before COVID-19, they were at about 60-70% live teaching at all locations. The plan is once we get back to in-person gatherings, we’ll move to an overwhelmingly majority live teaching.
Then, of course, it’s also what’s happening in homes, office spaces, community groups, and mid-sized groups all over the city. What are we doing to make those gatherings not just supplemental things that you do peripherally on the side but [make it] the meat and potatoes of how people understand what it means to be the people of God together?
We’re aware and we’re very sensitive to the psychology of this whole thing that we’re in that people will be very wary and cautious of being in person again, and particularly until there’s a vaccine or herd immunity. But at the same time, I’ve got to be honest, I’m very hopeful. What I’m seeing is a rising tide of angst and longing to be with others again. So this too shall pas, and when it does, I’m really hopeful that people are going to be clamoring to be together with other people, shoulder to shoulder, and I am longing for that day.