Friday, March 11, 2011

Hunters and Gatherers

We live in the information age.  Careers and fortunes are won and lost through the acquisition, manipulation, and execution of information.  It's as if we have stepped back many millenia into an age of hunting and gathering.  Our lives depend on information, but our media and technology has accelerated the production and dissemination of information to break-neck speeds.  If we are to succeed in such a world deluged with information then we must become adept at hunting and gathering the pertinent and the essential. 

Furthermore, the development of video technologies along with advances in entertainment have shaped hunters and gathers into oral/visual receivers of information.  Reading has been supplanted by the audio/visual.  No longer the foundation of information acquisition, reading has become a least common denominator skill and tool designed to retrieve the necessary with the least amount of effort. 

Subsequently, people have become adept hunters and gatherers of oral/visual information but terrible farmers of fields upon fields of written information.  The following statistics demonstrate what I mean:

1/3 of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
42 percent of college graduates never read another book after college.
80 percent of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
70 percent of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
(Source: Jerold Jenkins, http://www.jenkinsgroupinc.com/)
On average, a bookstore browser spends 8 seconds looking at a book's front cover and 15 seconds looking at the back cover.(Source: Para Publishing, http://www.parapub.com/)
Each day in the U.S., people spend 4 hours watching TV, 3 hours listening to the radio and 14 minutes reading magazines.
(Source: Veronis, Suhler & Associates investment banker)

If we live in a world of hunters and gatherers of oral/visual information then why are we trying to do discipleship like we live in a world of farmers?  The overwhelming number of mainline churches promote a program driven model of discipleship that is reading intensive and classroom based.  This farmer approach was effective for generations that preceded the information/technology boom of recent years, but presently it has become a Commadore 64 among iPad 2s.   Advocates of the farmer model can rant and rave about how things "used to"/"should" be, or they can rage against culture, or criticize the church's leadership, or enumerate a litany of other tertiary issues.  But the simple fact remains hunters and gathers don't want to be farmers.  The question for many churches today is whether they are willing to put down their hoes and pick up their spears?