The Curious Christian: An Interview w/ Gabe Lyons (Part 2)

And then finally, we think it’s important not to just think or be curious for curiosity’s sake. God’s given us the opportunity to learn, because he ultimately wants us to demonstrate good. In all the places that we’re going, let’s do good. Let’s help celebrate that which is good. Let’s help in the areas that seem confused in our culture. Let’s be the ones that start to bring clarity to it.

For the things that are wrong, we need to do good by stopping them and confronting them. We know evil exists. We have a role to play even there.

But let’s also get really good at something we’ve lacked the imagination to do: to celebrate and cultivate that which is good within our communities, even if it doesn’t go by the name “Christian.”

We believe that’s part of God’s common grace—that anything good taking place in our world, we ought to celebrate and cultivate it, because it ultimately reflects his nature and who he is.

In those areas of culture where we don’t see anything good happening, well, part of our job as Christians is to create that, to imagine a new way forward and to create something good.

Sometimes we add to the noise by failing to listen. Let’s talk about the way we communicate online. So many new communication technologies exist, allowing us to talk more than we ever have. But this has come upon us so rapidly, it seems like an important moment for us to get clear on advancing good in our online communication. How should we approach communication technology for the sake of civil discourse?

I urge Christians to be some of the most thoughtful about this. We see trends taking place where new technologies are introduced and adopted, and everybody clamors for them, believing they’re great.

What we have to think through is, “What does it mean for us to actually be thoughtful—long term—about how these technologies and these communications affect our communities?”

I know the Amish have actually done great at this. They really take into consideration every new technology they adopt—whether this is going to negatively affect their community or positively affect it.

Of course, they’re set up in such a way that they have an entire community come to weigh in on that and to vote on that. They have this authority structure in so many things that aren’t very practical for where we are today.

I’m not suggesting we all go and become Amish, but I think we can learn from their intentionality, because they understand that mediums really do affect things.

My encouragement is to think more about how mediums are messages in and of themselves. In doing that, we can find ourselves being thoughtful about how to manage technology.

I interviewed Kevin Kelly—the co‑founder of Wired magazine—in my last book, The Next Christians. I was talking about how to manage technology as a discipline that Christians should lead the way in. In a world that’s very wired, communication is very high. How can we do better in this area?

What I love about Kevin is although he’s co‑founder of Wired magazine—arguably the best magazine talking about technology and introducing us to how technology affects the world—here’s a man who, at the time, didn’t own a cellphone. He would travel on trips and would not carry a laptop. He would ride his bike to work.

Every day, hundreds of thousands of readers read his daily blog where he introduces a new piece of technology to the world. And yet in his own life, he chooses to be very intentional about how he’s going to use it.

So we were having this conversation, and he said, “You know, my first preference, Gabe, if we’re going to have a conversation, is for it to be face to face. I want to meet you. I want it to be in-person, embodied.”

He said, “I believe embodiment is this gift that the story of Jesus and the gospel gives to our world. And embodiment matters, because God sent his son to be among us, to be with us.

“So I want to be with you, but if we can’t do that, and my only other option to communicate with you is via phone call, well, when you call me, you can be assured I’m not going to look at my laptop while we’re having a conversation. I’m not going to try to interact with somebody else and multi‑task. I’m going to be 100 percent embodied and focused on our conversation.”

“And then finally, if we can’t talk on the phone and it has to be via text or an email, I’m going to make sure I’m a 100 percent present when I’m trying to communicate with you.”

There’s a principle here that he cares a lot about: “I want to be 100 percent there for a conversation. I believe that’s part of what it means to be human.”

This gets back to our kids’ questions: “What does it mean to be human anymore, mom and dad, if I can just text or we can all just kind of keep up with one another via technology, but doesn’t require a communal aspect to it? Is that human or not?”

I think we’re going to push this one all the way to the edge, to the point where our culture will start to see, “Wait, this isn’t sustainable to live life this way. We need one another. We need to be together.” And we’ll find some better solutions for how to communicate.

So, how do we manage these technologies and how do we do this well? Too many times the technology removes the humanity from the other.

In comment sections, we say things that we wouldn’t normally say if we were looking at one another eye to eye, having a conversation. We have monologue kinds of thinking, where we kind of preach and throw out what we think, then we walk away from the computer, because we don’t want to see what anybody else has to say.

That’s not humility. And I don’t believe that’s the way forward. So as Christians, let’s do better. Let’s lead in this. Let’s be those who care enough to keep those conversations going, to truly engage with people.

To be willing to get on the phone, as I’ve done before with people who’ve reached out to me on Twitter and criticized me for something, or assumed something about me. To be able to come back and say, “Well, let’s get on a phone. Let’s talk.” I’m not going to have a Twitter battle discussion. I just don’t engage Twitter that way.

Christian pastors are often seen as gatekeepers of their communities—they’re responsible not only for their congregation’s faith and spiritual life, but for their intellectual life. They are in a really unique position to be shaping their community’s intellectual character. What would you say to pastors about the current state of the Christian church’s intellectual character?

Gabe Lyons: Well, to the pastors and church leaders, the weight that scripture puts on this role of being a pastor that’s responsible for a flock of people is very, very high and to be taken very seriously.

I find many people who are in churches today—many Christians—aren’t being equipped. They’re not being equipped to think well about the world that we live in today.

If anything, some of the toughest topics are being avoided, out of sensitivity, and yet [pastors] are not realizing that their people are longing for these conversations. Longing to be equipped to think well, to know how to engage, to how to talk to their children.

On the other side of it, pastors are feeling smugly confident that they theologically know how to think about it, but they’re doing very, very poorly at communicating that to the people that they’re leading.

Research is bearing this out now. We’re seeing this disconnect and this longing from congregations to know how to be equipped to engage the real conversations they’re having with their friends and their peers and their colleagues and their children.

And what can church leaders do to respond to this longing for tough conversations?

I think pastors and leaders need to be emboldened to step up into this. To demonstrate as we’ve talked about today this idea of humility, open‑mindedness in a sense of listening.

Not just open‑mindedness of believing that any idea matters and is equal, but open‑mindedness to say, “I can listen to the other and learn from that. There’s something in a conversation, even if I disagree with somebody else, I’m going to model something differently that people in my congregation and in my community want to see modeled.”

I think my encouragement of these pastors is that conviction, that boldness, that sense of why you went into the ministry… of why you went to seminary… why you planted a church and always imagined that you would lead these people towards a way of living life as a countercultural community in the midst of a world today that might be at odds with us…

Get back to that.

Understand that that’s what’s needed today.

We need that more than ever. Don’t shy away from it because it’s uncomfortable.

If you feel uncomfortable because you don’t know what to say, well, go deeper into how you’re thinking about it. Read more sources. Come at this with a full-orbed view that’s going to be helpful to people.

But then when you do and you’ve reached that moment of conviction, don’t be shy about sharing your conviction. That’s what your people are hungry for. They want a leader that’s going to share with them what they’re convicted about and what they believe God’s trying to say to that community today.

That’s what the church is. So I would encourage leaders to embrace that. God’s called them for such a time as this and to walk forward into it.

When was you’re “Aha!-moment” when it comes to this stuff? Was there ever a person or a book that made you think differently? Do you remember a moment where something that you encountered made you change your mind?

I would say the book that did that for me was a book called How Now Shall We Live? by Chuck Colson. I was given that book by a friend in the late ’90s. I finally read it in 2000, I believe. When I did, he talked about the Christian story and there was this theme throughout this book that Christians are called to redeem entire cultures, not just individuals.

I had grown up in the church and my belief had been that the main call to a Christian was to redeem individuals—to help people get saved—and that that was the only thing that counted as it related to being a Christian.

That book single‑handedly transformed my view to understand Christian worldview. To understand the creation mandate—the cultural mandate that we’re called to have dominion, to hold back the evil that would otherwise overwhelm the world. To love scholarship and science and art and beauty and music and all these wonderful things that I already really enjoyed, but I didn’t realize there was this Christian rooting to it.

So when I saw that, I just woke up to it. I thought, if more Christians could understand that we are called to actually not only appreciate these things—but create these things—to enjoy this wonderful world that we get to live in and experience. That would be a different story for Christians to understand and to wake up to.

But I would credit all of that to this book by one of my heroes and mentors, Chuck Colson, How Now Shall We Live?