Storm Damage

We had a storm Sunday night. It was one of those wonderful middle of the night storms that makes you glad that you are inside. The rain poured as if someone had opened a fire hydrant. The wind was howling—with several gust reaching near hurricane strength—in January. And through it all I was nestled all snug in my bed while visions of caramel cake danced in my head. After all, I was dry and warm and safe.

When I came to the office however, I quickly saw the aftermath. No, our building was safe, no huge branches down—most of them have been blown out in earlier storms! The roof did not leak—at least I didn’t see any visible evidence. But there was a casualty.

Our sign.

Not the one with our name on it, but rather the one that has been hanging over our door proclaiming “Providence is a place to Believe.” It seems that the storm ripped our belief apart.

I wonder how often that happens—in real life. The winds of life blow—with the call from the doctor, with a slip from the boss, with a call from the teacher. The rain just pours down when the children leave, when the car breaks down, when a parent no longer is able to care for themselves the way we remember. It really isn’t anything out of normal. You know the storms are going to come—it’s just that you didn’t expect it now, with this ferocity.

And when they leave, you are surprised to see that the belief, which once hung, is tattered and torn. The eyelets were just ripped out. The brackets which had once held it all in place no longer hold.

So what do you do? We have taken the sign down. It just wouldn’t hold up anymore. And so for a few weeks there won’t be anything over the door. We will still believe—I hope. The sign just won’t be there.

But something new is coming. And in many ways it is what we do when our faith is torn apart by life. We imagine.

So just hold on… Something new is coming!

What I've Been Reading

My colleagues hate it when I read! Oh, they don’t really mind if I am reading a Robert Ludlum sky-thriller—they really don’t worry about me engaging in international espionage (they just don’t know!) But when I read something that makes me think, they really get anxious!

They are anxious right now!

I have just finished reading a wonderfully disturbing book by Ken Auletta, Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. It is a basically a “biography” of Google. This company is so much a part of our lives that it has its own listing in the dictionary—as a verb! And yet, it was only “birthed” in the last years of the 90’s! (I would have missed that on a test!) But it has grown up quickly, to the point that it is beginning to shake the media world. Newspapers, magazines, even TV networks are keeping an eye on this company and what they are doing. With good reason! “Google’s ad revenue in 2008 matched the combined advertising revenues of the five broadcast networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and the CW.) (emphasis mine.) This “little company really is changing the world as we have known it!

That idea was just heightened when Comcast recently bought NBC. In a wonderful column in Newsweek, Daniel Lyons explained why:

“Nielsen recently reported that although online video viewing has risen 35 percent in the past year, 99 percent of TV viewing is still done on a traditional TV. But that's not the case for younger people, like my pal Dan Frommer. He's 27 years old and works as a writer for a technology Web site. Frommer pulled the plug on cable TV in May 2008 and instead gets shows from the Internet via a Macintosh computer hooked to his LCD television. He can't get everything he'd like to see, but he's saved $1,500 on cable-TV fees. "I'm not going to let myself get ripped off for a bunch of garbage that I don't watch anyway," he says. Many of his 20-something friends have also pulled the plug. The next generation—today's teenagers—will likely never sign up for cable TV at all.” (Newsweek, December 10, 2009.)

So what? And why is this important to a church?

Well, last year my friend Jim Somerville asked an important question to a few of us who were meeting to plan worship. He just asked, “In 20 years will people be getting in their cars and driving to a building for worship?” At the time I thought it was just another one of Jim’s questions. Now he is looking like a soothsayer!

How is the church, our church, Providence, going to respond to this new world? What are the things that we must do that can’t be replicated online? What are the things that we must expand into the “virtual world” to do?

It is not all gloom and doom! Just last week our church was visited by individuals from Austria, Switzerland, the European Union, Australia, Canada, and Great Britain—via our website!

It is the end of the world as we have known it! Welcome to the new world! So what are we going to do? I would love to hear your thoughts.