Worship at Resurrection (Part 2 of 5)- Praise Service (continued)

Sermon: The Power of the Crowd

Following the Scripture reading, the lights went black, and a video played on the screens.  The following words appeared phrase-by-phrase on a plain white background much to the congregation’s amusement.  (While they may not have been very enthusiastic singers, their laughter here was refreshing.)

What if life was more than just a status update, tweet, email, txt?

What if you had friends you have actually met?  OMG!  lolz!  :-P

What kind of crazy world would this be???

Have a life you can Like.

The Real Social Network

(The video itself is viewable at this link on the right side of the screen.  Scott’s full sermon as preached at the 10:45AM traditional service is viewable here.) 

Rev. Scott Chrostek

Scott returned to the stage, bringing with him a clear glass table on which I assume some sort of notes rested, but it was a little difficult to tell at first, and the screens gave no insight, as the camera operators were focusing on Scott’s upper body and not panning over to the table.  I would later discover that this structure was actually a full transparent podium, on which Scott’s notes rested, but I didn’t know this at the time.  Scott’s tone was seamless and fluid, almost as if he were speaking from a memorized manuscript.  Scott must have been wearing some sort of headset mic, but the wire was so thin that I couldn’t quite tell where on his face it was positioned, and this did a good bit to put me at ease since I tend to dislike headsets mics for appearing just a little too slick.  This sermon was the second in a three-part series on social media, and I feel like Scott was looking at a lot of the same behavioral economics questions I’ve been asking lately in my rereading/listening of Freakonomics.  Of course, with such a technology-based topic, I couldn’t help but wonder if everyone in the room could fully relate to the subject matter.  It might be the most Millennial/Gen X sermon I’ve ever heard, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I do look forward to teasing a little more out of it in the next services I attend at Resurrection tomorrow morning.

As Scott began speaking, I could feel a certain tension about him, and it made me nervous at first.  He was carrying a rigidness in his shoulders, which were at full attention, while his neck was leaned forward to create a slightly uncomfortable contrast in his posture.  He seemed pretty nervous at first and spent the first few minutes of his sermon with his arms crossed in front of him before something seemed to click, and he relaxed.  As his shoulders unfroze, I felt myself relax as well, and I was able to enjoy the sermon after that.  Scott and the praise team had just returned from leading worship at the Missouri Annual Conference, so I’m even more inclined to forgive everyone for a slight off night.  Having just preached that event and with at least four repetitions of the same sermon coming up tomorrow (blended service, traditional service, another praise service, downtown service), I can see how Scott’s delivery tonight might have started out just a little awkward before he hit his stride.

He began by revisiting his previous sermon, explaining that social media have enabled the creation of a global community in ways previously impossible, and from there he started talking about the idea of crowds.  Scott explained that talking too much about quantity often undercuts quality (especially when you’re talking about numbers of people), and it seemed like he was drawing on Resurrection’s own growth --both numerical and spiritual-- as a sort of implied example.  I cannot recall whether or not he ever made this connection explicitly, but in the collective psyches of those present, you could sense a collective neuron firing.

Scott’s next illustration involved the battle of Jericho from Joshua 6.  You remember the battle of Jericho:

Joshua fought the battle of Jericho

Jericho, Jericho

Joshua fought the battle of Jericho

And the walls came a-tumbling down.

Okay, Scott did not use that old tune, but he did talk about how Joshua and the Israelites stayed so faithful to God’s instruction to be silent, and can you imagine being silent and marching around a city for seven days when you had just spent forty years wandering through the desert to get there?  As Scott pointed out, the Israelites must have had some serious pent-up energy at this point!  There was power in that crowd, and God blessed them by bringing down the walls of Jericho when their silence was finally broken with cries of celebration.  Scott rattled off a few other examples of powerful crowds: a U2 concert, the Christmas Eve candlelight service, the phenomenon of homefield advantage, mob mentality-- whether for good or for ill, all of these indicate that there is significant power when people gather together.

Scott talked about the rising trend of “Crowdsourcing,” when companies broadcast a problem to the community in order to attain an answer.  We see this with status updates on facebook all the time, where there are often situations in which a problem thrown out to the community generates immediate feedback and answers.  Of course, then there’s Wikipedia; as we collaborate more and more, the access to reliable information becomes greater and greater, undermining the authority of previously established “professional experts.”  Scott didn’t use this particular example, but just look at what we’ve discovered about the housing market in recent years through the availability of information on the internet; there’s enough floating around out there that realtors could probably become extinct within the next decade or two.  Even the news is benefitting, as viewer-contributed videos and photos submitted through the internet now get spotlights in local --and even national-- news, and nowhere was this impact more profoundly felt in recent weeks than with amateur footage of the Joplin destruction.  Through the internet, we are all rapidly becoming citizen scientists and journalists, full experts in our own right.

There is a dark side to this though: as we become increasingly dependent on our computers for information and entertainment, we enter into lives of isolation.  Citing Adam Thomas’s book, The Digital Disciple, Scott talked about gaming addiction, focusing specifically on World of Warcraft and the screen-focused, quest-fixated culture that surrounds it.  Scott painted a picture for us: imagine a group of baseball fans who go to a game together and, instead of watching the game itself, they keep their eyes glued to their iPhones and Blackberries, watching for the game to affect the stats of their fantasy leagues.  That’s what we run the risk of becoming in this technological age dominated by social media.  We hide behind screens, and we make ourselves into desert islands, hapless and alone because building face-to-face connections has just gotten too inconvenient.

Citing The Happiness Project, Scott argued that people are always happier when they’re with other people.  In surveys by that book’s authors, even self-described introverts admitted to enjoying the majority of activities more with another person present.  In fact, the only activity for which people consistently claimed to prefer solitude was prayer.  Jesus preferred to have company as well.  In fact, Jesus liked having big crowds of people.  He preached to crowds, he was sentenced to death by a crowd, and he died trying to reconnect with that crowd.  Jesus told his disciples (and, by extension, us) that whenever we gather together, he is there as well.  As Christians, we are people who gather, and when there is a crowd of us, Christ is in our midst.

Scott’s final illustration involved a Resurrection member named Kevin who had been in a motorcycle accident (struck by a drunk driver along with his mother while the two of them were on their way home from a service at Resurrection’s downtown KC campus).  Amazingly, both of them are alive and in recovery, but when Scott went to visit Kevin, he was dismayed when Kevin immediately asked him to check in on facebook and tell other people to come by.  Scott eventually did this, but before he did, he spent some time with just him and Kevin, because why spend time on an iPhone on facebook when you’ve already got someone right there?  Social media is a great way to invite people to come and join you, but it can’t replace the simple joy of having someone there with you physically.  As he closed, Scott called on us to think of the loneliness which many in Joplin are now enduring.  How will we help bring the love of the risen Christ to them?

Antiseptic Communion

Scott read an abbreviated version of the Communion liturgy and incorporated language of community and social media, driving home the connection between Communion and community.  As Scott prayed, the keyboardist returned to the stage and played the keys lightly under the prayer.  Scott asked God to make us salt and light to this world, and he then implored us to take Communion reverently and to be in a spirit of prayer as we did so.  This would prove difficult for reasons I’ll explain in a moment.  The keyboardist continued to play as she now sang,

Come, ye sinners, poor and needy,
Weak and wounded, sick and sore;
Jesus ready stands to save you,
Full of pity, love and power.

I will arise and go to Jesus,
He will embrace me in His arms;
In the arms of my dear Savior,
O there are ten thousand charms.

She had a wonderful voice that had a certain ethereal quality to it, and as she sang, an usher signaled for Luke’s and my row to come up and receive Communion.  So far in this service, I had experienced some musical choices that didn’t sit well with me and a sermon that I thoroughly enjoyed, but this was where things just got plain awkward.

As we walked by the usher, we had to hold out our hands and receive a little spritz of hand sanitizer.  Neither Luke nor I could really keep from rolling our eyes, and this was a subject of much discussion on the drive back to the Wetzels’ house after the service.  First of all, it’s not like we were handling other people’s bread.  In fact, the pre-cut pieces of bread (which were stored in plastic bags that rattled noticeably in the Communion stewards’ wicker baskets) were dropped into our hands from a good inch or two above by a germ-conscious steward.  I suppose some germs could have been transmitted when we dipped our bread into the grape juice, but even this didn’t seem like a risk worth disinfecting the whole congregation.  Second, the tiny amount of hand sanitizer was barely enough to get even one hand damp, let alone kill all the germs on two, so the disinfecting effort was just a token gesture at most.  In fact, as almost all of that salvific mist had landed on my right hand, my left could have still been festering with the plague for all we knew.  Third, as a slight hypochondriac, I am thoroughly adept at imagining that I taste or feel things that aren’t really there, so of course, my Communion elements tasted like Purell to me, and that taste lingered in my mouth all the way through dinner and on into the evening.  Bleh.  Lastly, there’s a long-standing practice in churches that observe a common cup where, if you are sick or ever so slightly germaphobic, it’s considered courteous to cross your arms, receive a blessing, and bypass the touching/dipping/eating process entirely.  In other words, the whole hand sanitizer thing is both ineffective and unnecessary, and I really don’t like the symbolism of having to be sanitized before accepting a physical reminder of purification.  I think Luke summed up this sanitizing effort perfectly in five words: “Well, that was just silly.”

Obviously, this isn’t that big of a deal, but it was kind of a buzzkill after what had been a very engaging and relevant sermon.  With the singing of one more chorus and a few announcements, we were dismissed, and I found myself feeling conflicted.  I had really enjoyed the sermon, but what about the rest of the service?  As missions-driven as Resurrection seems to be, I want to write very nice things about them, but I just wasn’t really feeling it Saturday evening.  The music didn’t invite me to sing as much as the band seemed to desire, and that hand sanitizer had quite literally left a sour taste in my mouth.  I’m just one worshiper (well, two worshipers if you count Luke’s input), so my opinion certainly isn’t gospel, but these might be things that need refining as this service continues to develop.

I Have a Theory

I think there were a number of confounding variables here that altered my opinion of the service, and I find it interesting how much Scott preached against social isolation, because I think a certain amount of the megachurch appeal lies in being able to control your weekly intake of human interaction.  In a larger church, you can have all the friends in the world, or you can be a total desert island-- it’s your decision.  That is one of the things about the megachurch that I have found most interesting in my travels so far: whether you like to blend in or stand out, megachurches have a niche for you.  In the case of Resurrection though, I visited the church for the first time with a friend, meaning that I had some automatic social interaction, and I’m wondering how this affected my perception of the service.  Obviously, I was happy to have Luke there with me as he functioned as a very well-informed extra set of eyes and ears (not to mention a great source of information on the church), but his presence did change how I interacted with the people around me, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe, through no fault of Luke’s, the simple fact that I was not alone and seeking out other people, might have made me see the service more negatively.   Without the drive to get along with my neighbor in the seat next to mine, perhaps I was simply less invested, and this enabled my brain to disengage and view things from a more detached, critical perspective.  I’ll be curious to see how my other church visits go when I have someone else along for the ride.

Well, one service down.  More to come on Sunday, and I’ll also have more thoughts to offer on the megachurch and isolation.  After all, I got to hear Scott’s sermon four times, so I was able to reflect a little more deeply each time I heard it.