Brain Fast Food: Living and Ministering in an Age of Casual Thinking

One of the great advantages of the technological revolution is that we have unbelievable access to all kinds of great resources. One of the great disadvantages of the technological revolution is that intellectually speaking it conditions us to go after McDonald’s hamburgers rather than Ruth Chris steak. If we’re going to be honest, there are a lot of times where the quality of online content and the popularity of online content is grossly mismatched, whether that means popular content is low quality content or high quality content is unpopular. Let me give an example.

 

The Problem

I had an interesting experience a few days ago. I was invited to a Zoom seminar being put on by the school where I did my doctoral work. This was pitched as an alumni event, and normally I don’t have the opportunity to participate in alumni events since I live in Indy and the seminary is in Texas. But, this was an online event, so I could actually attend for once. On top of that, the speaker was my advisor and I was very curious to hear and support him. I signed up for the event, even though I knew the timing might be challenging given that we would have a newborn when the session was held. But I was excited to hear from an old mentor and I was a little curious to see the format, and thanks to an epic and supportive wife, it worked out. What happened really made me think.

The session itself began with some technical difficulties, but hey, we’ve all been there. Once the meeting began, however, I found the session edifying and helpful. The theme covered was wisdom in James, a theme my advisor and I had discussed quite a bit during my time in the program. He had done his doctoral work on James, and my project had followed in his footsteps so to speak. Still, hearing him survey the letter and show how the various themes in it played off each other and intersected with the letter’s teaching on wisdom was a helpful and encouraging refresher. There was time for Q&A’s afterward, and after fielding a few questions, the event ended after about an hour.

Objectively, the seminar was highly valuable. A man who had spent his entire life studying a book of the Bible walked through some of the key ideas of the book, showing how they intersected and fielding questions from the audience. What got me thinking afterward was not primarily the session itself, although the session was thought-provoking. What really made me think, however, was the fact that only eight people tuned in. Now, to be fair, some of that might have been due to technical difficulties at the beginning. I could see people trying to get in and giving up after five or so minutes. But even still, eight people is not that many. The seminary I graduated from is one of the largest in the world, and they hosted an online alumni event and had eight people come. Why the mismatch between quality and popularity? 

And not just here, but why does there seem to be this mismatch of quality and popularity everywhere? If I went back a hundred years, and told a random person that one day we would have something called the internet and that on the internet would be places where people could watch a video on virtually anything you could imagine, I’m sure he would have been absolutely in awe. If you told him that the most popular channel for videos was going to be by a guy who makes people go through bizarre challenges to win exorbitant amounts of money, I’m sure he would be more than a little confused. Of all the high quality content on YouTube, how is it that MrBeast is the most popular channel (no offense to MrBeast)? Why is silly, trite content doing leagues better than free seminary courses that have been uploaded to YouTube. Why do reels on Instagram have millions of views and high quality sermons have dozens? Why do we walk past diamonds so that we can get to packing peanuts?

 

The Diagnosis

As I’ve been thinking about this, a few thoughts have crystalized. First, I think part of the reason more people didn’t attend was that the session was synchronous, that is, that you had to be there live to participate. Most people are used to getting content whenever they want it. A podcast is just waiting for me to turn it on during my ride home (cranked up to double speed of course). That blog post I see a friend share on social media can be read later in the evening when I have time. Going to a live Zoom call takes work for me to plan on the meeting time, and for most people making plans to attend something virtually is a hard sell. 

But beyond the convenience factor, I think some of it is that our tastes are changing. To be honest, I would normally rather listen to a podcast than hear a deep lecture. One is conversational and I can listen casually. The other requires thinking and self-discipline to follow an argument. I’ve found that when I’m driving I can listen to most podcasts, but I can’t listen to preaching or Scripture reading or I start to get drowsy. There’s something easier about a podcast that doesn’t require the same level of engagement with my mind. 

Neil Postman warned us this would happen. I originally listened to Amusing Ourselves to Death on audiobook because I had heard it referenced and thought it would be a reference about not spending too much time watching TV. In some ways it was, but the book went far deeper and was more nuanced than that. Postman wasn’t so much telling us to not watch TV, as he was warning us that the advent of the technology of TV was reshaping public discourse. He saw that everything from news, to politics, to education, to religion was being reshaped by TV. If his warnings about TV are accurate, and I tend to think he was on to something, then the fragmentation and instantaneous nature of social media, email, entertainment, communication, and everything else is making it harder for us to do deep, challenging, long thinking. It’s like our brain is a muscle that we never really work out much anymore. 

As another writer would describe this, the danger is that too much instant coffee would ruin our taste for French press.[1] In other words, whether it’s food or the things we put in our minds, your diet will determine your appetite. If all you eat is junk food, all you’ll want is junk food. Rather than reading carefully written essays or journal articles that will take an hour to carefully read and fully digest, we want blog posts that max out at fifteen minutes. Rather than attend something like the Lincoln Douglas debates, which lasted for hours and covered topics in depth, we would rather see someone dunking on someone else on social media. Rather than read a book in our free time, we would rather watch a movie.

 

The Solutions

So what do we do about this situation in which we find ourselves? Let me make two practical suggestions for Christians who might be alarmed and bothered by these trends they see in the broader culture, and perhaps in their own hearts as well.

1. Challenge Your Mind

The first thing this means is that we work to make sure we aren’t constantly plugged into the drip of easy, shallow content. Sometimes we need to stop, and sit, and think. We don’t always need to have something for our minds to snack on. Sometimes the kind of thinking we do will require work and we will be tired at the end of it. That’s not only not bad. It can actually be very healthy. Sometimes we need to read things that are challenging, things that are old, things that we have to read in little pieces and chew over before we come back to read more. 

Part of this is a mindset shift. The flurry of new posts, new episodes, and new books can create a panic if we’re not careful. “I’m going to be left behind!” we fear, and so we are so focused on filling our minds quickly with new data. The key is keeping up, and sometimes we don’t stop to think about how important the information is so long as we are up to date. But it’s okay to get left behind if what is leaving us behind doesn’t really matter. We need to be selective about what we read, listen to, and think about. There is way too much information to keep up on everything you would like to. It isn’t going to happen. Once you accept that, the flow of novelty loses its power.

Of course, the most important thing you can do is attend church regularly. God has established a regular rhythm in the life of a believer where weekly they will hear God’s Word read and explained, and at x1 speed. But resistance also means reading books, good books, books that challenge you and make you think and grow. It means sometimes when you drive to work, you don’t plug in to something so that you can think and pray. I’m not saying you can never listen to a podcast. I listen to a lot of podcasts and like them. It doesn’t mean you should never read blogs (for example, please keep reading this one). It does mean we should all take a step back and ask ourselves, “What kinds of things have I been feeding my mind recently?” A little junk food now and then isn’t bad. A steady diet will make you sick.

 

2. Reach People Where They Are

At the same time, I am not calling for Christians to retreat from newer forms of media simply because they are popular or because they can be overdone (and often are). It has hopefully not escaped the reader that what you are reading right now is a blog post. I have been on podcasts, in fact we recorded a podcast episode for our church earlier this week. I am not saying that we should pull away from mediums that allow for convenient, helpful information. While we must be careful about the effect these mediums have on us if we overuse them, the mediums themselves are highly useful. 

Believe it or not, historically Christians have often been cutting edge. The desire to get out the most important message that has ever been known has led to innovation and a willingness to try new things that ended up being ahead of their time. The early Christians were some of the first to regularly use the form of the codex (book) rather than a scroll. They did so because they wanted to carry a small library with them wherever they went and to reference it quickly. Eventually the rest of the world realized the codex was superior and caught up. The first thing printed on the Gutenberg press was a Bible. Christians pioneered educating the masses, because they wanted people to be able to read their Bibles. I think we need to keep producing good Christian content on podcasts, blogs, books, YouTube videos, and other ways that connect with people. 

At the same time, I think we need to keep creating less popular but high quality content that a handful of people will interact with more thoughtfully, whether they be training courses or sermon series. I have seen high quality seminary lectures on Youtube and thought, “Wow, only 10,000 views for this? This content is legitimately worth hundreds of dollars. I’ve seen pictures of cats fighting with millions more views.” Yet, that is thousands of people who saw those videos, and perhaps were grown, challenged, and shaped by it. If I produce a thoughtful YouTube video, and 100 people watch it, and 20 people are really helped, and one person’s life is changed, why would I look down on that?

In other words, it’s not either/or. We need both. Create the content that people are used to and looking for, and also create content that simply isn’t going to be as popular and trust God to use it in someone’s life in a deep way. Get the message out, and use the various methods and means at your disposal to do that.

 

 

Many people have probably heard of the Joshua Bell experiment. A world-renowned violinist played in a subway one morning and made less than forty bucks. In some ways it feels like that happens every time someone logs on the internet and passes by good, solid material for cotton candy. Sadly, sometimes it feels like I do that. The reason the Joshua Bell experiment captures our imagination is because many of us realize that we probably would have walked right past him as well. We live in a world where easy wins out for most people, most of the time, often including us.

But what should we do about it? We’re not putting this genie back in the bottle. We can’t go back to a time when things were not this way and people generally focused better and weren’t so distracted. This is the way the world is. And our response should be twofold. We should make sure that we personally seek to avoid the worst excesses of our age. But we should also recognize the value of these methods and seek to use them, while also not being afraid to do things that might be less popular if we believe that they are of high value. I hope my alma mater keeps doing alumni Zoom seminars. And I might have talked myself into going to the next one, even if it isn’t my advisor and I have to put it in my calendar. 

 

[1] Ken Myers, All God’s Children in Blue Suede Shoes: Christians and Popular Culture (Wheaton, Il: Crossway, 1989), 14-15.

[2] “Pearls Before Breakfast: Can one of the nation’s great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let’s find out.” The Washington Post.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/pearls-before-breakfast-can-one-of-the-nations-great-musicians-cut-through-the-fog-of-a-dc-rush-hour-lets-find-out/2014/09/23/8a6d46da-4331-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e5f_story.html