The Social Church by Justin Wise

Author:Justin Wise [Wise, Justin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-8024-8746-9
Publisher: Moody Publishers
Published: 2014-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

JUICING, FIBER, AND HOW I ALMOST DIED

For instance, my wife and I got on a juice kick a little while ago. We bought a nice juicer and began juicing everything we could get our hands on. Beets, carrots, cucumbers, celery, oranges, lemons, limes, grapes—you name it, I’d juice it. (This included an ill-advised “salsa in a glass” episode involving the juice of tomatoes, onions, garlic cloves, and a jalapeño. If you want to see how fast your esophagus can constrict on itself, juice a jalapeño and drink it.)

Then there were apples. I loved juicing apples. I say “loved” because our chiropractor nearly banned me from juicing them after he learned how many I was consuming daily. Apples, along with many other fruits and vegetables, have “meat” (a.k.a. the stuff that’s not juice) that aids in the digestion of the sugars present in the juice. In other words, an apple has its own regulation system built in. The time it takes you to eat an apple—bite, chew, swallow—gives the body time to process all the sucrose. When you juice an apple, you take the regulation system out of the equation, forcing your body to work overtime to process all the sucrose naturally present in fruit juices.

Writing by hand works much the same way. When we write things by hand, our mind is forced to slow down and process things at a much deeper level. Even the fastest hand-writer is no match for a decently skilled person typing on a computer.

Writing by hand is the “regulation system” it takes to deeply process our thoughts and present them in a cogent way. Typing on a computer removes the “regulation system” to a degree and allows us to process our thoughts faster. Sometimes this is beneficial—we’re working on a deadline and need to have a proposal to a client immediately. Other times it’s not—we want to get the greeting card for our parents’ wedding anniversary just right.

It’s not to say one is better than the other. We just need to be aware that the medium we choose to convey a message influences the message itself. As McLuhan himself said, “The personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves or by any new technology.”4 To apply this in our earlier example, what we gain in efficiency by typing on a computer, communicating through social media we have the potential to lose the thoughtfulness that comes from writing a message by hand.

Volumes have been written about McLuhan’s statement, so I won’t continue to unpack what has been done elsewhere and in greater detail.5 But a cursory understanding of McLuhan’s principle is needed to see how it applies to churches in the twenty-first century. Understanding the mediums we use to communicate our message is critical.

When Martin Luther co-opted the printing press for the mass production of Bibles, it flattened the power structure of the entire church. An instrument of control, the printed Bible, was taken from the hands of those in power (i.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.