The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion by Challies Tim

Author:Challies, Tim [Challies, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780310591696
Publisher: Zondervan
Published: 2011-04-19T00:00:00+00:00

A Lesson from a Brother

In the months that I worked on this book, I listened to the audio version of Brother Andrew’s old book God’s Smuggler. Though Brother Andrew is known primarily for his work in smuggling Bibles into Communist countries during the days of the Cold War, there was another critical component to his work behind the Iron Curtain. As he went from nation to nation, he visited churches and pastors, bringing them greetings from the Christians on the other side of the Curtain, Christians from the free world. This was a ministry of encouragement that became almost as important as his work of delivering Bibles. The greetings he brought to the churches assured the tiny pockets of Christians that they had not been forgotten. Men and women would weep to learn that their brothers and sisters in Christ, though a world away, were praying for them. It was his presence among them that assured them of this, that spoke of the depth of this Christian love.

Though Brother Andrew was God’s smuggler, he was also God’s envoy, his representative. As he stood there in flesh and blood, standing in nations that denied the existence of God and sought to destroy Christ’s body on earth, he stood as a physical manifestation that the church would survive and that the family was intact. This was not something he could do through a letter on paper or a message on a screen. It was his presence that mattered more than his words. There he was, im-mediately before them, a display of love and Christian fellowship.

In an electronic, mediated world, let’s not neglect the privilege and responsibility we have to be real people in a real world. E-mail and text messaging are inevitable aspects of life, and there is no reason to forsake them altogether. But let’s keep them in their proper context as supplemental and lesser forms of communication. We may well find that if we are to fulfill God’s mandate on earth, we will need to communicate less often so we can communicate more. We will need to forsake the ease and the pace of quantity for the reflective significance of quality.

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