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HiFi Faith in a WiFi World
Have you heard the one about the fish?
“There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the [heck] is water?”
David Foster Wallace’s mini parable illustrates how difficult it is to identify and discuss the reality we are immersed in.
We live at an interesting time, when about half of us were primarily shaped by an era one might call “analog”, while the other half grew up as “digital natives” (those whose formative years happened after the release of the smartphone). Another version of our piscine parable has the older fish exclaiming “water’s warm today!”, to which the younger fish still have no response because they still don’t know what water is. They don’t even know they’re “swimming”, or that one swims “in” something, or that what they swim in is a thing called “water” – and they certainly have no point of reference to know that the “water” they’re “swimming in” has changed.
It’s easy for those who have experienced a shift in our common culture to take for granted that everyone feels the contrast of before and after as viscerally as we do. However, our little fish who grew up with smartphones, tablets, and streaming services – they have no contrast to feel.
Often, our response is to play the “wise old fish”, explaining to these small fry what water is and why it used to be better. There’s certainly a place for the hard-won wisdom of experience to offer a vision for life that is less myopic, more expansive, not so scared of standing out. “Go ahead and be a weirdo!”, we might say, “if your friends really want to spend time with you, they can reach you without a cell-phone – we always managed in my day”.
But the ocean has changed – the young fish aren’t swimming in the same waters – and you can’t change it back. Or, moving away from our fish metaphor, no one who has tried to stem the tide of culture has succeeded. It is not the same world you grew up in, and by the time our young people grow up and have young people of their own, it will be a new world yet again.
For those in the Church, our call and inherited legacy (though imperfect) is to live as faithful representations of Jesus in every era, in all cultures, no matter the challenges of the day. This is resilient discipleship. If we are to continue in that legacy, we must bring the most bizarre and broken parts of our cultures to God, trusting that He isn’t merely interested in damage control, but has something hopeful to offer. His whole M.O. is bringing life from death, after all. These parts of our world that seem out-of-control are exactly where it becomes imperative that we hold onto the sovereignty, authority, omnipresence, and goodness of God. Frankly, if we don’t believe God is able to bring beauty out of binary, there’s a serious bug in our theology.
Recently, I met with a group of 18-20 year olds to run our digital discipleship workshop with them. In these workshops we discuss how everything we do and interact with contributes to our spiritual formation, and we offer functional discipleship on living Christianly in a digitally-connected world. At the end of our time together one young woman thanked me for helping her see things differently and “not feel so bad, because the primary emotion I associate with using my phone is shame.” My heart broke for her. To be clear, she wasn’t saying “I have bad habits that are enabled by my phone, and I feel shame about that”. This is just a normal girl, doing normal things to stay connected to her communities, feeling ashamed by default because she has been told again and again that these ubiquitous devices are inherently evil and should be avoided. The water’s not as good as it used to be – we should all just stop swimming.
Shame doesn’t come from the Holy Spirit. God’s plan is not for young Christians to become so self-conscious of the threats in their cultures that they cease to participate in public life; cease to have anything meaningful to offer their peers; cease to have a holy imagination for bringing embodied redemption to the here and now. As older, (sometimes) wiser fish, we need to do more than just tell the young ones what water is and why it’s different now. We need to learn how to swim differently. There’s value in intentionally unplugging, but there is equal value in plugging-in thoughtfully. We can start by holding ourselves to the same convictions we want to see in our culture: how many screens do you use at once? Try one at a time. How many apps are on your home screen? Try stripping back to 3 essentials. Do you use your devices in bed? At the table? Do you have your phone out when you meet people in person? Put it away!
Young people are hungry for real guidance in this area of life. We must start digging out the roots of our unwillingness to bring robust, Jesus-centric, self-sacrificial, counter-cultural discipleship to this sphere.
Of course we’ll feel the tension of this changing reality. If you’re not a little bit of a technophobe, you’re probably not paying attention. But if we’re never willing to be part of the solution, we can’t be too shocked when it feels like there isn’t one.
Start with humility. These waters are easier for little fish to navigate – it’s all they’ve ever known. Practice finding Jesus in all things – cultivate hope. Pray for revelation on how your use of technology is forming your spirit – ask Jesus to heal the broken bits and stoke the sanctifying ones.
InterVarsity is invested in creating resources and workshops on digital discipleship because we want to develop Christians who are passionate about human flourishing in every area of life, and who live as undivided persons. We can help young people hold hope and godliness in their digital lives. They can live as ones who are free from shame. They can grow into people who are equipped to live out the Gospel through any shift in culture, trusting that God is good and powerful to redeem all of creation.
Bio: Sanjana works on InterVarsity’s Communications team, focusing on digital ministry. If you are interested in booking a digital discipleship workshop for your youth/YA group, or ministry team, book a 30-min consult call here: Sanjana Daniel Booking Page or send an email to: [email protected]
