I should be asleep right now. Yesterday I was up for an elapsed time of about 30 hours with only an hour and a half intermission before I went to work. But I left my phone on by accident, and my church’s automatic message called and woke me up. Now I’m having trouble sleeping.
But while I was tossing and turning, a thought came to me: why is it that, on the web, Christianity is so much less available than, say, pornography? I someone finds themselves with a longing, he’s more likely to find a satiation for his physical desires than for his spiritual desires. Why is that?
The first answer that I came up with is that pornography’s easier. For that, all you have to do is take off your clothes and move around a little. A true expression of Christianity requires us to unclothe our souls.
Most of Christianity that’s easily expressionable comes in a corporate setting. Even preaching and teaching, which usually involves one person communicating with a group, works best when the response of the group happens… as a group. A mass of comments on a weblog, or a long list of forwarded emails is usually little recompense for being able to look to your neighbor and see in her face that the message is having an impact.
But if preaching and teaching on the web is less than satisfying, how much less the act of worship? It’s one thing to visit a worship music resource, or a prayer list. It’s quite something else for you to actually encounter something online that immediately inspires you to look to the living God. Let off the fact that it’s hard to find; it’s difficult to do. C. S. Lewis only wrote 7 Chronicles of Narnia. How many other written works directly inspire us to worship, instead of merely telling us how to do it, or worse, merely making a record of the fact that someone else has worshiped?
neumatikos 