Gospel Order and Convergence Culture (part 2)

This is the second part of a two-part essay written on Technology and Gospel order. You can find part one here.

The Gospel Order and the Nature of the Church

What Quakers call ‘Gospel order’ holds a particularly useful and rich account of the church participating together as the body of Christ under the reign of God. Theologically, Gospel order illustrates a set of powerful-practices that enable this kingdomlike reordering of our world discussed in part one. Gospel order is the structure of the Christian koinonia operating under the reality of Christ's Kingdom come. Within this structure all people are given room to express their gifts endowed by the Holy Spirit. For George Fox the body of Christ needs to recognize these gifts and put them to use, as he said, “Every member in the church hath an office: and is serviceable”(Roberts 118:2008).

But Gospel order is more than recognizing a ‘multiplicity of gifts’ as John Howard Yoder puts it in his outstanding book Body Politics, and it also goes beyond a simple non-hierarchical view of the body of Christ. Instead, it names the very nature, it’s being, of this body. Theologian Lloyd Lee Wilson explains that Gospel order retrieves the peaceful order established at creation:

Follow up:

Gospel order is the order established by God that exists in every part of creation, transcending the chaos that seems so often prevalent. It is the right relationship of every part of creation, however small, to every other part and to the creator. Gospel order is the harmony and order which God established at the moment of creation, and which enables the individual aspects of creation to achieve that quality of being which God intended from the start, about which God could say that "it was very good."

...it is an organizing principle by which Friends come to a clearer understanding of our relationship to God in all of the divine manifestations and the responsibilities of that relationship. An attention to Gospel order enables the meeting faith community [the church] to perceive and accept the spiritual gifts which God offers, as well as to develop and exercise those gifts as God desires. Finally, Gospel order is both a distinctive aspect of Quaker witness and testimony and the means by which Friends come to understand how they are to witness to the world" (Wilson 1996:4-5).

Gospel order then works itself out in at least three ways according to Wilson. First, the restoration and reconciliation of the created order to the Creator and our relationships to that order is a present reality not something continually deferred (Wilson 9). "The new order of the Kingdom of God, restoring the divine intent for the cosmos from its brokenness and sin, was (and is) Gospel order" (Wilson 9). Second, everyone could, if they were a part of the believing community, participate in Gospel order. This leveled hierarchy recognizes at a very structural level the priesthood of all believers and the reconciliation of all people in Christ (Gal. 3:27-28). Third, people can reject this ordering because Gospel order is fragile and does not impose itself (Wilson 9). The nature of Gospel order is non-coercive because creation is predicated on a primal unity. Further, it is by virtue of being a sign and symbol of God’s reign it witnesses to the rest of world a different reality. This means that by its very nature, the body of Christ, as it reflects the peace of creation, is a non-coercive witnessing and suasive community. The powers and principalities seek to overrun and crush the fragile balance of Gospel order. Thus discernment, resistance and the subsequent transformation of powers counter to the kingdom of God is also necessary part of this vision.

God’s Reign and Convergence Culture?

While technology is a dominating force in our world today God’s reign is not excluded from it, God’s reign can emerge from within as much as outside of this context. We often find unexpected places within the world where God’s Kingdom is reflected. For the last 50 years or so missiologists have argued that the Missio Dei (God’s Mission) is at work in cultures around the world whether the church is present there or not. One example might be to look at a few positive areas where God could be at work within ‘convergence culture.’ Let me explain what Henry Jenkins sees as the three features of Convergence Culture (2006) and then suggest one positive aspect of each.

First, media convergence looks at how content traverses mediums, platforms, and media industries beginning to cooperate more around the free flow of information. “Convergence is a word that manages to describe technological, industrial, cultural, and social changes depending on who’s speaking and what they are talking about” (Jenkins 3). One positive aspect here may be that culture appears to be drifting back towards a more holistic vision of reality, where life is not so divided up and people work together to keep information free flowing.

Second, participatory culture challenges the contrast between forms of spectator and purely consumptive media, where media flows in one direction from the producer to the consumer. In convergence culture, this flow is disrupted. Now consumers can produce the very content of which they want to consume (ibid). The best example of this is YouTube, which allows its users to create, upload, and comment on the video content of the site. One positive aspect here is that people who would not have a voice, or a chance to be heard through writing, music, video, etc now have that opportunity.

Finally, collective intelligence aids in the collecting and filtering of information. If our lives are constructed mythologies assembled in a piecemeal fashion of fragments of information, tradition, cultural as well as spiritual practices, than the faster and bigger our information culture grows the more difficult it becomes to make sense of our everyday lives. There is too much for anyone person to take in and process, thus sharing specializations and dialogue between consumers becomes essential. Collective intelligence signifies the collective process necessary within a convergence culture to make sense of the world. “None of us can know everything each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills” (Jenkins 4). What happens here is the dying off of the ‘expert’ paradigm where one person maintains power over the group and the group taking initiative to work together and share its gifts on projects/questions important to them.

The Church and Powerful-Practice

Taking our cue from Gospel order, and having a basic understanding of the changes within ‘convergence culture,’ I think the church needs to create communities of disciples who practice reconciliation, participation and resistance through discernment and transformation. Instead of rejecting technology and the World Wide Web, the church should rethink how it responds to these powers. This will start with a conviction that it is the church’s responsibility to form disciples in a way that encourages kingdomlike faithfulness in both the virtual and physical world. And along with this we need to approach this culture in the same way missionaries approach a foreign culture by asking, “how can we as the church find where God is at work in this culture and join that work?” The answer in this particular context may or may not mean: restructuring our communities around more decentered and mobile technologies; opening up the door for everyone to have a voice through the use of more socially-flattened media; occupying unlikely local and virtual spaces. In either case, all of this has to be done in a way that builds of the nature of the church that Gospel order recognizes and in my estimation will lead the church to resisting particular points of all powers. We cannot uncritically embrace technology or that power will consume and reconfigure the church under its own dominion.

Now I want to propose three powerful-practices for helping form communities that engage this convergence culture as a community of faithful Christians. We need to see the church as bound together through a true convergence of persons who relate to one another primarily through communion with the Holy Spirit. Second we should reconcile ourselves to all people through participating in Christ's body as it lives in the reality of the kingdom now. And finally, we need to abide as a community of peace within local/virtual space and time while continuing to challenge expert, or other dominating, paradigms.

The plurality of persons in the church is related to through Christ's work by loving our neighbors, whether they are local or virtual. This convergence of peoples gathers around Christ the Spirit, rather than relating to the Other through a mediator or external object (such as a website). Second, because of the reality of Gospel order the church recognizes the gifts of all people and continues to create a truly free space for everyone to have a voice wherever it is located. This is not out of tolerance, or inclusivity, which seeks to downplay difference. Rather it is motivated by the particularity of the Christ event, which has reconciled all people to God. A space is opened up for all people to the worship the creator through the gifts given to them. Finally, resistance and transformation comes in the form of abiding as peacemakers in local (and virtual) space. The church is first off a physical body and thus must always seek to gather and celebrate the created (physical) world. This practice of celebration doesn't reject the legitimacy of virtual spaces but recognizes the Gnosticism inherent in a digital world, as žižek says, “…Gnosticism is precisely a kind of spiritualize materialism: its topic is not directly the higher, purely notional, reality, but a “higher” BODILY reality, a proto-reality of shadowy ghosts and undead entities.”

The church has many new challenges as well as new opportunities ahead of it, I am excited for the possibilities of extending the mission of the church through new technologies and seeing new forms of church emerge but am also aware of the critical task and deep theological discernment this will require.