Jay Y. Kim - Analog Church: Why We Need Real People, Places, and Things in the Digital Age

I WEAR A WRISTWATCHAN APPLE WATCH, if you care to knowbut the face of the watch is an old fashioned set of watch arms: a long one for minutes, a shorter one for hours, and a moving second hand. The terms analog and digital arent part of my day-to-day vocabulary, but I suppose you could say my watch is a hybrid of analog and digital. An attempt, perhaps, to have the best of both worlds.

Of course, Im typing (or keyboarding) this on a laptop computer, which is nothing less than a godsend for any number of reasons. But I remember when I used to write on a piece of paper, text on the top half and footnotes on the bottom half, and then type it into a manuscript on a manualand later electrictypewriter.

My world is hybridity. The digital parts of my world are convenient (I really have no interest in typing on a manual typewriter anymore) and quick (using digital tools, I once did a bibliography for a book in about seven seconds). These are digital components Ive embraced. But I have some limits.

I dont read my Bible digitally (though I do research on biblical texts with Bible software programs). I buy lots of books, almost none of them electronically, and the ebooks I do have I dont use. I want to touch the pages, smell the paper, feel the binding, and underline and mark the pages.

We dont do church digitally. If my church went digital, Id stop going. We meet in a roommore than a hundred of us. We know one anothers names, we touch one another, laugh with one another, sip coffee with one another; we see one anothers faces and hear the timbre in one anothers voices.

Theres a theology behind what Jay Kim very helpfully calls Analog Church, and its the incarnation. God became one of us. He became Jewish, in the first century, in a Judea and Galilee ruled by Rome and its underlings. For some people Christianity is digital: God sent a message to us and we pick it up somehow, either believe it or not, and then either live according to it or not. But God didnt send a message. God sent his Son, born of a real woman, married to a real man who had a real job. They allthe whole lot of themexperienced real problems because very few bought their story of a virginal conception. But Jesus grew up and became a real man and found real humans with real bodies to follow him and extend his kingdom mission to the broken and wounded in his part of the world.

If Jesus is God incarnate, then God chose to reveal himself in analog, not digital. You can communicate a message in words and send such a message on paper/papyrus, but you cant see the revelation of God except in that one personthe person who lived, who died on a cross, who was raised up, who ascended, who rules, and who will come again. This is the treat you will find in Jays Analog Church. At that level, Analog Church provides an analog ecclesiology that conforms to the incarnation itself.

Church is the same way. We can communicate conveniently and quickly in digital formatsat my church we get an e-newsletter each week, and I like them. But we cant get to know one another apart from embodied realities. One cant do church digitally; the important things about church life are all embodied: knowing one another, loving one another, sitting and standing and praying with one another, listening to the sermon and watching the tone of the words and the movement of the body when we sing and walk forward to take communion. These are the things that make a church a church.

And yet the digital age has made some forms of communication, education, and instruction possible in ways previously impossible. We live in hybriditybut hybridity only cuts to the heart and soul if it is rooted in the embodied realities of analog. Kims book is an important read for those struggling with the inadequacies of our digital age.

Were all struggling to say the same old things in new and different ways. And so we must praise the new and different ways.