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The tiny: At a recent meeting in Johannesburg, Bindu Choudhrie explained how she and her husband Victor, a medical doctor, started several thousand churches in their region of India over the last decade. But if you went out to see something spectacular, you might miss it completely. The leaders are workers, housewives, students, and, in some cases, children. There is no large Easter or Christmas celebration to photograph—they don't celebrate those festivals. There are no weekly services to attend—they meet daily in homes over meals.
In his book Greet the Ekklesia, Victor describes it as a secret fellowship. "We do not go to church, as we are the Ekklesia, wherever we happen to meet, in a house or anywhere else. The house ekklesia is not a series of meetings in someone's house on a particular day, at a certain time, led by a particular leader. It is a household of God consisting of twenty-four-hours-a-day and seven-days-a-week relationships."
Tiny like a mustard seed. To see the tiny, we will need to unlearn the value system that has guided our vision. Thomas Friedman has called it the Cold War Mindset, a way of seeing that places undue value on size, weight, and longevity. That not only sums up the inhumane system of the grinding mechanical-industrial world: it pretty much describes how we used to introduce Christian conference speakers.
What did we go out to see? The influential missionary Roland Allen was once asked by his board to report some spectacular stories from the field. His response was unexpected: "I do not trust spectacular things. Give me the seed growing secretly every time."
The virtual: Much of our life has been relocated to the Web. But when we try to see church online with old eyes, we miss it. If older folk find themselves squinting awkwardly into the mysterious world of new media, our screen-age children have less of a vision problem. "Generation Text" are at home with the computer screen, which is replacing the movie screen as the primary visual medium. Cinematography taught us to see a sequential world where the future was always replacing the present and displacing the past. A disconnected world of cuts and invisible edits. We looked for the new as the old dissolved in a cross fade. Interestingly, the worship services of Western churches reflected the same mindset.
The computer screen shifts this way of seeing toward complexity and modularity, placing the power of navigation in the user's hands, teaching the eye to look for different things and in different ways.
We see that new media images are actually composites of nested layers. We can send layers to the back or bring them to the front. We can fade them with transparency or composite them with other layers—but we don't have to delete them.
We value continuity over cut. We expect navigation. Our eyes look for hyperlinks, places where we have been, places to go next. We seek the romance of virtual pilgrimage through what Lev Manovich has described as "navigable space."
We see the visible representation as less permanent than the invisible code that informs it—say, a sequence of numbers in a database that may or may not be accurately represented, depending on the operations performed on that data or the quality of the screen itself. Young people find it easy to see church this way also. Invisible and yet experiential, mystical yet tangible, global and yet aggregated locally and uniquely each time.
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