I had already been up this morning, typing on the computer. My nine year-old son came out from his bedroom and said “I miss Chris.” My son rarely expresses this kind of emotion, feelings reserved for cousins and very special friends. “I know, I miss him too. I thought he was really funny.”
Doesn’t sound that unusual, but the thing is, my son has never met Chris, at least physically. Chris Sligh was just voted off American Idol. We started watching the show a few weeks into the season this year,and we got hooked. In these past few episodes, my son felt connected to him, relating to him in a special way.
One thing I talk about in my classes is how modernity stretches space. Many many years ago, the space we shared with people always meant the sharing of physical space. Over the few hundred year span of modernity, more and more of our social world dealt with those at a distance from us, either across the town or across the world. Moreover, many of these people with whom we connected we did not even know, in the face-to-face conventional sense.
As Christian leaders, we spend the bulk of our time thinking about serving those with whom we share physical space. However, if physically proximate space is the only sphere in which we think missiologically, we might leave much of our social world untouched and ’secular’. Missional thinking, if it is to recognize that ‘the earth is the Lord’s’ and thereby all realms are candidates for redemption, must increasingly focus on faceless relationships as well as the face-to-face, on American Idol as well as the relationships in the home…
Technorati Tags: American Idol, Chris Sligh, everyday life, Social Space
