The right tool for the job

Expert carpenters will always say, “The right tool for the right job, and the right job for the right tool.” The key for any task is to connect the job and the tool. One can use a screwdriver as a chisel or as a crowbar—I’ve done it and so have most people—but it isn’t designed to work that way and is more liable to break.

I was thinking of this a couple weeks ago when I happened to encounter two people who were enamored by two different tools. One was a fellow professor, a church historian, who complained that his students did not want to read ancient histories. They might be persuaded to read a modern history of ancient times, but they thought that ancient histories of ancient times were useless, even though our modern histories are largely based on them. The other was a hierarch in the church-at-large, who wrote an email promoting twittering and Facebook as a panacea. It would build relationships, fulfill the Great Commission, and unleash the power of prayer. Besides, this is what Jesus would have done, I was told.

My first reaction was to bristle at the sanctimonious tone of the latter. As I wrote back to him, our Lord was concerned about repentance and faith, not about being a spokesman for a particular technology or, for that matter, an opponent of it. I granted that Christians have all sorts of freedom to use technology or to refrain from using it, and in either case they would have sound reasons. Later I thought that I could have made a better case by arguing that he was trying to use the wrong technology to accomplish the right goals. In effect, he was using a screwdriver as a chisel, and he was likely to break it.

Twittering and similar media are great tools to communicate simple information quickly. At our church we use emails as a way to plan for upcoming events or to remind people of them. We send out the bulletin and newsletter electronically, and we try to keep things up to date on the website. For the communication of raw information, it is hard to beat digital media.

But do these things really build relationships? It is easy to fool ourselves into thinking that they are. To the extent that tweets and a Facebook page enable us to get information about ourselves into the hands of others, it does give the impression that we are building a relationship, since relationships grow in part as people get to know each other better. But real relationships grow in the give-and-take world of interpersonal communication. Merely because 300 of your designated BFF’s have read your updated Facebook page it doesn’t mean that you have people who are willing to love you in good times and in bad and who are willing to confront you lovingly when you go astray. Either we communicate banalities in our digital media or we issue scathing denunciations that lack the loving environment of the face-to-face encounter. Neither builds real relationships.

Moreover, these are poor tools for giving thoughtful answers to important questions. Even blogs can be bad for this if one approaches blogging more as a long tweet than as an electronic version of an essay. The digital media allow us to access all sorts of information, but (like Wikipedia) the information may be overwhelming in scope and still not entirely accurate.

While we have been overestimating the value of some electronic media, we may have been underestimating some older tools. My church historian colleague was correct. There is great value in reading ancient histories (secular or religious) rather than simply reading whatever modern historians have to say about those times. Granted, ancient histories don’t build relationships any more than the digital media do, but that is not their value. They allow us to see a different perspective than our own. Historians writing today bring their questions, biases, and agenda as they look at ancient events. It is refreshing to read ancient accounts of these events since these authors in effect say to us, “We didn’t even think about those questions you are raising. They would have seemed irrelevant or bizarre to us. Here is what happened as we looked at in our own terms. If you want to understand what we were doing and why, you have to listen to our explanations, even if it means that we live in very different worlds. However, you might actually understand yourselves better if you took the time to contemplate the similarities and differences between how we looked at the world and how you do.” I could add that I learned more by reading the historians Socrates Scholasticus and Sozomen (who wrote about 4th century church history) than I did by reading all the secondary histories and being taught by an expert in that era of the church. More than that, I came to understand better the way the struggles inside our church body were playing themselves out.

By all means, read ancient and modern histories, read newspapers, blogs, and tweets. Engage in face-to-face dialogue, and use your Blackberries. Just use the right tool for the right job, and find the right job for the right tool.

© 2010 James A. Kellerman