Dr Paul Allen

by Ted Peters Our church—evangelical, mainline, Catholic or Orthodox–seems like a sandcastle on an ocean beach. We can stand back and admire our craftsmanship. Then a wave washes up high, and a few grains of sand get eroded. Another wave erodes more of the castle. Wave after wave finally leaves the beach the way it had been before our architectural triumph. Wave after wave of cultural change is eroding our church under our very eyes. Silently and almost invisibly, the digital world is replacing the biblical world. The world of Bible study, hymn singing, praying in unison, and using God as the subject of sentences is becoming forgotten. What now absorbs our attention is a complex array of video gaming, net surfing, Instagramming, Zooming, texting, and sexting. The digital world is actually a disorganized composite of min-worlds. In only half an hour, any teenager can be introduced  to the worldviews of QAnon, Sufism, yoga, new age meditation, naturalism, spiritual-but-not-religious,...