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| Can you hear me now? No! You’ve no doubt seen the commercial in which the farmer, in his corral, is wiping his brow in disbelief. There, milling about looking for feed, are 200 dachshunds. As though reading his mind, Sprint’s version of Neo appears — a trench-coated specialist who looks like he’s been sprung from the Matrix — and tells the rancher that the problem may be his cell phone. “What did you say?” he asks. “I ordered 200 oxen and got 200 dachshunds!” “Umm. Static,” says Neo. A dachshund stampede ensues. Verizon Wireless, competing for cell phone dollars, is also tapping in on our need not only to be heard, but to be understood. A Gen-X, Keanu Reeves look-alike prowls around in assorted locales — the beach, the street, a mall — and asks, “Can you hear me now? Gooood!” Of course, the question is moot if you don’t have a phone. One factoid that frequently surfaces in high-level economic and social forums is the notion that “half the world has never made a phone call.” The assertion was made by former Vice President Al Gore in 1998, repeated by HP’s Carla Fiorina in 2001, and by a number of other leading business and political figures. But it’s not true, even though it was once true. Clay Sirky of New York University’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program makes a persuasive case in Wired: By 2001, more than a billion land lines had been laid throughout the world, and the rate of growth in lines laid was greatest in the developing world. In six years China went from 41 million to 179 million; more than 40 other Third World nations doubled their land lines in the last six years of the millennium. These figures pale to the growth in cell phone sales. The number of mobile phones went from 91 million in 1995 to 986 million in 2001, and the number continues to grow. The words of a popular advertising campaign, “Understand me, unleash me, uber me,” have become the mantra of the masses. Never has being in tune been so urgent, and out of tune been so common. This should be instructive for the church. It’s popular in some circles to argue that more than half the people of the world have never heard the gospel. It’s likely not true. We’ve heard, but not understood. The people of the “post” world we live in — postmodern, post-Christian, post-feminist and so on — are fed up with static and interference. When you live post-9/11, when you’re still waiting for your dividend check from WorldCom, when you’re trying to develop your personal plotline for life, when you’re desperately looking for a container for your joy, when you’re living with wars and rumors of war, you’d like someone — anyone — to pick up the white courtesy telephone and make a small connection that validates you, affirms you and gives you hope. Yet it is arguable whether the good news is getting a hearing. Tony Campolo, America’s uberprophet and critic, invited to speak to the National Council of Churches to address the question of how mainliners can better understand evangelicals, told them that he had read through their “platform” and approved of most of it. But then he added something to the effect: “I’ve got to tell you: This looks a lot like the Democratic Party platform. What I am interested in is how your theology supports your positions.” Evangelicals don’t do much better in the popular culture. George Barna Research recently released a poll in which people were asked to rank 12 groups in terms of their “favorability.” Evangelicals as a group came in next to last, right behind lesbians, but ahead of prostitutes. Oops! If evangelicals are asking, “Can you hear me now?” the answer clearly is “No!” What to do: We need to remember that the church is about relationships not locationships. Pool reporters during the 2000 presidential campaign teased Alexandra Pelosi who was filming a documentary of George Bush that would later air as an HBO special called Journeys with George,”about her locationship with a certain Newsweek reporter. When you’re both flying around the country 24/7, you can only hope for periodic locationships — not anything that can develop into something more meaningful. The church is in love with location. If we stay in one place we’re apt to be unheard or misunderstood by the audience we’re trying to reach. We love nothing better than to erect buildings and develop sprawling ecclesial campuses. The church is not about locationships: It’s about vocationships and relationships. Christianity is at its core an itinerant and a relational gospel. Jesus walked and talked — “Can you hear me now?” — and the early church did its evangelizing in the marketplace. New millennium ministry is also about clarity not noise. Interference, static, noise — it all affects the transmission of the message. We are facing today unparalleled challenges with cultural, generational, gender and ethnic noise that require new skills to communicate the good news. Sometimes, we’re not even speaking a language people understand. We may have lost sight of the essential mission of the church by confusing the prophetic ministry of the church with the political agenda of national parties. A preacher grinding a prophetic axe in the pulpit often sounds like a politician wielding the axe to someone in the pew — because for many, the only difference between a preacher and a politician is a well-chosen Bible verse, and the result is litmus-test Christianity. Finally, the church in 21C is about speed not stasis. The lifespan of a typical church is about 70 years. Churches that die have failed to pass on to succeeding generations the core values that enabled it to enjoy early vitality. When you’re a 28K modem church in a cable modem world, you’ll soon be irrelevant. Research shows that 80 percent of the nation’s Protestant churches are either in decline or have leveled out. After 10 years, most new-start churches are not much over the 100-member level they realized initially. Only a few of these dead or dying churches will become “turnaround” churches — churches that redefine their mission and their methods to fulfill it. “Go into all the world and make disciples,” Jesus said. We may be doing that, but we should be asking, “Can you hear me now?”
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