The Good Ol' Days

This morning I was thinking about all the things we do simply because we don't want to learn a new/better way. Call it "old dog new tricks" or simply being lazy, but we as a society don't like to learn new things or change what we're doing to be better. A few general examples would be our QWERTY keyboard (the way we type was intentionally used to slow fingers down to stop typewriter keys from sticking, but we still use it) or the metric system (America finally joined the rest of the world by officially using metric in 1993, but we don't actually use it, it's too much to learn, even though it's easier and people still don't know the system we have now, Lorie still asks me how many ounces are in a pound...)

So I started thinking about the ministry I'm involved in. This summer marks 10 years of full-time ministry for me. What if I still did things the way I did a decade ago...

~if I wanted to reach everyone in the youth group, it meant calling and leaving a message at each house or mailing a letter. No cell phones, no text messaging and only nerds had email (like me...)
~to mail something, like a newsletter, if I wanted art I would have to photocopy the art from a book, cut it out, tape it to the letter I was making, and photocopy it again. Programs like publisher were expensive and since my top of the line computer had a hard drive of 3 (yes 3!) gig, saving pictures was not an option (and that was my home computer, my church computer way worse).
~to do anything with video it required careful planning and recording everything on a camera in order or painstakingly plugging two VCR's in together and play/pause/record/pause/play/stop. But seeing how no one could afford a projector, the only way to watch a video was for me to carry a TV and VCR downstairs to the youth room. It happened seldom.
~without projectors, Sunday morning worship was the almighty overhead, black letters on a shining white backdrop. And after singing a verse a giant black hand would swoop in from the side, all the lyrics would blur to the right and new ones would appear then need to be adjusted, centered, flipped over and/or turned right side up. For every verse of every song for every service...
~recording a service was done on tape. If someone wanted a copy, it meant plugging two tape recorders into each other and waiting through the entire sermon again (unless you had an awesome tape duplicator like my college which could do a tape in 1/4th the time!)
~all pictures of youth events were done on film. You could get digital copies made so you could print more than one for your group, but that would require finishing the roll and waiting the four days for it to go out of town and come back on a Kodak CD.
~no video illustrations, no youtube.
~there were no online or offline Bible programs. All lessons, sermons, etc. were done with the lesson book, a Strong's Concordance and pure Bible knowledge.

And that's just off the top of my head in a little under a decade. And I know what the purists, those that don't like change, are going to say, none of this changes the gospel message. And that's true. But it's changed how I present the gospel. It's changed how I get that message to people. It hurts to think of all the time I "wasted" (there was no other way) when I could have been working more on my sermon or with students. Even this blog, wouldn't have happened a decade ago. Instead of spending most of my time preparing for a Sunday morning photocopying overheads, putting them in order, then having half my sermon prep be cross-referencing or trying to find that verse I know is in Romans somewhere, I can spend more time on the content and presenting that message.

Don't be an old dog. I just had to pause a second ago because Julie came in with a newsletter question, trying to get a photo where it should be for our church newsletter "Rooted". Man, that would have never happened a decade ago...

T