Mark Sayers is a deep thinker, especially when it comes to thinking about culture and where culture is going.
He had a lot to say, but what he really wanted to talk about was the beautiful apocolypse.
What he argues is that we are now in the age of the image. In this age, there is a death of inwardness. In the age of social networking, selfies, and the desire to document and share everything in our lives, we spend less time "becoming" selves and more time creating an image of ourselves that we want others to see and that we want to believe.
He described travelling to New York and watching a whole bunch of people taking pictures with their phones, and nobody living in the moment or connecting with one another. He also shared about the movie "Her" where people had ceased to be connected with one another, but had been completely been drawn into a virtual world of connecting through social networks and other messaging services, but never connecting meaningfully by truly sharing lives and being present with each other. He sees this as a death of society, an apocolypse that is neither some progress to utopia or some Mad Max view of the future. We are just lost in a cult of self.
He shared how more and more a cult of the body, and a worship of the body is also becoming a part of the age of the image and the worship of self.
This increasingly virtual world, Sayers argues, destroys the foundation that the church and Christian mission have been built upon. There is no social framework to connect to and build upon.
He shares that church folks will have to create and do church in different ways, but on the same foundation of the creeds and faith of the past. Churches may need to create the structure for people to connect and to get outside of themselves in order to reach them.
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