Pete Cashmore of Mashable wrote an interesting column at CNN this week. He talks about the new “Facebook killer” on the block, Diaspora. Specifically, Cashmore says that Diaspora will be no threat to Facebook for one simple reason: it is foundationally an improved Facebook clone, not an innovation. I think he is right, but even if you don’t care about such things, there is a huge lesson to be learned here for the Church.
The Christian Church has always been good at mimicry. We can take just about any successful technology, idea, method, or style and create a Christianized version of it. Ever hear of GodTube? Yeah. YouTube + Jesus. Christian search engines? Wouldn’t want to come across any sinners, right? The problem is that as long as we are mimicing and not innovating, the Church will be an obscure, parasitic sub-culture instead of becoming the transformative counterculture that Jesus called it to be.
I’m not calling for a re-creation of the wheel, nor am I saying that history cannot teach us. Rather, I’m saying that history DOES teach us. It teaches us that it is the innovative thinkers that in the end lead the culture into the future. Innovation changes the culture, not parasitic mimicry. This is the potential danger that I see in the current push for cultural relevancy. It’s not just that we could lose the message of the gospel. We must be careful to not only refrain from compromising the message, but we must also refrain from falling into the trap of cheap mimicry that seeks to beg, steal, and borrow the most superficial aspects of current culture. In the end, it just comes off as, well, cheap.
We should be students of culture so that we can see the holes in it where innovation needs to happen. Cultural savvy is important not only to help us communicate in the vernacular, but more importantly it should give us insight into how those who worship the Creator can enter the culture and transform it with ideas born in the mind of God.
I’m praying that we all learn to be led by the Spirit. When we mimic Him, we will tap into the ultimate Innovator and we will cease to be irrelevant.
