In a culture of instant communication, anything less than a tangible, high speed connection with God can be challenging for today’s young disciples. Revd Greg Downes unpacks five areas we need to teach into if teenagers are to fully understand the reality of a life-long connection with God.
Barack Obama’s half-sister, Auma Obama has just written a memoir, And then Life Happens. In it she writes about being reconciled to her long lost half-brother. The two siblings eventually met and shared their common history of familial love and loss of a shared father who was not present for either of them.
In an interview to an American television channel she spoke of her first meeting with her famous sibling. ‘When I met my brother we had this instant connection. I was able to talk to him and he really understood what I was talking about…’ Clearly Obama’s ability of ‘instant connection’ is not something just limited to family. Four years ago Barack Obama went from being an unknown senator to becoming the first black President of the United States of America.
Long before his historic win on November 4th 2008, Obama had wooed huge swathes of the electorate who felt they connected with him and his worldview through his soaring oratory and empathetic communication style. Some commentators have noted that this was at least in part because Obama was the first President in history to embrace social networking and modern communications. Obama embraced Twitter and Facebook and through regular updates a whole generation of younger voters felt they instantly connected with him (even though his updates were done by his staff). Modern technology has transformed communications and with it our own expectations of connecting with people.
Communication breakdown
Earlier this year we marked the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic which went down in the freezing waters of the Atlantic on 15th April 1912. A few days later my 76-year-old mother visited and, commenting on all the press coverage said: ‘You remember your great uncle John was supposed to be on the Titanic?’ to which I replied, ‘Yes Mum - how could I forget?’ The story of Great Uncle John was a centre piece of the Downes family historical saga that I was brought up with as a boy.
My maternal grandfather’s older brother had a job to work on the Titanic as a steward, aged 18, but contracted mumps shortly before and so had to pull out and missed that fateful voyage. One hundred years ago instant communication was still a novelty. The first successful bi-directional transmission of clear speech was made by Bell and Watson on March 10, 1876 - just 36 years before. The Marconi wireless radio was a recent invention and a technological marvel to be found on the more advanced ships of the day.
The Titanic, being a state of the art ship, had a radio and two Marconi operators, Harold Bride and Jack Phillips. When Captain Edward Smith realised the seriousness of Titanic’s plight, he went personally to the wireless room on the port side of the ship and told the two operators to call for assistance.
The California was so close it could be seen from Titanic but the radio operator had switched off and turned in for the night. Fifty-eight miles away was the Carpathia who was successfully contacted and made haste to the scene but Bride and Phillips calculated that she was about four hours away and would probably not be able to arrive before the ship went down. They were right. At around 4:30am Carpathia arrived; of the 2,227 passengers and crew on board Titanic only 705 survived.
Instant answers
The successive century has witnessed a communications revolution. We live in an age when we are not only accustomed to instant communication but expect it and even demand it. A few days ago I received an email from a stranger asking me for a meeting and then another from the same man almost straight away - slightly agitated in tone - asking if I didn’t get the earlier email. I quizzically checked the date of the earlier email thinking perhaps it had come in a month before and my PA had sent it to the top of the pile, but no. It was simply dated two days before - the individual didn’t get his answer straight away and wanted it now.
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