Fracking is form of gas
extraction. In the old days, a well was drilled straight down and gas was
pumped up. Now to get at less accessible gas, wells are drilled thousands of
feet down and then thousands more horizontally. Hydraulic fracturing pumps thousands
of pounds of water, sand and chemicals down the well to fracture the rock that
holds the gas. This extraction process boosts production, migrating
natural gas and petroleum to the well. For all that is gained in
Fracking there is a growing chorus of people exposing the environmental impact. No one contests how
productive Fracking is for extracting gas, it is exceptionally productive. What is being pointed out is that
the process leaves behind damage. Whatever your opinions on Fracking are, they
are irrelevant for what I’m poking at. The greater question I want to ask is
“What does Extracted Learning do?” Often our celebration
in extraction revolves around what is gained, pulled to the surface. Extraction
always profits us something yet leaves behind something in the aftermath.
The Damage on Practice
I contend that the church has submitted to information-delivery techniques that extract. How we learn and teach is stuck in
a habit that perpetuates separation. In order to get at, isolate, codify and distribute
spiritual information we’re damaging something in the process. The very way we
execute the majority of our learning within the Church through the vehicles of
sermons, Sunday schools, podcasts, 6 week courses and Bible Studies often does bolster
extraction. Like Fracking, our mechanisms for delivering Spiritual Information leaves behind damage in the process; the character of Practice. Practice is left lifeless and inept. As with Fracking, we
may efficiently lift information to the surface but do environmental harm on
our social existence as the church. Our souls are impoverished because we consume calories of information
but are isolated from local, faithful, practicing community. Our current unquestioned approaches to
transferring spiritual information are brutal on the virtue of Practice.
How We Learn
Practice is the inner quality of being formed and informed by the bumps,
bruises and baptism of application. Practice is at the soul of being a
Jesus-follower but more so it becomes the material for credibility as the
People of God. James 1:22 -- “But be people who live out the
truth, not people who merely receive it and fool themselves. When you do this
you are like a person who looks in the mirror, walk away, and then forget what
they look like.” The future of the Church must re-calibrate how we learn,
understanding that we are shaped by the techniques we employ. The
methods we implement for maturing as Jesus-followers either lead to increasing
integrity in our practice or lead to an increasing in-authenticity in our
practice. When it comes to
education, theology and personal betterment more and more of our learning
processes perpetuate extraction, removal from habitation, in order to acquire
the desired information.
Information and Immersion
Divorcing information from immersion is
something I bump into regularly. It is all around us but we’re acculturated to it. A few years back my
wife and I went through a 3 month adoption training course to get our adoption
qualifications. I was taken aback when I asked our certified instructor his experience about a very specific family challenge that went beyond the written
training material. His reply was “I’ve never had a child in my home, not sure
I’m cut out for that”. Now I’m cool with his choice about not having children
but it was hard for my wife and I not to wince. Why wasn’t this odd to anyone
else? How can one be an expert in Family Therapy without ever being tested by
the real life challenges? I was sitting under an expert who never touched and
grappled with the information in the real world. It has become normal to separate the spiritual information we store up from actualization locally. This used to be
called hypocrisy but now it’s simply the way in which we carry around and
sometimes sling around the information we’ve collected in our mental folders.
Expert Delusion
We can be proclaimed experts without immersion. It seems like never before we are more
inflamed or convinced about some theology, new idea or cause that is less
sourced from what is happening on the ground in our local places and more from
what provocative story we read on-line, what blog we recently devoured, what book we just inhaled or what
podcast we just downloaded. We are fascinated with what we can discover that will boost our enlightenment or boil our blood. Only in an information-based society can Christian author's write from a
place of ideation rather than a place of practice. At times I’m lured into the lie that I can be an expert on something because I’ve
had information-intake on a specific matter. Peter
Senge in his book the Fifth Discipline unpacks our fixation on becoming experts
-- “Being an expert gives us power and
prosperity over our peers.” We secure our strength in our societal cosmos
when we have more accumulated intelligence in our head than anyone else. This
knowledge offers an expert-delusion that we are not vulnerable to making the
unenlightened errors others will. We fear ignorance, ignorance is our enemy. In no previous time has there been such a fire-hose, keg-like binging on
information. We are rabid about acquiring information
but at what cost? A great divorce has been filed between information and
immersion. This separation propels the opinionated milieu we find
ourselves in and presumes we are transformed because we’re informed.
What needs to change in our churches and spiritual living to close the gap between information and immersion?
