Dr. James Emery White

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from the latest book by James Emery White, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church in a Post-Christian Digital Age (Zondervan). You can order from Amazon HERE.

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We call it the digital revolution, but in truth it is the latest in a line of three industrial revolutions. With each, the invention of a technology brought about fundamental societal change. 

The first industrial revolution started around 1760 in Britain. It was fueled by the invention of the steam engine, which enabled new manufacturing processes, which in turn led to the creation of factories. 

The second industrial revolution, approximately a century later, was characterized by mass production in new industries such as oil, steel, and electricity. Inventions during this period included the lightbulb, telephone, and internal combustion engine. 

In the 1960s, the third industrial revolution began with the invention of the semiconductor and led to the inventions of the personal computer and the internet, marking the digital revolution.

But it is only of late that the digital revolution has made its impact most keenly felt, and many missed the moment it descended upon our world like a tsunami. As Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman put it, “What the h*** happened in 2007?” 

Friedman makes the case that 2007 was one of the most significant pivotal years in all of human history—not simply because that was the year the iPhone was released but because of all the iPhone set in motion and all that came into play in a simultaneous way. Beyond the iPhone, in 2007, Facebook left college campuses and entered the wider world. Twitter was spun off. Google bought YouTube and launched Android. Amazon released the Kindle. And the number of internet users crossed one billion worldwide, becoming the fabric of our world. 

All in 2007. 

(Friedman neglected to note that also a little company called Netflix began streaming videos in 2007.) 

With self-deprecating humor about his own earlier writings, specifically The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century that he began writing in 2004, he notes:

... when I was running around in 2004 declaring that the world was flat, Facebook didn’t even exist yet, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking space, “applications” were what you sent to college, LinkedIn was barely known and most people thought it was a prison, Big Data was a good name for a rap star, and Skype, for most people, was a typographical error.

What set off the revolution that year, though, was without a doubt the iPhone. When Steve Jobs introduced the original iPhone as little more than a combination of “three revolutionary projects” – a cellphone, an iPod, and a keyboardless handheld computer with internet connectivity – even he didn’t know what had been unleashed. 

And make no mistake – the iPhone changed the world. 

James Emery White

 

Sources

This has been an excerpt from James Emery White, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church in a Post-Christian, Digital Age (Zondervan), order here.

About the Author

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. 

His latest book, After “I Believe,” is now available on Amazon or your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org, where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. 

Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.

One summer, many years ago, our family went to Washington, D.C. We had a number of places we wanted to visit, including the Smithsonian, the Washington Monument, the White House, Congress, and the Lincoln Memorial.

We had no idea that one of the most moving places we would visit would be Arlington National Cemetery.

The first soldier, from the Civil War, was buried there in 1864. By the end of that year, more than 7,000 soldiers were laid to rest in its soil. Even those who had died before its establishment began to be moved to its hallowed grounds. As a result, the cemetery has become the burial ground for casualties from all of America’s wars—from the Revolutionary War to the most recent of conflicts. 

In 1929, it was the site of the first national Memorial Day holiday. Today, approximately 400,000 service men and women are now buried on its 639 acres.

Beyond the thousands of white crosses dotting the landscape and marking the graves, we saw the burial sites of countless historical figures including President Taft and Supreme Court Justices Oliver Wendell Holmes and Thurgood Marshall. There was the memorial to the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger. We were moved by the flame that always burns at the site of President John F. Kennedy’s grave, and the nearby site of his brother, Bobby. 

But nothing prepared us for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Established in 1921 as a burial place for the Unknown Soldier of World War I, unknown soldiers from World War II and the Korean War were soon added. An unknown soldier from the Vietnam War was buried there with full military honors on Memorial Day in 1984.

The tomb itself simply says, “Here rests in honored glory an American soldier known but to God.” 

In honor of all of those who died in combat defending our freedoms, there is a round-the-clock guard at the site of the tomb. A sentinel from the Third U.S. Infantry maintains the vigil around the clock. In a symbolic mirroring of the 21-gun salute, the guard paces 21 steps down the mat before the tomb, pauses for 21 seconds, and returns. The changing of the guard takes place every hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, rain or shine.

When we were there, it was packed with tourists, but you could have heard a pin drop. The sacred nature of what the place stood for, the solemn nature of the guard, the setting of the cemetery itself, lent itself to something that felt sacred, something that deserved honor and respect. 

No matter who you were or where you were from, it was natural, it was good, and it was right.

Today is Memorial Day, when we remember those who gave their lives for our country, particularly in battle or from wounds they suffered in battle. Many of them lie in Arlington. 

So remember and give honor.

You might even want to Google a video clip of the changing of the guard.

James Emery White

 

About the Author

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. 

His latest book, After “I Believe,” is now available on Amazon or your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org, where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. 

Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.

Quick: who do you think believes in hell the most – Baby Boomers or Generation Z? I’ll give you a few additional bits of information to work with: the study was conducted in the U.K., and there, Gen Z, more often than not, identifies as atheists.

Okay, got your answer? If you said, “Well, it’s obviously Baby Boomers,” you would be…

… wrong.

While only 18% of Boomers said they believed in the concept of the land of the damned, a whopping 32% of Gen Z said they did. If this leaves you scratching your head, prepare for more itching. Their belief stops at hell. They do not throw in a belief in heaven, much less God. Further, they continue to declare themselves irreligious.

All this from the “World Values Survey” conducted by the Policy Institute at King’s College in London. 

To try and sum it all up, Generation Z (and Millennials, the survey found) do not consider themselves religious, do not generally believe in God, but do tend to believe in life after death. At least in terms of a hell.

Now one would think this would betray some fairly significant spiritual confusion. Or at least, a lack of spiritual reflection. What is behind a belief in hell independent of some kind of justice-doling God? Further, why would a belief in hell rest so peacefully with a rejection of any and all religion that might spare you from that hell?

But let’s let stated beliefs simply be stated and draw the one clear conclusion about the theology of younger adults: they believe in something beyond this life. Or as Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute, put it:

Our cultural attachment to organized religion has continued to decline in the U.K. – but our belief that there is something beyond this life is holding strong, including among the youngest generation. 

While the youngest generations continue to have a lower attachment to formal religion, many of them have a similar or even greater need to believe that there is “more than this.”

It brings to mind a rather obscure essay C.S. Lewis once wrote on modern man and his categories of thought that I included in my book Meet Generation Z. Lewis argued that when the gospel first broke out, the evangelistic task was essential to one of three groups: Jews, Judaizing Gentiles and pagans. 

All three believed in the supernatural. 

All three were conscious of sin and feared divine judgment. 

Each offered some form of personal purification and release. 

They all believed the world had once been better than it now was. 

But now, Lewis argued, the average person shares none of those marks. In fact, he ended the essay by stating, “I sometimes wonder whether we shall not have to re-convert men to real Paganism as a preliminary to converting them to Christianity.”

Perhaps their belief in hell can be the starting point of that conversion.

James Emery White

Sources

“Belief, faith and religion: shifting attitudes in the UK,” The Policy Institute, May 2023, read online.

Moohita Kaur Garg, “What the ‘Hell’? Gen Z More Likely to Believe in Damnation After Death, Finds Study,” WION, May 19, 2023, read online.

C.S. Lewis, “Modern Man and His Categories of Thought,” Present Concerns (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1986).

James Emery White, Meet Generation Z (Baker), order online.

About the Author

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. His latest book, Hybrid Church: Rethinking the Church for a Post-Christian Digital Age, is now available on Amazon or from your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.

The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Christian Headlines.

Photo courtesy: ©Getty Images/Romolo Tavani

James Emery White is the founding and senior pastor of Mecklenburg Community Church in Charlotte, NC, and a former professor of theology and culture at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, where he also served as their fourth president. 

His latest book, After “I Believe,” is now available on Amazon or your favorite bookseller. To enjoy a free subscription to the Church & Culture blog, visit churchandculture.org, where you can view past blogs in our archive, read the latest church and culture news from around the world, and listen to the Church & Culture Podcast. 

Follow Dr. White on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at @JamesEmeryWhite.