Pastors like me read in the productivity genre. Not long before COVID-19 hobbled the world and mine and everyone else’s rhythms, I stumbled backward into my productivity guru. I picked up Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport because I had just read Pulitzer Prize Finalist The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr, relished it, and was clicking every “More Like This” link I saw. Carr’s book is a philosophical and social study. I didn’t know when I grabbed Digital Minimalism, I was jumping from the philosophy section to the productivity genre.
Cal Newport is an associate professor of computer science at Georgetown University, where he is also the founder of the Center for Digital Ethics. He writes well. He’s clear and thoughtful, and what he’s up to fits well with me. I usually have a stack of books I’m reading through at any given time. Somewhere between 6 and 12 of them. Newport’s newest book, Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout, is among them. This week, I read in that book about the Slow Food movement. After telling the story of its genesis in Italy when a McDonald's tried to horn in on Rome, he distills the movement’s two foundational principles: 1) focus not on “problems” but on appealing alternatives, and 2) draw solutions from time-tested traditions. “Slow Food doesn’t just support longer meals…It doesn’t just support fresher ingredients, it [recommends] dishes that your great-grandmother might have served. Traditions that survived the gauntlet of cultural evolution…They can apply to any setting in which a haphazard modernism is conflicting with the human experience.”
See why I like Cal? Those few lines were worth the price I paid for the whole book. In the margin of my copy, I wrote: “Pastoring FAB.” Cal’s words made me think of another book. In The Agile Church, Dwight Zscheile argues for “traditioned innovation,” a productive tension that mines the depths of Christian tradition to find ideas whose time has come back around again. Qoheleth insists, “There is nothing new under the sun…and for everything there is a season.” The thing about seasons: they are cyclical. They come back around just like those giant blue jeans I wore in high school that are now around the waists of Gen Zers.
“Pastoring FAB.” I’m old enough now to know I don’t have all the answers. I’ve been at this pastoring thing long enough now that I am pretty sure that for churches like FAB, haphazard modernism always loses to traditioned innovation. There’s just something about great-grandma’s recipe. The way it tastes like home decades later. Maybe it just needs a little of this, a touch of that. Like those jeans. Like suit jacket lapels. Like Famiglia, the “Southern Italian Trattoria” on 6th Avenue in Huntington, West Virginia. They’re almost the same.
~ Rev. Zach Bay
