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Crossing the Equator of the “Phygital” Church
What’s holding you back isn’t what you think.
In this post, I want to zoom out from our current situation in order to get some perspective. A warning: this is much more conceptual and therefore longer (~3000 words) than my typical posts. But I hope you find it helpful. Here we go!
Let’s look at another historical moment that feels an awful lot like our own. I promise we will get back to the 21st century, digital discipleship, and the hybrid of physical and digital Church that we call “phygital.” But before we do, let’s take a trip back in time. Waaay back…
Feeling down because of current events? You’re almost certainly in a better spot than 15th century Europe. They were in a collective funk that makes our era look like sunshine and lollipops.
As Edwin Friedman tells it in his magnificent book A Failure of Nerve, the entire continent suffered from “imaginative gridlock,” the inability to even conceive of anything new or different. He describes an issue of the Nuremberg Chronicle in 1493 which left several pages blank so that readers could fill in “the rest of the events until the end of the world.”
What was going on to so severely limit their imaginations?
“Contributing to the general malaise was a combination of political, social…
