Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons/public domain
The 1000-year-old Campanile di San Marco in Venice suddenly collapsed into a heap of rubble in 1902. Mercifully, there were no casualties apart from the caretaker’s cat. There followed a time of great debate – whether, or how, to replace this beautiful bell-tower. The view which gained acceptance was summed up in the campaign slogan Come ere, dove era – meaning “As it was, where it was”, pronounced ‘COM-aira, DOV-aira’ – and a near-identical replica (with better internal strengthening) was inaugurated in 1912.
As a cultural heritage issue, this was surely the right decision. Our home town, Derby, has had many of its historic buildings trashed during the last 70 years in fits of misguided modernization. But are there any spiritual parallels?
Of course, the nature and truth of the gospel is unchanging. On the other hand, the context in which we share the good news is always changing, and so the way in which the message is presented must be constantly changing to suit the surrounding culture and the medium being used. We cannot simply transfer methods from another medium to digital, unchanged. Church websites cannot be ‘brochureware’. Social media should be used as a ‘cafe for conversation’, not a ‘pulpit for preaching’.
If we do not understand the context and culture around us, and apply “as it was, where it was” to our methods, we have a ‘historic bell-tower’ that looks nice to architectural historians, but is not of much use to anyone else.
One of the students in Les Miserables sings that the “colour of the world is changing day by day”. The men of Issachar are commended in 1Chr.12.32 – they “understood the times and knew what Israel should do.”
We won’t even notice these changes if we are marooned in the ivory tower that Ryan recently blogged about here.