Theological Thoughts for Thursday

Do you know what QWERTY is? If you look to the top left of your keyboard you will see the acronym used for the common configuration of letters on keyboards. When typewriters first came out the letters were in Alphabetical order. This made sense to everyone at the time. The problem occurred as typists got better at typing and typewriters couldn’t keep up. The keys would get stuck, the teethy spokes would get clogged together.

My mother had a typewriter when I was little. She pulled it out once a week to write a letter to grandma. I loved playing with that typewriter. I would just bang on the keys and watch the twines get intertwined. Mom hated it when I pulled that stunt.

But that was a daily occurrence when the letters were arranged in a common sense fashion. So someone hired someone (fact checking is for sissies) to come up with a completely ridiculous new system. Thus QWERTY was born. It was literally designed to slow us down.

Today we don't have the problem of a machine that needs our fingers to move more slowly - our fingers could move much, much faster without any problem at all for any of our modern machines - but, who wants to change something we already all know?

Fun Fact: In Korean Typewriters the vowels are the keys on the right and the consonants are found on the left. The more you know.

When it comes to the church I don’t think anyone was intentional in trying to slow us down. I think it was (and is) a natural process. We are slowed down by any number of things. Routine, tradition, theology, etc. None of these things is bad in its own right (just like there’s nothing inherently wrong with having E next to W on a keypad) but the culmination is an ineffective church – which is a bad thing.

It is a proven fact that long monologues (sermons) are the least efficient means of communication we attempt. Sermons really only resonate with about a third of the population. Most people retain less than 10% of a sermon. [For proof of this, think back to the sermon last Sunday and try and write up an outline. Good luck.] However, most of our churches would never dream of scrapping the sermon. We got QWERTY'd.

We have worship wars. People who don't like hymns don't like people who don't like "the new stuff" (antidisestablishmentarianism at its finest) and we all forget that worship isn't about music. It’s about the heart. We got QWERTY’d.

It's incredibly frustrating for young adults in the church. We watch as each piece of tradition bogs down another chance for change. Sometimes churches try to do good by highlighting the accomplishments of young people, but they end up sounding old, outdated and stodgy.

The business world hasn't moved past the QWERTY problem, yet. So, I don't feel so bad for the church. I think it's even possible that we will solve our problem long before the world moves past QWERTY.