Platforms to Pillars

The desire to escape from this world was also the ambition of the pharaohs. The pyramids, monumental engineering feats, symbolized a quest for immortality and departure from earthly existence. The kings of Egypt conceived these grand tombs to transcend this world. Similarly, a comparable aspiration is evident among the influential tech CEOs of Silicon Valley who oversee our largest digital platforms. While their technology is more sophisticated, their ambitions echo the religious vision of ancient Egypt, driven by engineering prowess.

Exodus, however, was not about escape; it was about deliverance.

At Sinai, the people would meet with God as heaven and earth met. Earth would not be jettisoned; rather, it would be marked with the imprint of heaven. Atop the mountain, they were called by God to be His covenant people; they were charged to imprint the world with His ways.

The kind of contemporary global culture, spread by the internet and popular entertainment, prefers novelty to wisdom, individualism to building community, and irreverence to respect.

The ability of pillars to persevere under pressure over long passages of time is an essential part of their ability to partner with God in His kingdom’s mission in the world. Eschewing the temptation to seek publicity and celebrity, Asbury lived simply and sacrificially. His faith and perseverance “brought him respect, even renown, based on sacrifice rather than accumulation of buildings, money or other trappings of power.”5 Sacrificial living is an essential element of the discipleship of a pillar.

It is also important to note that the distinction between leaders and followers exists on a continuum. Most people have some degree of influence. A ten-year-old influences their six-year-old sibling. So, we all lead and influence in some way;

Ideologies shape technologies. Technologies are tools invented as solutions to pre-existing problems. It is this factor that many analysts, attempting to understand the changes wrought in our society by digital platforms, miss.

social capital grows among a group of connected people when they choose to live in ways that are mutually beneficial to each other. The more people do this, the stronger and more attractive the community becomes.

At their core, the market revolution and the sexual revolution were two sides of the same coin of hyper-individualism. They were both mythologies that proclaimed you could have it all without limitations or consequences.

Whereas the exploitive regimes of the past restricted and punished, the platform society does not force us into exploitation. Instead, we are lured into patterns of life that diminish us. We are beckoned to a mode of living in which we are willing to sacrifice our time and attention to boost the profits of large digital platforms and the multinational companies behind them. This new form of exploitation is not coercive but seductive. We are seduced into sacrificing our precious time, attention, and relational capacity for others’ profit.

Whatever book of the Bible you are reading, and whichever Christian practices you are involved in, echoes of the exodus are in there somewhere,”

To put it simply, Herod cut the top off a holy mountain and built in its place a massive platform. The temple, designed to house God’s presence, would sit atop a platform to feed Herod’s ego.

Like Cain, we are spiritually restless wanderers, always east of Eden, aware of what we miss. This does not mean we will always be physically homeless, for Cain established a city for his family. Rather, it means that no matter how great the houses, cities, and civilizations we construct, they will always fall short without God. Our drive to build is necessary to find shelter and contains religious roots, for we are created to build to host God’s glory.

Faithfulness has been replaced by forgetfulness.

How you act when God seems absent sets you up for how you act when God’s presence is powerful. Pillars commit to the breakthrough that happens before the breakthrough.

“we may look back on the high point of secularism as a phenomenon peculiar to an age that hubristically believed itself to be at ‘the end of history’—an affluent, self-confident, and relatively monocultural society that now belongs to the past.”

Rather than offering the Christian community as an alternative to the increasing loneliness and meaningless of contemporary life, we mirror its patterns, fleeing from the essential components of healthy community building: commitment, stickability, resilience, and reliability. Regular connection with the Christian community becomes fleeting, an imposition upon personal freedom. We seek community and convenience without covenant. We may champion the church in a secular age but unwittingly weaken it as we walk to the drumbeat of the second secularism.

Thus, the creation of a counter-society of strong relational ties was a key and deliberate strategy alongside the sovereign move of God to pour out His Spirit. Institution building, family strengthening, and education brought good news and created a counter-society, which restrengthened social ties with Jesus at the center. Leaders like John Wesley, George Whitefield, and Francis Asbury were at the helm of this movement.

We need such an outpouring again. Yet one revolution we need to fully be the church in the platform society is pillar-like living among the people of God, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to creatively rebuild the social space and respond to God’s growing hunger within the culture. This will not happen if the church remains a place of intermittent engagement, church shopping, and the consumer approach to faith that the platform mentality generates.