A Lifeguard For The Surfers

If swimming were a sin, it’s not, but I'm sure youth group has made you feel that way, would the life guard be a sinner because he’s the best at swimming? Maybe, we’re picking too hard on the church types. What if drowning was a sin. Would the lifeguard be a sinner because he knows exactly how people drown. How to stop it? How to reverse it’s effects? And all because in order to be a lifeguard, you have to get as close to drowning as possible, to keep people as far away as they’ll get.

It’s a paradox of talent and restraint, but ask any life guard what they are told to do when a drowning person won’t let them bring them back to shore. When their flailing's and terror are too set in for their own good, that they threaten the life of the guard.

They let you drown, at least enough to get you to let them save you.

Tech is the same kind of danger that an ocean is. It's as deep and dangerous now with your LLM’s making you bikini pixels as it was when you published your first MySpace post about Baywatch. The danger has not changed, so much as its shifted. Like tides tend to do. And the qualities of who can keep you safe or remove you from danger, have not changed either.

There has been, for some time, a need for lifeguard theologians and pastors who will engage with tech. On tech’s terms but not alongside tech's purposes. Those people know that a world without swaths of social media and any A.I. would be a better one. But are constrained by the times to live in a world as if they were not part of that world. Those theologians are not going to be the nigh on heroic Piper/Sproul types. These guys will play their part, but aren’t the right kind of person to be a lifeguard that actually pulls people from the water. That roll will go to people who have seen both sides of the equations. The slippery pool deck from before and the suffocating pool bottom of the now.

That role will likely go to the millennials in our seminaries. But only if they figure out that learning how to swim at all is a path to not drowning for more than just you.

Everyone who has ever done a swimming class or two ,past water wings, knows that knowing how to swim ignites something inside of you. When you know you can make it across a body of water, you begin to think about getting someone out of that same body of water from the middle. Every boat you get on prompts you to wonder about the men and women who could possibly go overboard. Every pool party becomes a volunteer shift counting heads and keeping your pockets ready to empty.

And theologically, those same kinds of people will get out of their drowning porn addictions, and teach every gooner they find, how to tread water in the cultural waters of OF and snapchat. They will have notebooks for private thoughts and blogs for the same kind of inner monologues. They will have 1000 reasons for a church not to have a TikTok ministry and be a prolific poster of those reasons on TikTok.

The paradox of skill, sinfully, follows the saved to their ministry. It makes their witness that more effective once made so by the grace of Christ. The same way God’s clothes were better versions of the sinful ones Adam and Eve made prior. The sacrifice on their behalf did more than just cover them.

“Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God make coats of skins, and clothed them.” Genesis 3:21 KJV