A Dead Horse in the Church Parking Lot

To my great amusement, last Sunday’s post inspired a text from a regular reader only a few hours after it went up, requesting I suggest a few remedies for Christians suffering from reduced attention spans, which I suspect is almost every Christian in the Western world and more than a few outside it.

He’s a good friend, but he fell right into my trap, which was very much deliberate. I wanted our readers to stop and think.

The Main Thrust

The main thrust of the post, if you haven’t read it, was to draw attention to research that documents a decrease in average attention span among regular computer users from 2.5 minutes to a mere 47 seconds over the last fifteen years, almost surely due to various changes in our technological environment and our unthinking responses to it. Attention drift causes stress, reduces productivity and increases errors, many of which are amusing and some of which may become expensive or dangerous. But what’s most alarming is the evidence we are losing the capacity for reflection, and with it intelligent, conscious behavior. Modern, tech-savvy human beings are in danger of becoming creatures of stimulus-response.

Ironic to find out that technology may be taking away from us more than it gives, but we should not be surprised by that. The god of this world is one crafty spirit being.

In response, I pointed out some of the ways a reduced attention span may play out in gatherings of Christians, but I intentionally stopped short of proposing solutions. Why? Partly because this is all old news. We all instinctively knew it was true even before science weighed in. We all know what the culprits are. We’ve all read about it before. Who hasn’t come across a mainstream media article in the last few years running on about the need to regularly decouple from your cellphone, get off social media, and make sure you use technology, rather than letting technology use you? Nobody, that’s who. We all know what needs to happen in each of our lives. We just refuse to make the necessary changes. We like our toys, conveniences and flattering interruptions. Way too many of us are prepared to live at the intellectual level of rabbits and squirrels in order to enjoy the benefits constant connection brings with it.

Are We Willing to Change?

The question before believers is whether any of us is willing to change habits we have adopted as unthinkingly, obediently and comprehensively as lab animals under partial sedation. Let me suggest we really need to, and the reason is love.

Love?

Love.

Attention is love. You know it, I know it, and your wife or girlfriend definitely knows it. When you produce that birthday or Christmas gift she never explicitly told you she wanted but absolutely did, she’s touched because it reminds her you were paying attention. It doesn’t matter if it was during a shopping trip when you made a mental note of what items caught her eye, or when you overheard her conversing about it with a girlfriend, or when you noticed a bookmark to an online catalog page on her laptop. However you may have acquired the necessary information, the message you’re sending is that you care enough about her to notice what she likes and respond accordingly. Attention is love.

The reverse is also true: inattention is less-than-loving. I got a mini-lecture from my eldest son last year during a lunch in which I changed subjects in the middle of something important to him. He felt it was evidence I didn’t care about what he was saying. The fact is, there were four of us at the table and I was distracted by his sister, but his point was quite valid. In not paying attention to what he was saying, I was demonstrating it was not my highest priority in the moment. I was giving him less than my best, and attention is love. My message was quite unintentional, but he got it all the same.

Let me suggest that when you will no longer pay attention to what’s going on around you, you are no use to the Lord and to the world, and a 47 second attention span is heading in that direction at warp speed. Christians need to change ours.

The Greatest Commandment

What is the greatest commandment? We have the answer from the mouth of the Lord himself: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”

Attention is love for God, and attention is love for your neighbor. Attention is loving with your mind. It’s one of the most precious gifts a human being can give to another, and it’s a sign of our respect and love for the Lord we claim to serve. Do we need a greater motivation for making changes to our daily habits? I hope not. As the Lord went on to say in that same passage in Matthew, “On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” We will be immature children of God if we do not manage our attention spans for his glory. Moreover, we will be failing to show the love we owe to God and man. And as we know, in scripture, love is not the fuzzy, affectionate feeling you experience when discussing somebody who matters to you, it’s what you do about it as a result. If you don’t act, it ain’t love.

A Few Practical Suggestions

So then, a few brief, practical suggestions about how to express love to the Lord and to your fellow believers by giving them your attention. Some of these have been made before in this space, so if you feel like I’m flogging a dead horse, that may be the case. But it’s a dead horse lying in the church parking lot, it’s attracting flies, and everybody is wandering around it like it’s not there, so forgive me for raising my voice a little. We need to give the matter a little … er … attention. Before the neighbors start noticing the stench.

For Everyone:

Leave the cellphone in the car when you go to church. (Out of sight, of course. I put mine under the front seat.) Carrying it with you in purse or pocket is inadequate. Why? Because the text you don’t receive will draw your attention away from the sermon, hymn or the people you’re talking to between meetings as surely as the one you do. We are all becoming slaves to the next ‘ping’. Get used to not hearing it, and use its absence to concentrate on your surroundings for the glory of God. If you use your phone to read scripture during the meetings, stop. Get a Kindle or other device disconnected from the internet. Additionally, this practice would benefit all of us who have to listen to your phone ring or ping during meeting when you forget (or don’t know how) to turn down the volume, which takes us out of the message too. Seriously. Leave it in the car or leave it at home. Trust me. It’s an act of love.

Leave the cellphone in another room when you visit somebody’s house or have them over. There is almost nothing I find more annoying than four phones on the table during lunch with everyone’s eyes glued to them, or somebody “discreetly” texting her daughter about some triviality during dinner. It’s hugely disrespectful. If you have to be available to respond for work and must have your device with you, keep it in your pocket and refuse to take it out until you can go do so in the washroom, out of sight and hopefully out of mind.

Leave the cellphone in another room when you read your Bible and pray. Unless you are in the middle of counseling a suicidal teen, there is literally nothing on earth that can’t wait thirty minutes. I go one better and do my praying walking in the dark at 4:00 am. The phone never goes with me. Again, waiting for a text to drop, or fishing in your pocket to see if you might have missed a ‘ping’, is as distracting as answering one, maybe more distracting, because your attention is perpetually disrupted. We serve a great God, and he deserves our best, not our leftovers.

Never have an important text conversation. Texting is vastly inferior to normal personal interaction. It’s good for asking questions like “What weekends are you away in December?” It’s awful for anything much more serious, and especially awful because typos and delayed responses so frequently generate misunderstandings and miscommunications. I greatly appreciate my two brothers for how they handle this: one doesn’t text at all; the other texts, but stops to call you and have an actual phone conversation the moment anything serious comes up.

Read books at home rather than listening to audiobooks when you drive. Get used to doing your reading in uninterrupted blocks of ten minutes or longer. This practice will definitely help your focus. Use your in-car time for the type of material you can afford to drift in and out of and not miss much that matters. Anything deep, serious or theological is better read at home. You might prefer audiobooks to reading, as many do these days, but a driver’s attention is by definition split between driving and listening. You will not do both well. I hope the one you do well is driving!

Actively concentrate during meetings of the church. Active concentration is a discipline that requires practice in order to succeed. Recognize when you are drifting off as a deficiency in you instead of (or as well as) the speaker, and learn to focus on what is being said rather than drifting along merrily in your own thought stream.

Wait for your friends to finish talking before responding. It’s well known that YouTube watchers usually start commenting on a video well before it finishes, and many make comments without ever finishing more than a third of the video. This bad habit also occurs often in Christian conversations, which can be nothing but a series of rude interruptions. Learn to let your friends say their entire piece before reacting to it. If you haven’t fully processed their point, you have nothing useful to offer by way of reaction. Love requires you let them finish. Sometimes all they need is to be actively heard and to have their opinion treated respectfully. A quiet, caring listener is a lot better liked than the guy who always has a comeback and never lets you finish speaking.

For Elders:

Pick a reasonable allotted time for your speakers and ask them to stick to it. Most Christians cannot process a forty-five minute message anymore. Cut the average believer some slack. Most forty-five minute messages are padded with constant repetition and unnecessary rambling. Get your speakers used to self-editing for clarity and finishing when they have promised to. If necessary, offer to hold your hand up for them to see the appointed hour has arrived.

Consider introducing interactive studies. Interactive Bible studies keep people more engaged than lectures of a predictable length. The only biblical example we have of a lengthy lecture in a church meeting resulted in a young man falling asleep and tumbling out the window to his death. I don’t blame Eutychus for that, even though it was long before the days of diminished attention spans. I’ve sat through many sermons that put me to sleep too, both before and after I worked night shift. A Bible study that allows opportunity to ask questions, or that may result in you being asked a question at any point, is much more likely to keep your attention where it belongs.

For Speakers:

Use visuals if you can. PowerPoint should never become mandatory, and can be distracting when badly managed, but done right can be very effective in making a spiritual point. For an audience with reduced attention spans, it can break up a presentation into retainable, manageable chunks.

Respect the clock and the audience. Always stop when expected, even if you have to chop up your marvelous message to do so. Five minutes before your expected end time, skip to your conclusion and begin to wrap up, without rambling and repetition.

Throw them a curve every three minutes. Even way back in 2004, the average attention span was only 2.5 minutes. Mature Christians probably have slightly greater ability to maintain sustained concentration spans than average, but not by much. Say something shocking, funny or thought provoking every three minutes and you’ll keep the audience engaged much longer. Ask the audience questions, even if they are only rhetorical. They’ll still have to think about the answers.

Hey, it worked in the first century. The Lord did it all the time.