Since at least the middle of the 1700s, people have lived with the sense that life feels like it’s moving faster. There is less time in which to get everything done and seemingly more to do. Everything goes so fast and seems to be getting faster. Indeed, it’s not just a feeling. Social and historical scholarship support this sense of social acceleration.
Technology usually features in explaining this phenomenon. From machines to wires, radio waves to processors, we’re able to do a great deal faster, more efficiently. As a result, we can get more done in the same amount of time. To the extent that technological advancements and efficiencies remain synchronized, the experience of life can be exhilarating.
Yet, it’s exactly when technology and efficiency get out of sync that we tend to have problems. And it has everything to do with how much we try to get done in shorter and shorter periods of time. When technology and our to-do list are out of sync, when there’s not enough time to do everything we want or believe we need to do, we feel exhausted, overwhelmed, and frustrated. We feel sapped of creative, spiritual, and mental energy. Sometimes, we begin to despair. In other words, many of us suffer from what theologian Andrew Root calls, “timesickness.”
Maybe your life feels like you’re stuck trying to go up the down-escalator. You’ve just got to keep going or you’re going to fall so far back that you’re uncertain you could start again. At the same time, you’re just not sure you’ll ever make it to the top. In an odd sort of way, even “getting some rest” has begun to feel like a task. That is what Root means by “time-sickness.”
It’s not wrong to blame technology for feelings like time scarcity or social acceleration—none of the time fatigue we’re feeling would be possible without it. But blaming everything on technology would be incomplete. It’s more complicated than that.
In 1930, the sociologist Max Weber argued that a certain sense of work had come to dominate and orient our imaginations. How we think about time offers an example. Vacation, retirement, schooling—all these are periods of time when we are “not working.” It’s as if life itself is based around when we’re working and when we’re done—whether that means preparing for a career (schooling), taking a break from work (vacation), or ending our season of work (retirement). That we’ve become so oriented around work comes from what Weber called the “Protestant work ethic.” The ethic is something we’ve inherited, mostly from the Puritan Christians, who taught that hard work is the basic form of Christian faithfulness. We are to work hard and give it our all, it is said, because Jesus gave everything for us. Good Christians are good workers, according to the Puritans.
According to the ethic, what counts as good work is productive work. The busyness of productivity, however, tends to affect how we think about what we’re worth. Are we busy enough? Are we productive enough? Our inner accountant is not just counting the dollars in our bank accounts but also harangues us about the fact that we’re not working hard enough, that we haven’t accomplished enough. We start to believe that we’re not worthy enough. As a result, busyness, productivity, and how we use our time—all these get tangled into a complicated web that can cause a spiritual crisis.
Our inner accountant really is the voice of the devil. It tries to make you pay more attention to your efforts, your achievements, and the unaccomplished items of your to-do list than to all the truths that matter most. Those truths include that you are a baptized child of God whose sins have been washed away (see 1 Peter 3:21), that nothing can separate you from God’s love (see Romans 8:38-39) and that God’s power is not revealed in your efforts and achievement, but made perfect in your weakness and failures (see 2 Corinthians 12:9). That little voice of the inner accountant causes us to question whether those truths could possibly apply to us.
Our striving in the workaday world signals we believe that we haven’t arrived. That we aren’t enough. But the Gospel has something to say about what it means to be enough. Having a busy life does not equal having a worthy life. Neither your productivity nor the length of your to-do list says anything about whether you are enough.
There’s only one marker that determines any of our worth. God has made his Son Jesus more than enough for all of us. His death on the cross and resurrection from the tomb have secured our redemption. Rather than working for it, we’re simply invited to receive this good news as a gift. Jesus says to you, “My child, there’s nothing more to do. You have been loved before the moment of your creation. There’s no more pressure, no more ‘you have tos’ or ‘you musts,’ no more efforts to make to find yourself acceptable, lovable, affirmable—there’s only freedom and rest in Christ. All that needed to be done has been done.” Jesus said it Himself: “It is finished.” (John 19:30b).
All of this means something for how we imagine ministry in our time. Whether we are pastors, church workers, or lay people, it’s easy for us to become captive to the busyness and productivity, to the optimization strategies and efficiency requirements that are derived both from the Protestant ethic to work hard as well as the technological advancements that both enable us to and subtly demand that we do more in less time.
But who said ministry is supposed to move quickly? And when did ministry become about productivity? Is not ministry, after all, introducing people to Jesus and walking with others through the midst of their difficult moments, caring for them as Christ would? This is what everyday Christians can and are called to do.
What does this look like in an Age of Acceleration? We can consider ministry through the lens of pace. Ministry moves at the pace of relationships. Relationships are slow, messy, and require a great deal of time. If we stop to think about it, the fastest ministry can go is about 3 mph. Why? Well, it’s kind of silly to think about, but that’s roughly how fast Jesus ever would have moved. That’s the average pace of a human walking. But He wasn’t always walking. Most of the Gospel records tell that Jesus often stopped and was teaching or in conversation with people for extended periods of time. This should be a primary point of reference for us when we think about ministry.
God has chosen to involve us in His work of care, compassion, mercy, and redemption. He reaches down from heaven and uses the variety of gifts, talents, skills, and abilities that He has formed within us to accomplish His good work in the lives of people He’s drawing to Himself in our midst. We can rest in the promise that God is indeed working through us, present in, with, and through us as we care for those He’s brought to Himself by bringing them to us. In all of this, God is the primary Mover, the One who is in charge, the Star of the show, all for the sake of the needy ones that sit across from us. This is how Jesus has arranged for you, your work, your gifts, skills, talents, abilities, training, and trials to work for the good of others.
Ministry doesn’t have to be captive to the pressures built into the Age of Acceleration. But many of the people God will bring into our lives will be struggling with a kind of status anxiety that’s only been made possible by our workaday world and all that it demands. In these moments, God will use you to proclaim the Good News. And your freedom in the Gospel will be a witness that ministry in the Age of Acceleration only moves at the pace of human relationships through which God does His redemptive work. At Lutheran Hour Ministries, we stand ready to support you in all of this.