Is the Treo the Emerging Tool? On Connectedness.

Just an observation:

While at the Revolution Conference, there was a large number of people sporting laptops, mostly bloggers who were covering the conference. They were hogging the electrical outlets, lugging around big heavy bags, monkeying with a plethora of cords and cables, and the light from their screens was negatively impacting my enjoyment of the conference; not to mention how they all were choking the Wi-Fi there at Overlake.

You know I'm only kidding - my incredible envy is showing, because I don't have a laptop. ;) I have not until now had any justification for wanting one, but now that I'm becoming a famous novelist, that may soon change.

But it's no secret that I'm a Treo fan, and I saw no less than 14 people at the conference who had Treo's, including several "bigwigs". This is just the people who I saw using them, so there likely were more. This is the ultimate in-between tool - not a PC, not a cell-phone, not a laptop. It's all of the above, though it's better at some things than others.

The fact that so many people had them - the ultimate portable communication device - seems evident to me of how the relational landscape is changing with the emerging church. We are connected in so many different ways - and I don't mean connected in the sense of always-on internet, I mean we are connected with people in so many different ways that we now find it necessary to have all those different types of connections at our fingertips at all times.

The net is nothing new, and even using the net as a spiritual tool is not a new concept. But the way we "do church" has evolved, because today the brick-and-mortar church is no longer our only spiritual outlet. At this conference, there were so many people who had relationships but who had never met. People who had blogged together and gotten to know each other over great distances, but had never been in the same room. I actually met several bloggers who I read on a regular basis. It's interesting because when you meet someone new you usually have to find common ground for conversation, but when it's someone you are already relational with in some way, you already know what your common ground is.

I am observing how the net is changing church culture, it's fascinating to me. When I was a girl I had a pen pal. She lived in New York. You have to know this was the 70's, there was no electronic communication widely available to the public, so our friendship was pen and paper. This went on for maybe a year, but we got tired of waiting for each other's letters to come via snail-mail, and it kind of faded.

Today, we have such a variety of communication methods available to us, not the least of which (in the emerging church) is the blog. When you think about it, doesn't this seem strange? I'm not knocking it, I think it's great to be able to relate online with people you would otherwise never meet.

This conference was my first official foray into the emerging church culture. It was amazing to be in a place where people didn't when I told them I had been taking a break from church for about 2 years. Usually they had a similar personal story to relate, some were still on hiatus and some had interesting stories of how they are "doing" church now. They didn't balk at my issues with big-church, they didn't tell me not the "throw the baby out with the bathwater". They were kind and unassuming and thoroughly encouraging, every one. The cool thing for me was knowing that I could communicate, via blog if nothing else, with almost everyone I met at this conference, no matter where they lived.

We in the emerging church are so wired. In fact, when Jim Henderson was doing interviews, people in the "audience" could e-mail, text , or IM their questions to him at his laptop that he had "on stage" with him. There's nothing like being interactive!

This is kinda a disjointed post, please realize I'm writing my fingers off lately, so it's kind of hard to pull cohesive thoughts together. But I think you get my drift.

Do you think all this is a good thing? A bad thing? Indifferent? Do you feel like your spirituality or even your life is difference because of modern connectivity?