Death of the Newspaper

Newspapers are going away.

I don't think that's news to anyone. If you live in a big city, like Dallas or Denver, you've watched in the last couple decades as the number of major city newspapers was cut in half. Some places, the newspapers have gone from 50 pages to 32.

Silverton, CO ... they probably had a lot of newspapers, too.

And admit it: if you're reading this blog you may not even know anyone who still subscribes to a newspaper. The young people view them as a quaint, old-people's thing. The middle-aged people see them as still a nice thing, but not necessarily something to subscribe to. That leaves the elderly, who are still the newspaper's most reliable source of income. (Sad news, though: the elderly are dying off for some reason [we need a government study on this]).

What happened?

The obvious and easy answer is the internet. This is true, but it's only part of the problem, in part because finding local news is not always easy on-line. You can find out what mud a Kardashian is currently rolling in with two flicks of the thumb on your smart phone, but finding out whether the local city council voted to outlaw gypsies last night is going to take some digging. The newspaper is still the best place to find out the details of the local haps, but most people in our world are content with either a] not really caring about the local haps (most popular answer) or 2] (less popular but still more popular than the newspaper) finding out about the local affairs by having the TV news on while they order take-out.

It didn't used to be this way. I remember reading about the little gold-mining town of Cripple Creek, Colorado--it's little now, anyway. Back when it was a booming mining town of 10,000 residents, it had ten different newspapers! The New York Times and the New York Post still wage something of a war, but the only people who care about it are the employees of the New York Times and, occasionally, the New York Post.

Now, instead of getting their misinformation from the NYT, most people would prefer to get their information from whatever squirrel writes the news for the internet or, barring that, just skip the news entirely and play Pokémon Go! (is that still a thing?) or watch reruns of "Game of Thrones Porn" on their phone while telling their friends at church they only watch it for the storytelling.

Is there a way to get back to those old days, when newspapers mattered? Short of the kind of disaster I champion in my novel series "The Last Valley" (buy it in paperback or for Kindle or Nook by clicking here), I don't think so. For one thing, go to a museum (check your GPS to find the one nearest you) and check out old newspapers. You know what they had in them?

News!

Back in the day when Cripple Creek could support ten newspapers, all ten of them were either one broad sheet of paper, or maybe one broader sheet of paper folded once to make a four-page newspaper. Almost no pictures (sometimes none at all), very little advertising, just news. Column after column of tightly written, sometimes sensational, news and commentary. They still had the baseball scores and recipes, but what they didn't have was three pages taken up completely with an advertisement for a dress shop. Once they started running pictures, the pictures were part of the story, not just a hook that replaces the story.

I don't think our world could go back to that. We don't have the desire or aptitude to read the kind of long articles they wrote back then (with long paragraphs and long sentences to boot). We have short attention spans (most people bailed on this blog long ago) and want quotes that could appear in Reader's Digest because they're both pithy and short (as opposed to succinct, which is really different entirely).

Addendum: I thought about adding something along the lines of how most newspapers (especially those with "Globe-News" or "Avalanche-Journal" in their title), if you submit something to them like, oh, I don't know, a comic strip, won't even bother to write back. No, "Thanks but no thanks", even. I realize they're busy drowning in debt, but maybe if they had a little more courtesy toward their public it would help their relationship to the public?

Withering Church

Was in a small, west Texas town last week to see some patients and came across the 1st Christian Church of That Town . I had wondered where it was, as I had had some dealings with it before, sort of. Back in 2010, I attended a meeting of what was called (I think) the Panhandle Evangelism Association, which amounted to two people from our church, the minister from That Town, and an old college alum of mine (who was ministering at a church in Amarillo at the time). So I had wondered if the church of That Town still existed.

Having taken a wrong turn in my effort to get to the nursing home, I spotted a building with a sign out front that proclaimed (in muted tones), "1st Christian Church." Nice-looking little building, and there were two trucks pulled up out front so I thought maybe someone was there mowing the yard. I stopped and went in and was met by two elderly gentlemen whose names I don't remember. They greeted me and I told them who I was and I found out that they were 2/3 of the church. On Sunday mornings, one of them brings his wife. And they live more than an hour away. He told me the Church of Christ had tried to buy the building from then and my thought was, "Sell! Sell!" but he was born and raised in that church, he father was a founder, and he can't bear to let it go.

[I say the sign proclaimed the church in muted tones because while it had the name spelled out, it did not have the service times anywhere on it. So, if Joe Smith decides one Sunday morning he would like to attend 1st Christian ... how's he going to know when to show up? I asked them that in a polite way and they took it kindly, though acted like they had never thought of anything like that. The building itself is in OK shape, though it smells musty and the interior is definitely from the 1970s. So, from a strictly superficial standpoint, the church has 3 strikes against it before a service could even start.]

That Town is a dying, rural town. Doesn't even have a grocery store anymore. Just a Love's, another convenience store (which is across the street from the Love's), a Subway and a Sonic. A dozen Mexican food restaurants (which is a really low number for a town of that size in west Texas). The town square is just a square of empty shops around a courthouse. There's an old, closed movie theater on the square that I would love to see the inside of. So, even if you had the wherewithal to--say--sponsor a church-planting team to come in and take over the building, canvas the area, etc., what are the chances of it taking off in a town like that? I'm sure it COULD be done, but I wouldn't bet on it BEING done.

This Town (the town where I used to minister) is not a dying town like That Town, but I could sure see the church where I used to serve following the path of that church in That Town. Maybe it won't, but there is very little in the church's current makeup to make one say, "That'll never happen here!"

On the other hand, I think churches/congregations may be like plants. Some of them are designed to be planted, grow for a while, then die off. It should only be sad if we prolong it long past the sell-by date, holding onto a building more than onto our Lord. We should probably rejoice in the time it had and the lives it affected when it was supposed to.

Normally, I think cultural fads flow from the big cities outward, but I wonder if this particular flow--while it may be coming from the cities (I could write more on that later but probably won't)--is most clearly visible in the rural areas: the church model of 'if you build it they will come', sometimes called more formally 'the attractional model', is nearing it's end. Our culture bombards everyone--but especially our young--with attractive enticements. Many churches have tried to jump on that bandwagon and are meeting with a season of success, but I think that season is closing. For some, it already has.

There are think tanks in the world of science and politics and art (and maybe every discipline) who try to predict "the next big thing". New methods of propulsion. New mediums for art. Demographic changes that make old methods of polling obsolete.

Surely there are think tanks for the church. I wonder what they are predicting? I firmly believe that God will always preserve a remnant, but it may not be anything like what we expect a "church" to look like.