It’s become conventional wisdom that the key to happiness is less screen time . . . or at least that’s how it often seems. Turns out, that’s not entirely accurate.

As Rhiannon Williams describes, “Screen time has a bad reputation, and there are plenty of negative headlines blaming the amount of time we spend on devices for everything from reduced attention span to depression and anxiety. But there’s a growing body of evidence suggesting that reducing your screen time won’t in itself make you happier, and that general device usage isn’t a reliable predictor of any of those things.”

To be sure, there are elements of social media, phone addictions, and the inability to step away from work that can make our lives worse, but some variation of “Do I need less of those things in my life?” is the wrong question.

Unless you first understand what it is about the time you spend on a screen that’s making your life worse, you are likely to end up solving for the wrong problem.

And screen time is hardly the only area of our lives where we face that same issue.

What is the church?

In an article for Christianity Today, Kirsten Sanders argues that Christians in America are making a similar mistake when it comes to our understanding of the role the church should play in our culture. As she writes, “One question I encounter regularly these days is why the local church matters. This, I think, is the wrong question.”

She goes on to describe how the pandemic taught us that “God can be encountered in living rooms, in nature, and even on a TV. . . . The entire Christian tradition insists that God is not hindered by anything. . . . God indeed dwells with his people, gathered in homes across the world.”

At the same time, however, Sanders argues that “the church is not God’s guiding, consoling presence in one’s heart or the very real consolation and correction that can come when a group of Christians meets to pray. Nor is it what we name the occasional gathering of Christians to sing and study in homes or around tables worldwide.”

So what is the church?

That, it would seem, is the correct question. Unfortunately, it’s also one that has proven increasingly difficult to answer for many believers today.

Needs “only the church can meet”

Throughout her article, Sanders goes into greater detail on the myriad ways in which Christians have attempted incorrectly to define what it means to be the church, and her account is worth reading in its entirety.

For our purposes today, however, the most crucial element of her argument is that the church’s greatest mistake is often losing sight of what makes it unique in its attempts to make itself relevant.

Efforts to care for the poor and the needy, provide a place of community, and help people live more moral lives are all important pieces of what it means to follow Christ, but they cannot serve as the foundation of what it means to be the church.

The reason is that those services, as vital as they are, can be found in other places. They’re not what makes the church distinct from the world around us.

As Sanders, notes, people’s physical and emotional needs are important, but “spiritual needs are the ones that only the church can meet.” Consequently, that needs to be our focus and the principle that guides our other efforts to serve people in the name of God.

Sanders concludes, “We must refuse to justify the church’s existence by stating what good we offer, what our contribution is, or whether we can promise that our people will resist temptation or refuse improper use of power or never harm each other. The church matters because only there is the truth about the world spoken—because only there is the Lord proclaimed as King.”

When the world doesn’t understand the church

In short, what makes the church the church is our common cause of worshiping Jesus as the only path to salvation and the Lord of our lives.

However, as Paul writes, we should not be surprised when that identity is considered “folly to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18). As he goes on to say, “We preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles, but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God” (vs 23–24).

But will we be content if the world around us doesn’t quite understand that purpose? Can we resist the pull of defining our worth by the culture’s standards rather than God’s?

Those can be difficult questions to answer, but they reside at the heart of what it means to be the church today. Fortunately, the same was true for the first generations of Christians as well.

We are purposefully peculiar

One of the primary ways that the early church proved its value and worth was by being a blessing to the people they met. However, blessing others was never their focus. Rather, it was a natural byproduct of a life dedicated to serving God and growing in their relationship with him.

In the same way, there is an important place for Christian service and charity in the church’s purpose. But, as Sanders describes, if meeting physical and emotional needs ever becomes a higher priority than meeting spiritual needs, “the church becomes understandable to the world but loses its mission. It is no longer peculiar, even if it is now coherent to a culture that is anything but Christian. We need that friction, that impossible question of how church works, that puzzlement over what the church does, because what it does is often inconceivable to those outside it.”

As we think about what it means to be the church, we’re going to have to accept that there will be some who just never get it. Whether it’s mischaracterizations in movies and entertainment or even just a sideways glance from our neighbors and coworkers, we’re going to have to learn to live with being misunderstood.

And that’s all right. After all, people didn’t get Jesus either.

The crowds followed him because he fed them and performed miracles, but few understood him because his priorities were different from theirs. He never gave up on them, but he also never strayed from his purpose to accommodate them.

If we want to embody his church in our culture, we must do the same and remember that our purpose—what makes us unique—can only be found in worshiping God as part of the body of Christ and making him known.

Is that your purpose today?

Denison Forum

On Monday, spurred by the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, President Biden addressed the nation in the wake of the ongoing banking crises to reassure Americans that we “can have confidence that the banking system is safe. Your deposits will be there when you need them.”

Unfortunately, the stock market disagreed.

Trading on more than a dozen small to mid-sized banks was forced to halt after prices continued to free fall. However, the crisis seems fueled less by the fears of an impending bank run depleting available cash—emergency measures taken by the government over the weekend appear to have largely staved off that fear—than by concerns that what happened at Silicon Valley Bank last Thursday is a sign that the Fed’s attempts to control inflation through interest rate hikes “may be cracking the banking system.”

A closer look at what went wrong last week shows that such fears are not entirely unfounded.

SVB was not a normal bank

To understand the scope of the crisis that began last Thursday, it’s important to note that Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) was not a normal bank.

SVB got its start in the 1980s by investing in Silicon Valley startups and then providing a place for those startups to keep their investors’ money. As such, they’ve always leaned more heavily into the high-risk, high-reward technology sector than your average bank.

Whereas most financial institutions have a pretty diverse set of customers, SVB was primarily used by venture capitalists and small businesses. As much as 97 percent of its deposits went beyond the $250,000 limit insured by the FDIC and the average customer balance as of late last year was $4.2 million. Consequently, when customers attempted to withdraw roughly $42 billion last Thursday over fears that their money wasn’t safe in the bank, SVB ended the day in the red by more than $950 million.

Word quickly spread after screenshots of error messages from those who tried to access their funds went viral and the government stepped in last Friday to shut them down.

But while the Silicon Valley Bank collapse happened quickly, the signs had been there for some time.

What caused the Silicon Valley Bank collapse?

SVB’s largest problems stemmed less from the influx of people trying to get their cash than the ways that the bank had used that cash in recent years.

No bank carries enough currency to match the total amount deposited by its customers. Rather, they keep a percentage and reinvest the rest in loans, bonds, government securities, and other assets. That reinvestment is why they are able to pay interest on savings accounts and take on other forms of risk to help their clients.

The people running Silicon Valley Bank, however, leaned far more heavily into those risks than most.

As Vivek Ramaswamy notes, SVB invested roughly 57 percent of its total assets—its peer average is 24 percent—and of its $120 billion investment portfolio, only $26 billion was held in assets that were easy to move. The rest was tied up in bonds and securities that can be difficult to sell without taking a loss, especially in the current economic climate.

You see, well before SVB invested much of its pandemic-related growth in US treasury bonds and mortgage-backed securities, the Fed warned about inflation and the likelihood that they would raise interest rates in a way that could heavily jeopardize the value of those assets. SVB ignored those warnings and invested anyway.

As such, when they were forced to sell $21 billion in bonds over recent weeks at a nearly $2 billion loss, it set off red flags that culminated in the chaos of last Thursday.

However, given that SVB President Greg Becker sold roughly $3.6 million in company stock two weeks ago while urging investors to “stay calm,” it seems clear that present events were hardly a surprise.

Will the SVB collapse affect your finances?

So what happens now?

Unlike when the “too-big-to-fail” banks went under in 2007 and 2008, those in charge of SVB have already lost their jobs and the bank’s remaining assets are being sold off to help cover the cost of ensuring that the bank’s clients will have access to their money. Sunday night, HSBC bought the UK subsidiary of SVB for one pound—roughly $1.20—and a similar model could be pursued for the rest of SVB as well.

However, the larger threat to the banking system still looms.

As George Godber, a fund manager at Polar Capital, remarked, “The imminent crisis may have been averted but it’s alerted people to the fact that there’s a group of companies out there with business models who will struggle in a high-interest rate environment.” In short, people are worried that what happened to SVB could happen to their bank as well, even if the same risk factors don’t exist. And that fear—even though unfounded in most cases—has proven strong enough to potentially damage an entire industry.

Choosing faith over fear

One of the most difficult of Christ’s commands comes in the Sermon on the Mount when he instructs his disciples to “not be anxious about your life” (Matthew 6:25). In the Greek, that sense of anxiety carries the idea of being “divided into parts” or “drawn in opposite directions.”

The idea here is not that we never experience the emotion of fear—God never commands us how to feel. Rather, the sin against which we are warned is feeding our anxiety by dwelling on it instead of giving it back to God and trusting that he not only knows our needs but has a plan to meet them as well.

Fears over the present economic climate and whether your bank will be the next to go under are understandable. And they are hardly the only thing we have to be anxious about these days.

But it’s the times when fear seems like the most natural response that choosing faith can make the greatest impact on our lives and on our culture.

Which will you choose today?

Denison Forum