Outliving Yourself

Changing the world.

It’s about changing people, right? It’s about millions, even billions of people changing the way they treat each other. But then, all of them are going to die. And the world will be left with the next rebellious upstart generation that wants to change the world.

Maybe that’s the significance of the Biblical story where God knocks down the life expectancy from 900 to 90. Whether you take it as history or myth the meaning is the same: any changes that we make are erased in 100 years. We live in perpetual cultural upheaval.

So how do you change the world for generations? What lives on after people pass away? Two things come to mind – ideas and organizations.

There’s a lot of talk these days about viral ideas – ideas that spread from mind to mind the way that a virus spreads from body to body. Once it plants itself in a host, the host spreads the idea to others, almost involuntarily. The idea takes on a life of its own. Some even have the power to jump generations.

Organizations can also last – look at The Red Cross, Ford, the Mormon church. And it seems to me that the stronger the commitment to an organization’s ideas, the more likely it is to last. (And its ability to make money. That helps too, for a time.)

The collision of ideas and organizations is what gives religions their amazing longevity. They are organizations built completely on ideas, or perhaps they are ideas that people perpetually build organizations on. Either way, they have staying power.

The ideas that Jesus talked about were archetypically viral. Viral ideas have spreading mechanisms built in. Like an email forward that promises you a new iPod if you send it to enough people. The idea is spread by virtue of its contents.

Jesus’s ideas had a different spreading mechanism. His ideas were about life change, and his life was their first showcase. When they spread to a new host, I mean really took root in her like a virus, her life changed. And when people saw the life change they were introduced to the ideas in a powerful form. If actions speak louder than words, then a new way of life is a sustained shout. Jesus’s ideas were shouted from his and his followers’ lives.

The reason his ideas spread so powerfully in the years immediately after his death was that the change they created in his followers was overwhelmingly attractive. These hosts of Jesus’s ideas loved each other, provided for each other, transcended extreme difficulties with joy and patience. Who wouldn’t want to know more? The virus multiplied.

I wonder about today’s Christian church, though. Is it founded on Jesus’s viral, life changing ideas? Or are there new ideas at its core? Or is it more like an organization (or group of organizations) that propagates because it has learned how to make money? Perhaps, like one of my last posts, it's a mix.