In a recent conversation with a local university chair, we talked a good bit about the motivations behind an initiative like MMM and its eventual aims. One of these aims is to fill in some of the gaps that other areas of our various societies commonly find need. In context to that college, one of those gaps is within education.

Education is one part learning the necessary skills to succeed in the current environment, and another enabling the skillets to sustain life in future environments. As one educational professional put it (paraphrase) we don’t teach kids today to deal with our technology challenges, but the ones they will encounter when they enter the workforce/adult world in 2025.

This means that we aren’t advocating digital learning methods or multimedia communication channels because they are the hip thing to do, but because in the context of the world that is developing, these will be the primary (or only) channels, and our ability to both see the current and develop for the future is key to growth.

Our opinion here is that there’s a lot of creative and intellectual capital in churches that can and should be used for this. Not just in the respect of making Bibles available, or putting our message on every communication channel possible – but we have the potential to fill in gaps where policy or traditional methods are failing or aren’t sufficient.

My friend, in our conversation yesterday, pointed to a simple but profound question: if school districts can no longer afford social and creative educational programming, why wouldn’t the local church seek to fill that need because they have the need of trained producers for such efforts? If there is a problem with the reading and comprehension levels of students in some socio-economic classes, yet there are several churches in the community, why wouldn’t they band together to create the learning and elearning curriculums and resources to feed the need?

If you will, the technology in our hands allows us to be mortar to some of the walls that badly need attention around us. What is stopping us from addressing the gaps, or rather, what do we need to develop within our contexts to become the mortar to the walls around us?