Yesterday I wrote about “the remnant” referring to a powerful essay by Albert Nock first published in 1936. I was prompted to dig out that essay, sent to me by a friend a number of years ago, because of a provocative article by Mike Metzger about TED talks. Near the beginning, he has a paragraph strikingly reminiscent of the opening of Nock’s essay: smart people believing that they can change things by spreading ideas to the masses.

TED’s premise is simple: ideas change the world. There are problems in the world… fortunately, there are solutions to each of these problems… they’ve been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people… so, for their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible in stories that actually manifest a new world. – Mike Mezger, April 18, 2022

Mike was quoting from another article, What Was the TED Talk? by Oscar Schwartz. I commend both articles in their entirety. Schwartz’s article opens with the story of Bill Gates advocating in 2015 that we weren’t prepared for a global epidemic. He was right, of course, and he had a solution – an idea. Schwartz reports Gates’ idea:

Back when he was a kid, the U.S. military had sufficient funding to mobilize for war at any minute. Gates says that we must prepare for a pandemic with the same fearful intensity. We need to build a medical reserve corps. We need to play germ games like generals play war games. We need to make alliances with other virus-fighting nations. We need to build an arsenal of biomedical weapons to attack any non-human entity that might attack our bodies. “If we start now, we can be ready for the next epidemic,” Gates concludes, to a round of applause. 

But Schwartz continues that few of the TED ideas as good as well-articulated as they were, bore fruit:

Of course, Gates’s popular and well-shared TED talk — viewed millions of times — didn’t alter the course of history. Neither did any of the other “ideas worth spreading” (the organization’s tagline) presented at the TED conference that year — including Monica Lewinsky’s massively viral speech about how to stop online bullying through compassion and empathy, or a Google engineer’s talk about how driverless cars would make roads smarter and safer in the near future. In fact, seven years after TED 2015, it feels like we are living in a reality that is the exact opposite of the future envisioned that year. A president took office in part because of his talent for online bullying. Driverless cars are nowhere near as widespread as predicted, and those that do share our roads keep crashing. Covid has killed five million people and counting.

Mike Metzger says that the assumption that ideas in and of themselves change the world is false. And certainly spreading ideas “to the masses” doesn’t work. What does?

Jesus gave his 11 remaining apostles and, by extension, the total of 120 in the upper room a mandate to change the world.

When they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” And He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority. But you shall receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be witnesses to Me in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” (Acts 1.6 – 8, NKJV)

And after Acts 3, we don’t have any record of big meetings. (And even those meetings were followed by extensive training: “And daily in the temple, and in every house, they did not cease teaching and preaching Jesus as the Christ. (Acts 5.42, NKJV)

The world has been changed, not by spreading ideas through the masses but by committed Jesus followers, living out the Gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit. Rodney Stark documents this transformation in his marvelous book The Rise of Christianity (strongly recommend). In The Biggest Lie in the History of Christianity, Matthew Kelly argues we can do it again through Holy Moments. And we should be intentionally investing in the other people, including the next generation. It’s something any of us can do – without worrying about how to reach “the masses.”

But as for you, speak the things which are proper for sound doctrine: that the older men be sober, reverent, temperate, sound in faith, in love, in patience; the older women likewise, that they be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things–that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed. (Titus 2.1 – 5, NKJV)

Do all things without complaining and disputing, that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life, so that I may rejoice in the day of Christ that I have not run in vain or labored in vain. (Philippians 2.14 – 16, NKJV)