I passed our town library the other day and felt a pang of nostalgia. I used to spend a lot of time writing in libraries. There’s a certain feeling you have walking into a library that you don’t get anywhere else. There’s an immediate hush that comes over you like the hush that insulates a neighborhood after a snowfall. You suddenly feel smarter, like all the books that surround you are accessible to your brain even though you haven’t read them. It’s a disappearing feeling now in this digital age.

Facing a computer, the feeling is closer to overwhelm. There’s an endless array of information at your fingertips, but it somehow seems diminished in its sheer volume.

Books have covers. There’s a beginning and an end. Books are tangible. You turn a page and there’s more; you come to the end and there’s no more. With digital information there’s no beginning and no end. Just an endless stream. We even call it “streaming.”

Late night talk shows on TV are on the decline. People like Johnny Carson, David Letterman and Jay Leno were fixtures. You could always count on them being on in their time slot. People organized their lives around these shows. Now clips of their best or most controversial gags are available online whenever you want. We don’t respond to media; it responds to us. This is why we are so divided: we only choose media we already agree with.

But back to libraries, there are no Republican and Democratic sections in our libraries (at least I hope there aren’t!). In a library, you have to find out for yourself who’s who. And that’s good.

Before you pass me off as some old guy wishing for “back in the day,” I must point out that there are retro movements in our society that are not just coming from old people trying to go back to what they know.

For instance, vinyl records are enjoying a resurgence, and that’s not just with the older generation. Younger people are discovering the warmer sounds of analog and the unique artwork on an album cover. Record stores are popping up all over. And believe it or not, books are still selling—real books with covers. Somebody somewhere has discovered the magic of turning a page on more adventure.

So why is this important?

Since we are a community that spans all generations, we need to resist the temptation to make broad categorizations of each other based on our age or generation. With so much division going on in our society today, we, as a community, want to display a different attitude—one that appreciates differences and seeks for consensus. We can benefit from each other. Streaming isn’t any better than setting a needle down on a record; it’s just different, and we can learn from those differences.

Instead of staying in our generational silos, we here at the Catch are changing the metaphor from simply passing the baton to the next generation to a more functional, biblical picture of the body — that is, the entire community of faith, across the entire lifespan, working together to fulfill God’s purposes.