As of today, I’ll have officially completed my third year working at the CGGC. Somehow, I still feel like the newest member, but that might be because I’m still the youngest member (I like to remind the staff of that routinely).
In these last 3 years as the Director of Communications it’s been my job to tell the stories of many amazing people. Some of those people can be found in books, file folders, and pictures. And I’ve loved digging through dusty cabinets to unearth (metaphorically) a person who's been forgotten, and who deserves to be remembered. There’s a deep pathos I feel when I read the writing of someone from a different time and almost a different world, who still bears all the marks of a humanity I recognize well. Some of these people feel like friends I never had the chance to meet, and I lament that.
I’ve also been fortunate to write stories about people who I could meet and talk to in the flesh. I’ve met so many people who are doing amazing work for Jesus and His kingdom. I’ve been inside different churches, sometimes to speak and sometimes like a fly on the wall. I was always surprised to find archetypes of the people I knew from my own church back home, and I’ve been equally surprised to find people who are shockingly unique. It’s their quips, and jokes, their smiles and laughs, their firm handshakes and their welcoming hugs, all from total strangers, that resonate with me when I sit down to write an article or edit a video.
But this role isn’t just about telling stories. In fact, it might not even mainly be about that. Much of my time is spent wrestling with technology. I was born somewhere between a digital immigrant and digital native. Born in the 1990’s in a country home, I didn’t have internet access until 2006, but I did play around with the latest tech I could get my hands on. I loved new gadgets, toys, games, and computers. I used to stand in the laptop department of Best Buy as a teenager, hoping my parents would get the hint for Christmas. It’s been strange then to grow up with a steadily declining excitement level about technology, it’s promises, and it's real world affordances. There’s almost always a gap between the marketing and the real product, but never has that seemed so stark as it does today.
So, it’s a little sad (and given my role, a little scary) to admit this publicly, but I’ve become something of a tech pessimist.
I still build my own computers. I still get a little excited about new hardware, and I still listen to technology insiders about the latest news. I still see it as my job to help the denomination innovate by putting the latest technology to use. In fact, let me lay out a few things that I strongly believe about the church as it relates to technology.
- I believe it’s essential that the church utilize the latest technology to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ.
- I believe God calls us to where people are, and people are currently living in a digital world.
- I believe that technological advances are generally a net positive for the world, and that technology itself is (mostly) morally neutral, and the outcomes are dependent upon how we choose to use it.
But I’m still a tech pessimist, so here's some caveats to the "I believe" statements above.
While I believe it’s essential for the church to utilize the latest technology, I believe we frequently do so either thoughtlessly, or without consideration of the consequences. From the use of the printing press that helped started the protestant revolution (and the horrific 30 years war after), to Pastors using AI to write their sermons, there's a great many ways we can use technology in the church positively, and yet many unforeseen, disastrous consequences have followed. We've engaged people in online spaces, but have often followed in the steps of the culture, rather than charting a better way.
While I believe God calls us to engage people on digital platforms, far too many Christians have used social media sites in both flagrantly sinful ways, gossiping and sniping, or in just unhelpful ways, loudly and uncharitably proclaiming every opinion they have, alienating people they might otherwise have helped come to Jesus. Without modern media literacy, many Christians accidentally spread lies and false information, peddle conspiracies that support their beliefs but undermine their credibility. Even as passive partakers, Christian people are just as prone (if not more so) to be infected by the algorithmic division that curates a false perspective on the world, and our place in it.
While I believe technological advances are a net positive, the technologies we interact with on a daily basis are not driven by a desire to do good, to fill a need, or even to innovate. The internet, for example, is an amazing technology, created to fill a need, first by the United States Department of Defense, and then for the needs of researchers, scientists, and eventually the general public. Unfortunately, we’ve turned the internet into a tool that mostly commodifies your private information for companies to trade and sell. While algorithms and machine learning tools are incredible at learning what we like, we haven't considered strongly enough how companies controlling what we see and when we see it might radically alter our perceived reality or our relationship with other people.
Tangentially, the average piece of consumer technology (or technology service) is stagnating, and in some ways regressing. While computers get more powerful every year, the pace of improvement is slowing to a crawl while costs skyrocket. It used to be the case that technological improvements meant yesterday’s technology became cheaper fast, and only the early adopters paid high prices. Now consumers are faced with a silly decision; pay high upfront costs for buggy technology, or pay more for the same technology once the bugs are worked out. Pick your technological poison.
Software companies put out annual updates to their software, only for technical debt and poor coding practices to ensure that it runs slower, breaks more, and the cost (now monthly) rises year over year. Sometimes this kind of technological arson is negligence from companies too big to quality control their own products, and sometimes it’s preplanned obsolescence, like in the case of Apple who has been fined with lawsuits from the EU, the USA, and the UK for intentionally and secretly slowing down older iPhones with software updates. Proprietary designs are working overdrive to ensure you can't legally repair your own devices (or your own cars). And why should you, when it's better for you to just buy a new one?
That’s pretty pessimistic, right?
Well, I can’t very well leave it there. Instead, this post will be the first in a series dedicated to the use of technology in the church. We’ll start by looking into biblical principles that call us to use technology for the spreading of God’s Word and for the Great Commission. From there, we’ll view historical examples of how God’s people have used technology throughout time to spread the Gospel, and how that’s worked out well, and not so well.
Next, we’ll dive into publishing, printing, and all kinds of modern and post-modern technologies, attempting to bring clarity to terminologies and Christian practice. We’ll also take a future look at technologies that are in development, and how the Church might prepare itself for a new digital age.
As we approach our 200th Celebration in July, we’ll have even more to share about how we’re preparing for the future of the church, and we hope to bring insightful church focused technologists into this space to broaden out all of our understanding. In the meantime, I'll encourage all our readers (if you've made it this far, you're the rare few) to do practice careful media literacy by doing these four things:
- Pray for a spirit of discernment in this new age of disinformation.
- Check your sources for accuracy. If they cite something, check it. If they cite nothing, double check it.
- Flex your mental muscles by engage longform content like books, articles, podcasts over short form snippets.
- Read & watch broadly across different sources to gain wholistic views.
CGGC eNews—Vol. 19, No. 18
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