Church tech

The insidious destruction of intentionality

I’ve been thinking a lot about the extent to which Christians should engage with technology. The question has been growing in my mind for some time, and it’s weighing on me enough that I feel drawn to write a series of essays to help myself — and other Christians — think through it.

I’m trouble that so many Christians justify tech as necessary, inevitable, or even desirable. The prevailing attitude seems to be, “It’s here, we might as well learn how to live with it and use it for godly purposes.” We bring screens into our churches to “enhance” the service, set up Facebook accounts and YouTube channels to “reach people,” and implement church tech platforms to “maintain communication” — all without thinking about how these changes impact worship or tempt fellow Christians to spend more time interacting with devices that already devour huge chunks of their lives.

On average, we spend somewhere between three hours and 20 minutes and five hours and 15 minutes on our phones every day, picking them up around 186 times. Most of us start this frenzied dance within 10 minutes of waking up because we feel so addicted that we can’t go even one day without gazing into what British writer Paul Kingsnorth has so aptly dubbed our “little black mirrors.”

We’re inundated with bings, buzzes, rings, vibrations, and banners that shatter our focus and keep us hooked. Moment by moment, we’re tempted to check the latest news or message, and it rarely stops there. I can’t count how often I unlock my phone “just to check my texts” and find myself “just checking” so many other things that I no longer remember what I meant to do in the first place.

Asking congregants to sign up for another platform and receive more notifications amplifies distraction in an age when fragmented attention is robbing people of the ability to read books or simply think without getting sidetracked. It allows the world to insinuate itself in the church until we’re texting and checking Facebook during services or spending fellowship time staring at our phones instead of building real relationships with brothers and sisters face to face.

Worst of all, church-sanctioned tech engagement undermines intentionality and focus, two disciplines essential to knowing and worshipping God. If we can’t focus, we can’t spend long enough in God’s Word each day to build the solid Biblical literacy we need to discern truth. We can’t stay in His presence long enough to wrestle with what Scripture speaks to our hearts. We can’t be still long enough to pray for wisdom and hear when the Holy Spirit brings passages to mind to guide us. We lose countless opportunities for spiritual growth and remain as babes, unable to feed on the strong meat that God wants to give us (Heb. 5:12-14, King James Version).

We’re so busy attending to our phones that we don’t realize we’re stuck in the spiritual shallows. The technology our churches adopt may ultimately fail to strengthen the congregation and instead produce weak, immature Christians without the Biblical knowledge or inner fortitude to bear the fruit of the Spirit. Rather than empowering the Church, tech renders it ineffective, and the Body atrophies.

Even the apparently normal act of texting keeps us glued to our phones, held captive to the hypnotic “incoming message” ellipsis. And, because texting lets us “keep up” — or at least touch base — with far more people than we can through other forms of communication, we begin to sense an obligation to connect regularly with dozens or even hundreds of people we barely know instead of cultivating a few deep, intentional friendships.

Whether we call it FOMO or the tyranny of the urgent, the persistent weight of feeling like we must keep up with the whole world only gets worse as more tech enters the picture — even church tech. The nature of the messages doesn’t matter; the nature of the platform is the issue.

Nearly half of Americans feel addicted to their phones, and 53% want to cut back on their use. But the pull of the screen remains. We may say we’re going to sit down and meditate on our Bible reading for the day, but we barely last five minutes before we feel compelled to check our latest notifications. Thoughts are interrupted, meditations cut short. And once the phone is in our hand, we’re just a tap or swipe away from millions of potential rabbit trails that eat up minutes and hours and days as we scroll on, oblivious.

And what of those who choose not to engage? What of those who feel the conviction of the Spirit as He illuminates detrimental effects of the tech they use in their own lives? What of those who sense danger for themselves and their brothers and sisters in Christ and feel called to reduce or abstain from tech?

Accommodations can, and should, be made. This is right and Biblical, in line with Romans 14 and 15 and 1 Corinthians 8. Yet it’s easy to adopt the world’s view that the tech abstinent are weird or backward. It’s easy to exert subconscious pressure to get on board. After all, refusing to embrace tech as a good or neutral medium to be used for God’s purposes is refusing to embrace progress. It inconveniences the elders and constrains the church.

But is it right and good to create a culture where tech is necessary to stay connected with the Body of Christ and where disengaging puts some members on the outside? Is it loving to ask people to choose between enslavement to their devices or alienation from the congregation because of a strong conviction that the way they’re using tech is a sin (Rom. 14:23)?

Requiring technology for church life makes it harder to disconnect from other distractions like social media and television. It perpetuates the worldly idea that hyperconnectivity is normal, necessary, and unavoidable and the most we can do to break the cycle is practice the occasional “digital media fast.”

This attitude exposes a troubling trend: The tech giants are influencing the Church just as much as they’re influencing the world, and their doctrine is destroying our intentionality. The devices in our pockets, our homes — and, increasingly, our sanctuaries — are sucking away the attention we need to truly worship God and form deep bonds with fellow Christians. We’re so busy flitting from notification to notification that we stop to evaluate whether the tech we’ve deemed necessary actually benefits us or our churches. Our attention is so fragmented that we don’t have time to think — or even realize there’s something important to think about.

Instead, we embrace tech as inevitable and essential, never noticing that, more and more, it’s transferring our worship from the personal God who desires our attention, love, and fellowship to the Neon God the world has made.

What is the path forward from tech dependency? Is there a single path that every Christian ought to follow?

I can’t answer that yet. That’s what I plan to explore in these essays. But a few starting points come to mind. First, Christians can do what God calls us to do when we need wisdom: pray and ask, on our own and with our brothers and sisters. Second, church leaders can seek God’s guidance on what’s best for their congregations spiritually and personally and whether tech should play a role. Third, we can all benefit from taking a step back to evaluate our current tech use and ask how it affects our worship, relationships, and spiritual formation.

For my part, I’m praying about and taking steps toward getting rid of my smartphone. I’m toying with the idea of no longer using email for communication outside of work. I’m reading more books and physical magazines. I’m using my laptop instead of my phone for the digital things I’ve determined are, at least for now, important. And I’m wrestling to let go of apps and habits that aren’t necessary but that I’ve gotten so used to that it’s hard to imagine getting rid of them or developing workarounds.

I need some tech to do my job as a freelance writer. And in daily life, I would literally be lost without GPS. But I suspect that much of the tech or features I think I need are simply things I’ve gotten used to or that make life feel easier. A large part of disengaging is deciding how much I want to sacrifice for convenience and how much inconvenience I’m willing to put up with.

We’ll see where God leads me. But I know I can’t stay where I am. Something has to change, and I’m ready to take those steps.

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to share this piece with someone else who’s thinking deeply about tech. Or, if you’ve come across a good book or essay on this, please drop me a comment! I’d like to read more along these lines as well as write.

Featured photo by Shyam Mishra on Unsplash