Faith and technology

Theology and computers are my stock in trade. I work online, and while that allows for certain perks, there are certain drawbacks as well. It also makes for some trying times. This week has had a few of those in my life, mostly good people who do not understand how things like cutting and pasting something into a browser works. (Not all links in an e-mail are live ones, mind you. Nor should they be.)

Now I could very easily go off into a blog about how, as Christians, we should not be afraid to use the technology and yet need to not make it more than it is. It would certainly be easy enough to write.

I’ll get to part of that in a minute.

It just surprises me that, in this day and age, there are those people my age and slightly older by a year or three who really don’t understand technology, people of faith not withstanding. Worse, they’re afraid of it, and I don’t understand why. Granted, I grew up in a home where technology was embraced. We learned by doing, and doing meant having the tools to work with, or at least going to where there were tools to work with in order to learn.

But technology didn’t replace hard work as such. For example, calculators were used to check math, not to do it. A spellcheck would have been helpful (and is today), but we had a big dictionary. Encyclopedias were available at home as well.

I’ve written enough of late to give most of you the idea that I know a little about computers. But in a sense, I’ve had a lifetime of learning about them. BASIC in summer school, plus TRS-DOS in high school. AppleSoft in college. More software programs over the years than I want to list or admit to, never mind the hardware that ran them all.

Now you can see why I wonder why people don’t understand how things like the Internet works.

Now, moving forward, we add faith into the mix. As Christians, we need to use whatever tools we can to advance the Gospel of Christ, and use them well. And while I admit to a fondness for “dead tree editions” (read: books), I am not against using Keynote or PowerPoint for worship services as opposed to hymnals and Bibles. (I still think we should have both in the seats or pews, however. Some folks like to have the book in their hands.) We cannot allow ourselves the luxury of being afraid of computers or the Internet. We must learn to use these tools, not to keep up with the world (or worse--become worldly), but because the world uses these tools and has come to expect their use on a daily basis. If we want to reach the world, we need to take the tools (which are neutral, in and of themselves) and put them to work for the Kingdom, just like we did with radio, television, and music. (Notice I haven’t mentioned movies. There are better Christian movies being made--Left Behind, Facing the Giants and Fireproof among them--but Christian movies still have a long way to go in terms of writing and production values.)

And this isn’t just for large churches, or well-to-do Christians, either. This is for all churches, and honestly, given the cost of computers these days, any Christian.

I understand that I am preaching to the choir, as it were. If you’re reading this, you’re online unless someone printed it out. (If so, I’d like to know, okay?) I guess I feel so strongly about this because it used to be that the Christians were well educated. Now we are perceived as being backwards, a little slow perhaps. We react, and we need to be proactive in its place. We put our faith in front of our brains, and it needs to be that our faith molds our education. We need to be the educated people God called us to be, and that means being able to use a computer for more than an expensive doorstop.

So...go learn how your computer works. Figure out some of those programs you don’t know much about. There are books that you can get that will help, and online tools as well. You can’t really break your computer, anyway, unless you mess with the registry or you drop it. (I do not recommend you do either. Both become very expensive.)

If nothing else, at least learn to cut and paste a link into your web browser.

Enough for now.