God and Technology

Written and Media by James Hudson

We’ve all been in a moment where we’re in service and when the pastor asks to open your bible to a certain passage and the person next to us or even the pastor himself pulls out a technological device whether its an iPad or cell phone. In most cases and for my generation of people, that’s completely normal to pull out a device that has a bible in it. However, generations before us would think this is abnormal and prefer to have a hard copy of the bible because to them it’s the way it should be. Surprisingly enough, people across all generation now have different preference on how they read scripture whether its through a device or a hard copy.  In our day and age, technology is thriving and spreading throughout all different types of cultures. It should be no surprise that the church would start to adapt technology through their own vision or those who come to worship use technology to worship in their own way.

Many churches chooses to use technology differently than others. In some churches, you will either see a small or large amount of influence on technology. Is it necessarily a bad thing that no matter on how big of a scale technology is in a church? That would depend mostly on the type of audience that are consistently there for worship. A more younger crowd would probably be applicable for technology to be heavily present as for a church with the elderly you would want to hinder technology as much as possible.It’s not only reading scripture through a device the only type of technology that’s in the church. Videography, projection, televisions, studio sound boards etc. are all present in the church. There was a church that I normally go to that even went as far as to live stream their service through their website. Now there are a couple of things that bothers me a bit. The concept is pretty legit, being able to worship God in the comfort of your own home but with that kind of service available, what’s stopping people from not showing up? It may not be happening now but perhaps sometime down the road it’ll get to a point where you can go to “church” but still be inside your home.

Technology is apart of God’s creation as is everything else in the world. It’s been around ever  since God created this world and left it in the hands of us humans to take responsibility of it.We must be aware of technology, understand it and recognize the role that it plays in our culture today. God gave us the ability to be creative to be able to produce many forms of art, music, literature and technology. If you look at it from a different persepcitve, technology suffers from the effects of humanity’s fall into sin since it derives from human cultural activity. When we use technology, there’s always a possibility that someone in the world will abuse it for evil purposes. Many problems can be solved but at the same time, new ones can arise with that same technology.

At the end of the day, we should be trusting in God and not in technology. As Christians, we have to be mindful on how much technology influence our lives. We don’t want to get to a point where we’re unable to do anything unless we have some sort of device available. This goes for being at that church and living our everyday life. We should be realistic and hopeful with the amount of technology we shall be receiving as time passes on.