Technology & the Christian

Now we'll ask God's blessing upon the meeting. Our Father, in the name of my Son, we bow before Thee. We thank Thee for the words we have sung together.

We bless Thee for the beauty that marked the pathway of my Son. Every day, moment by moment, there arose to Thee a fragrance of the light. There was not merely the absence of all that grieved Thee found in other men, but there was the abundance, the overflowing of every virtue that thrilled and filled the heart of God.

We delight to think of the pleasure the Father found in the Son. This is my Son, the Beloved, in whom is all my delight. We thank Thee for him.

To think that he would go to a cross and that the cruelty and wickedness of our hearts there displayed would impale him to a tree, and heaven would be silent, and the Son of God would yield himself to the awful wrath of divine judgment against sin, bows us in worship today. Again, we thank Thee for him. We trust that the outcome, the result of our gathering will be hearts drawn to him, lives consecrated to him, and each of us conformed more to his image.

We do commit ourselves to Thee now and return our thanks in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen. Now there was one question that was given to me or asked me or suggested to me, so let me just mention it, and perhaps our brother Crawford would want to comment when he is up as well.

But the question came up about technology and its influence upon our gospel testimony. It's a very, very important question, and I think one that we need to be aware of, at least to be thinking about. I think we need to see that, first of all, even though as you get older you fear it, technology in itself is not evil.

Men are not inventing evil things. Technology is really a discovery of principles God has already put into our universe. Men discover them and then do something with them.

It was one of the great scientists of a past age, Pascal, who said that he was privileged to think God's thoughts after him. So when men discover things, as they call it, or invent things, they're really just finding out things that God already placed into our universe, tapping into it, and then utilizing it. So technology is, in a sense, neutral.

I'm sure that when cars first came out, there were people that thought, how terrible, now we are going to be fragmented, we're going to be going our own way, there won't be neighborliness, there won't be community, people will just travel hither and yon, and some of that is true, but cars also serve a useful purpose, likewise. So technology is neutral. What we do with the technology and what is done with the technology is the great issue.

The person who posed this question had a very, very genuine comment to make. He mentioned that it used to be when you paid your electric bill, you paid your phone bill, you slipped the track in, and the track went off with your bill. Now you do it online, so there's no communication.

So one thing that technology has done is, in one sense, made us have less actual face-to-face contact with people. That's a problem. But I think there are really some other more serious problems, especially for gospel preaching.

People have become accustomed to being entertained. The Internet entertains. Even large industry, if any of you are involved in human resources or training management in large industries, large industries have learned that training new employees is very difficult, and many times what they do is they actually put their training into a fun video, interactive fun video, because a generation is growing up and that's the way they do everything.

It's got to be fun. So what's that mean for gospel preaching? Are people going to come to a tent because they're so accustomed to looking for fun and rapid interchange and gospel preaching? I mean, it's the furthest thing from their minds. Couple that with the fact that the Internet and video games and all the rest have created a generation with a very short attention span.

People cannot listen very long. Now let me just give you an example. Go back to the age when we were a people marked by written things rather than visuals.

If you read about the debates between Abraham Lincoln and Douglas at the time they were running for presidential candidate here in the US 140 years ago. Their debates in the open air lasted six or seven hours and people actually stood. Stood there, they took a break for lunch and they all came back.

They were accustomed to listening. They were accustomed to in-depth things. You can hardly get people to listen to an hour debate now, much less stand outside for seven hours and listen.

Our society has changed completely from a text-based society to a visual society and that has tremendous implications for the gospel. If you're preaching the gospel in your own assembly, learn this very quickly if you have strangers in. You've got five minutes.

Five minutes to get their attention. You lose them the first five minutes, you've lost them. Same thing with children's work.

If you don't engage children immediately, you've lost them because they're used to being entertained. If you were to read some of the things that go into the entertainment industry, you would learn that they know that the longest a person can view an image is about five seconds. It must change.

There's got to be rapid change. Even if it's just a matter of changing the angle of the camera, honing in on something else, because after five seconds, people begin to drift. So you can see what we are facing as we preach the gospel to a generation that is used to entertainment, fun, interaction, rapid sequence of changing events, and they want their information in bytes, not in reams.

Give it to me in, you know, one screen. That's all I can handle. Just give me one screen and that's it, and to sit and listen for a half hour.

So those are some of the tremendous obstacles that technology has introduced into our gospel preaching. Now, that does not mean we change our gospel preaching. It doesn't mean we come down to the lowest common denominator and do it the way they want it done.

As our brother Crawford reminded us, God's pattern is still the heralding authoritatively of the gospel. We don't interact. We speak for God, to men, with all the authority of this book.

We're not making suggestions. We're not looking for their comments. We're preaching.

What about the pluses of technology today? Well, I think you heard one already from our brother when he spoke about the PBS, that it can be used as well to reach more people. It can be used to stay in contact with people who have shown an interest. It can be used to communicate with them, to try to keep in touch with people at long distance.

And many people feel much safer behind a computer screen than face-to-face, and so it does at times allow an interaction that wouldn't be enabled face-to-face. Assemblies can use it as a website to make themselves known in the neighborhood and advertise that website, and people may well look at it who would be afraid to come into the hall to learn more about you. So there are some positive things, but I think we have to recognize it has brought about some very negative things that make gospel preaching more challenging, perhaps, than ever before.