We live in the age of ever growing technology. The very fact that you can read my words via this post, view the attached video through YouTube and benefit from numerous advances in ways to learn is evidence itself. The problem here is one that does not appear so obvious to many in the church. Technology can never become a substitute for incarnation and the worship of a God who is not bound to such technology.
Having a wrist watch is generally helpful. (With cell phones even the watch is less needed these days!) But being bound by your wrist watch is to be enslaved to a tool. It is considered polite and important to be “on time” in our culture. To this end the watch can help you. But when you must have a $5,000 Rolex, purely as a symbol of power and status, something profoundly wrong has happened in this equation.
The church often thinks that spiritual and congregational “excellence” equals the best that technology can offer. We then substitute the technological method for human presence or weakness, since the human will disappoint us. The loss is evident when the faith is itself rooted in incarnation and humanity.
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John,
Tying this back to your posts on discipleship (being and making), God created us for relationship and we are at root relational. Discipleship is a relationship, first vertical and also horizontal. The covenants were not bodies of abstract concepts but, rather, God-given definitions of our relationships to him, each other and the rest of creation. Somewhere along the line, we made the abstractions more important than the relationships they define. We perhaps think that mastering the abstractions is true discipleship. In reality, they peel back part of a mystery of knowing God and each other. Some mystery… awe-inducing, disturbing, remains. We need to appreciate that.