Last November, Christianity Today asked me to write a short piece that answered the question, “Which new technologies hold the most promise—and the most peril—for use in church ministries?”

Instead of discussing a particular technology (as Brad Abare and Mark Keller helpfully did), I said:

I believe that the technology that has the most promise in the church is not the latest thing that comes off the assembly line. Rather, it is the technology—any technology—that church leaders openly discuss with other leaders and with their congregations. Conversely, the technology that is most perilous for a church is the one that leaders immediately adopt without thinking through and addressing how it will subtly reshape our spiritual lives.

I went on to give the example of how a seemingly unimportant technology like online giving is worth thinking through spiritually:

For years my wife and I would spend the final minutes before leaving for church frantically searching for our checkbook. So when our church announced that we could set up automatic draft payments, we jumped at the chance to streamline our life and give more consistently.

After a little while, though, we noticed that our new plan was changing our giving in ways we hadn’t expected. Every week, when the person next to me passed the offering plate, I started to wish secretly that I had an “I give online” token so that he or she would know we were faithfully paying customers. A few months later, when our pastor gave a sermon on the joy of giving, I started wondering if we were missing out on the intimacy with God that can come through repetitive acts of devotion. Instead of worshiping through sacrifice, I seemed to be sacrificing the chance to worship for a little convenience.

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A reader named Adam posted a few videos from Wheaton College of Professor Read Schuchardt’s chapel presentation in which he addresses several issues with our media and electronically saturated culture (see his notes for additional quotes from the lectures) . For some background, Dr. Schuchardt is a well known in the Media Ecology Society and is a keen observer of electronic culture, though he himself chooses not to have a TV at home for he and his five kids. Below are two short videos that some great one-liners and observations of media culture.

God Does Not Post to YouTube

Highlights:

• From Neil Postman, ”it’s a strange injunction to include as a part of an ethical system [the commandment against images] unless the author assumed a connection between the forms of human communication and the quality of a culture.”
• Video screens may condition us to be willing to listen only if we can tolerate looking.
• We live now in an age that says: “A picture never lies. Seeing is believing.” This is the opposite of faith. This is proof. Faith is the evidence of things not seen.
• You have to be there. You have to speak in as un-mediated a manner as possible. And you have to do the work of the gospel.

No Attention Span Needed

Highlights:

• In a world where everything is vying for your attention, nothing has the power to grab you.
• It’s easy for advertisers to create desires you didn’t have to make you buy products you don’t need with money you haven’t earned to buy impress people you can’t stand.
• Everyone benefits from this system – except for you.
• Twitter is addictive, powerful, and entertaining. Since when did addictive, powerful, and entertaining become the measure of goodness, truth, or beauty? The Bible is really only one of those.
• If we care about what we take into our mouths, we should also care about our media diets – what we take into our minds.
• Google puffs up, but love builds up.

I found these via Adam’s blog The Second Eclectic, so please go check out his site. It’s full of great observations and comments on media culture.