I watched in amazement one Sabbath morning as I witnessed a very practical example of how technology is changing the world we live in. The scripture reading was being read, and I was distracted by a silent but very visible exchange between a deacon and one of our youth. Disgusted by the smartphone in the hand of this young man, the deacon was motioning to him to put it away. It was not too long before the deacon’s face changed from one of repulsion to one of embarrassment, when he realized the young man was actually following along on his smartphone’s Bible App.
In just 175 years, we’ve moved from Morse code to the age of radio, TV’s, fax machines, computers, the internet, cell phones and cyberspace. In almost every part of the world these fast-track developments have had their impact. Newspapers contain yesterday’s news, as global events and news is available in real time. When President Barack Obama took the oath on Capitol Hill, almost anyone who wanted to see him could, distance has become a thing of the past.
One of the main contributors to this metamorphosis is the Internet. Every day millions of people exchange ideas, pictures, video conversations and information at the click of a mouse, as if they were physically present. As a provider of Multimedia Solutions, I’m seeing that with the steady increase of broadband internet service, internet technology is exploding with highly advanced methods of communicating both audibly and visibly. Vendors are employing all the tools available to them to maintain consumer relevancy and seek cost-effective opportunities to acquire and retain customers. This begs the question, where is the church in all this?
Too many of our churches are still trapped in the dark ages of communication, but with the momentum with which new technology becomes user friendly, any church can empower its members to become powerful ambassadors of the Gospel, and the greatest resource available to us is sitting right in the pew.
The other day my (then) five year-old and I walked into a Bell World store and within five minutes he was tugging at my pants leg to listen to a voice recording he made using the IPhone 4 demo. Can you imagine the possibilities if we could marry the life experience of our seniors with the innovative high-tech minds of our youth, working together and using technology to spread our message?!
Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, GodTube, Linkedin, and Blogger etc., have all become household names and it’s not unusual for account holders to have 300 or even 1000 followers, giving an entirely new meaning to each one, reach one. Social media isn’t a fad, it’s a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.
If we’re not deliberately using at least one of these forms of social media, we may be slowly becoming silenced by these new forms of communication, and soon we may be busy saying nothing at all. So where do we begin? The best place to start is with our youth, our youth are not our future, they are our present, and given the opportunity they can not only help provide education about the usefulness of these innovative forms of communication, but they can easily spearhead the effort of integrating them into our ministry.
What a difference if that deacon and young man were both sitting at a control booth, streaming the service.