We have already learned that screens are not an aid to education but actually a hindrance. We thought we were preparing people better by using the tools of entertainment but it turns out the screens are a diversion and a distraction from the educational task. Even careful and judicial use of them is not advancing the cause of reading, writing, and arithmetic but becoming competition for the core tasks that once dominated the educational sphere. Why would churches follow this dead end path in their own approach to worship, catechesis, and the sanctified life? The reality is that nearly everyone is unable to balance screens with anything else and the tools become the master and the mind and heart the servant of that master.
Take down those dang screens that distract away from altar, pulpit, and font, from hearing the Word read and preached, and from the fellowship of the table lived out before, during, and after the actual communion on Christ's flesh and blood. Stop trying to sell devotional life as an app. The first step to a fruitful devotional life is to get your face off a screen not glued to one. Stop turning the church's song into a mere soundtrack for the video which is chosen and reflective of each individual's preference. Give up the illusion that some people are visual learners and train up the mind to hear and meditate upon the Word of God. It is not the Word that must accommodate the person but the person who grows in knowledge, appreciation, and trust in that Word. Faith comes by hearing. This was not a statement conditioned upon the lack of technology when it was written by St. Paul but the universal conclusion of how God has operated from the beginning and to the end of all things.
In addition to the problem of screens for the person, there is the role the screens play working against community. With our ear buds in and our eyes on our screens (large and small) we are increasingly isolated in life and the church should not cater to this. Look around you. Homes are fortresses to keep people away where once they were places where we welcomed others, broke bread together, built community through conversation, and enjoyed our lives together in entertainment that engaged us together (like card games and board games). The reality is that this happens less and less among all ages. It also happens less and less in the church. The jokes have made pot lucks and game nights and other such things into a mere joke. We have ignored that the food was not the focus but the eating together around long tables which made us sit with people we would not have chosen and engage one another in conversation about who we are, our lives in the family, and our lives together as God's people. Instead of community, we have collections of individuals living in the bubble of their own worlds and screens -- even in church.
Some have labeled our time as the anti-social century. One might add that the church has also become at least neutral to the cause of community and sometimes also its enemy. Our penchant for finding a church that fits us has made the Gospel itself malleable and adjustable so that we hear what we want and then we hear it how we want to hear it. The pews is an increasing anachronism to a people who do not need to be present for worship but can do it just fine at home in front of a screen. Even communion has betrayed its own name and turned into a person in front of a screen with something that resembles bread and wine (or juice) in a hermetically sealed container. We meet Jesus in our jammies instead dressing up and we meet Jesus more and more alone instead of together and then we wonder why the church is viewed as irrelevant or why we are not making headway in our purpose and mission.
Community cannot be defined digitally. It cannot be created digitally. It begs what is in short supply today -- face to face identity. In person has become the option that vitiates against the fellowship that the lonely long for and the fearful need. No, technology ought to be suspect by those who deal with a reality that is personal, a God in flesh, and a God in flesh who works through means. It does not get more real than this. People gathered together around the Word and Table of the Lord. Our use of technology has become a liability and not a blessing in the pursuit of a people called by God to be His own in baptism and nurtured by His Word, fed at His table, to love and forgive one another in Christ's name. It is time to wake up and smell the roses. Technology is not our savior and may be our demon.
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