I have written with some regularity here about my upbringing in what I would call an “old-fashioned” evangelical church. We had an ancient organ, sang the Doxology at every service, and nary a screen nor a PowerPoint e’er graced the sanctuary.
I spent many of those years longing for something a bit more—well, modern. I wanted screens and PowerPoints and internet, and ping pong tables and vibrant youth conferences. Yet when I married, moved away and was empowered to choose exactly that sort of church, I found the reality fell short of what my imagination promised.
Now, in a turn that would have shocked my ten-year-old self who longed to enter a more contemporary age, I’ve turned my back on contemporary everything and fled instead to a liturgical church. There is, believe it or not, an organ. We don’t sing the Doxology, but we engage the liturgy each week.
I have chalked up this journey over time to many things: growing maturity in myself as a believer, a longing for Scriptural depth, disillusionment with contemporary worship trends. But it was not until this week that I began to understand that all of this might have been, without my realizing it, an attempt to flee the dangerous shift in culture and society heralded first by the internet and its influence on how we think, engage and behave.
In Christianity Today, theologian and pastor Russell Moore—riffing on Andrey Mir’s fabulous book Digital Future In The Rearview Mirror—ponders the consequence of changing literacy on the church. Mir posits that the digital era—the internet, social media, our smartphones, all of it—is transforming our literacy, leading us into an era that more closely echoes pre-literary traditions. For Mir, this has profound consequences, including changes in how we understand truth and consume information.
And for Moore, this is a greater danger to the church than nearly anything else we might be able to think of. He writes:
…if we do not recognize the way it is reshaping us, we will not be able to dissent from the ways it can numb us away from hearing the gospel, from deep reflection in the storyline of Scripture. … If we don’t see and name the pull to digital orality, we will conform to it. We will then trade in the distinctiveness of evangelical witness as an appeal for personal repentance and faith, as a people of the Book, for something even worse than moral therapeutic deism: oral digital totemism.
This article coincided with my reading of John Eldredge’s Experience Jesus. I am misaligned with Eldridge on a good many things, and I found much that I was not entirely aligned with in this particular book. However, his contention in the first chapter that we have becomes Disciples of the Internet struck me as painfully accurate. Positing that “the Internet has discipled your soul to expect immediate answers,” Eldredge further believes that “when you turn to Jesus and you are not answered in the way the Internet answers, you feel he isn’t listening or you can’t hear from Him”
We’ve been discipled, Eldredge says, to expect immediacy, accessibility, practicality, and certainty—but our experience of God and growth in Christ demands faith, patience, mystery, and a willingness to linger and let God be God. To embrace what we cannot or do not understand and allow ourselves to be formed slowly and over time. We want “Seven Great Ways To Live For Jesus” rather than to encounter Jesus and be formed to live for Him.
Which brings me back to my own church journey.
One of the reasons I became disillusioned with the contemporary church, I realize now, is because the medium began to feel indistinguishable from my work and the rest of my life. I watched PowerPoints at work; I watched PowerPoints at church. My phone and TV give me videos and loud music and pithy quotes and book recommendations and “five practical tips on how to live for Jesus” and…so was my church. Everything started to blur together: church, the prayer apps on my phone, work trainings, internet forums, media. And it all had roughly the same heft: that is to say, I consumed it all and then it fell into a void.
A majority of people, an article tells us, want churches to “look churchy.” There’s a small movement of believers turning away from contemporary churches to seek out more liturgical and more traditional worship. There’s very clearly a real hunger in us, culturally, for ancient ways, tradition, and—as I now see it—an escape from the digital culture that has seeped into every single aspect of how we live our lives.
As a scholar and a professor, I find myself thinking about these things quite often. Artificial intelligence is changing the way we consume, understand, and analyze information—often without our consent or full understanding. Our phones and social media are meant and made to pull us in, exchanging our attention for dollars that goes into the pocket of tech overlords whose influence on power, government, and culture grows daily. Our attention spans are disintegrating; our social bonds are dissolving; we’re being made into creatures devoted to consuming whatever we are fed.
Is it any wonder that a return to church feeling “churchy,” or more traditional, or more liturgical, might feel like a balm in this day and age?
We do have screens in our sanctuary, but they are only turned on for announcements. I enter to people talking and chatting and saying hello. In the service, we turn our attention to the Word of God and to each other. We praise Him. We seek forgiveness. We take communion. We reflect on Scripture. I emerge feeling like my right self, and I have come to a realization that this is the life I want: relationships in real time, the ability to think and read deeply, availability and awareness to encountering God in moments both painful and wonderful, quiet, calm, even a little boredom.
To have it, I have to be willing to opt out of much of what we have been told is convenient, helpful, efficient, and better. And I am. I have all but eliminated the bulk of non-necessary phone time (barring what is needed for work or texting distance family). I have no social media. I have cultivated a small list of internet websites/blogs I find engaging and worthwhile to my heart, mind, and spirit, and attend to those. I keep only a small handful of apps, most devoted to prayer or practicality, that I know will support me as needed tools.
I’m not alone in this. And I am encouraged that I’m not, because it’s hard enough to exit the cycle already. At some point, opting out will no longer be a real alternative.
Let us choose the Lord and life.
Samaritan's Song 