The threatening crisis–perhaps not just a virus: What about our technology for our churchs' potential in a time of crisis, unasked questions

​"Institutional church is threatened by anything that threatens its existence. Not just because the leaders-maintainers feel their power and status is threatened, but because they have lost the capacity to imagine any other way for a gathered-church to be."

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Two years ago I wrote this. Facebook popped it up on my page as a memory. It is interesting that I said this two years ago and that it is so relevant for much of the church in the USA today. We need a New Testament imagination now. I'd have said, "now more than ever," but we always should have a New Testament imagination for church-gathered. Just because we have the technology (even for a crisis as this) to bring church into everyone's living room, kitchen, or family room, the question is should we.

A number of years ago I read Neil Postman's book Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. I'll leave you with a few quotes from that book. Seems appropriate today. Thought-provoking, I hope.

“Our youth must be shown that not all worthwhile things are instantly accessible and that there are levels of sensibility unknown to them.” 

“With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy.”

“One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.”