Digitally Disengage

There is a dawning awareness that our Christian discipleship has been rather shallow and lacking as we face the exigencies of life. The present pandemic has exposed the soft underbelly of the church as the common practices of gathering together in worship have been taken away and left us bereft of a thriving and vibrant faith experience. Over an extended period of virtual worship and fellowship, the spectre of our secular consumer culture and its attendant digital presence has overwhelmed our senses.

Swimming in the world of digital reality has replaced much of our mental and emotional energies. Ubiquitous information has poured down upon us and almost drowned our ability to discern and filter through what is worth our attention and what is pure entertainment and nonsensical blather.

In many ways, the church has unwittingly become married to cultural norms and realities that bear little resemblance to those perspectives that reveal God’s image and his passions. It is troublesome when we begin down the slippery slope to dissolution without footage in kingdom thinking. It is critical that we indulge in deep and reflective thinking about a just and compassionate society, ordered within the parameters of belief that leads to what is right and wholesome.

Cultural accommodation has led us to sell our soul to forces that are ruled too easily by money, sex, and power, the very things that Jesus rejected in his first encounter with the devil in the wilderness. (Matthew 4: 1-11) He rejected them profoundly with scripture and authority.

How do we balance the inflow of influence and carry forward a journey toward a well-balanced perspective on our daily encounters? For sure, we do not pitch our technology and digital devices that are ever-present in a dumpster. We modulate and learn to distance ourselves and provide space to hear alternative voices and become able to say NO to what might dominate and overwhelm our senses. Technology is the marvel of our age. If the invention of the printing press by Gutenberg was the first revolution, the invention of the present revolution driven by technology, symbolized by Zuckerberg, has ramped the influence a hundred-fold.

What will shape our thinking? What will contribute to meaning-making and cut the umbilical cord to the primary prescient fascination with our devices focused on entertaining our proclivities and feeding our minds with information?

If we can self-regulate and allow our digital world its place without allowing it to rule, we will be better off and more sound in body, mind and soul.

A healthy part of our communal renunciation is setting apart our technology once a day for an hour and allowing it to find its water-level so it does not dominate our daily walk with God, drowning out his voice at the expense of his presence.