Digital Disciple, Interview with Adam Thomas

As a follower of Christ, I have to be diligent at following him in all facets of my life. The fastest growing new area of existence is the virtual existence. I have had to increase my awareness of the presence of God when I use technology, the Internet especially. I discovered a couple of years ago, much to my chagrin, that when I would go online for extended periods of time, I would unconsciously shut off the part of my brain that searched for God. Somehow I decided that God wasn't there; I wasn't looking for him. But now I try to incorporate into my virtual existence all of the things I do in my physical existence in practicing the presence of God. I found that online, it can happen just as well as it can in real life. The barriers online that don't exist in real life have to do with embodiment--not being able to be with the other person that you're engaged with face to face. That kind of challenge is an added dimension that makes practicing the presence of God online harder. As I say in my book Digital Disciple, there are tremendous opportunities for connection online, but every connection comes attached with the danger of isolation. So we have to work on moving toward those connections and not ignoring the nature of those dangers. If we believe that God is who God says God is, then we have to believe that God is in all things, including the things that humans have created, like virtual reality.

Individuals tend to make mistakes, institutions tend to magnify them. People in churches use technology poorly any time the technological situation, for lack of a better word, is the only payoff. If there is no external connection besides the technological, if there is no extra-virtual (physical) thing your technology is delivering, then you are missing something. I could tweet all day long, but if my tweets don't give somebody something that they can do in their real life, then all I did was tell them what I had for breakfast. That's not important, and it's not what we should be doing.

When we as followers of Christ use technology, we have to continue practicing the presence of God--looking for God in technology, recognizing that it's hard to do that because of the disembodying nature of technology--and then finding new ways to bring people together, both virtually and in the real world, and having those two really tie together. My favorite example is the flash mob. Everybody found out about this flash mob online and then they all appeared in the same spot in real life. That's fantastic! I think the first flash mob was the day of Pentecost. We're still doing that. If there isn't some sort of real world payoff to a virtual existence, then that existence threatens who we are in all facets of our life.

From a wider church perspective, the worst way technology can be used is to castigate other people. There is no way to engage in a dialogue when that kind of vitriolic language is used. In face-to-face conversation, sometimes you can move past inflammatory rhetoric, but when you see it in text on a website, there is no way to get past that. You're going to close the window. Churches, when they are online, have to recognize the fact that everything they put on the Internet is one side of a conversation, and they're not going to hear the other side of it unless somebody is really trying to make themselves heard. They have no control over how it's being received. This is the same problem that's been around forever, but the Internet magnifies it.

Source: BuildingChurchLeaders.com