The tech-church show
A week or two ago a clip went viral of a prominent pastor lecturing his listeners, during his sermon, about treating Sunday morning worship like a show. I didn’t watch it, and I’m not going to comment about the pastor in question, whom I know nothing about. Here’s one write-up about it. The clip launched a thousand online Christian thinkpieces. A lot of hand-wringing about churches that put on worship as a show simultaneously wanting congregants not to see worship as a show.
Any reader of my work knows I couldn’t agree more. But I don’t want to pile on. I want to use the occasion to think more deeply about two issues it raises for the larger landscape of churches, public worship, and digital technology.
First: Should churches understand themselves to be sites of resistance against the digital status quo? That is, given their context, are churches in America called by God to be a “force for good” in relation to digital technology? And thus are they called to be a “force opposed” to the dominance of our lives—which means the lives of congregants as well as their nonbelieving neighbors—by digital devices, screens, and social media?
It seems to me that churches and church leaders are not clear about their answer to this question. In practice, their answer appears to be No. The digital status quo obtains outside the walls of the church and inside them. There is no “digital difference” when you walk inside a church—at least a standard, run-of-the-mill low-church, evangelical, or Protestant congregation. (The Orthodox have not yet been colonized by Digital, so far as I can tell. For Catholics it depends on the parish.)
In and of itself, this isn’t a problem, certainly not of consistency. If a church doesn’t think Digital’s dominion is a problem, then it’s only natural for Digital to reign within the church and not only without. You’d never expect such a church to be different on this score.
The problem arises when churches say they want to oppose believers’ digital habits, dysfunctions, and addictions while reproducing those very habits within the life of the church, above all in the liturgy. That’s a case of extreme cognitive dissonance. How could church leaders ever expect ordinary believers to learn from the church how to amend their digital lives when church leaders themselves, and the church’s public worship itself, merely model for believers their own bad habits? When, in other words, church members’ digital lives, disordered as they are, are simply mirrored back to them by the church and her pastors?
To be clear, I know more than a few Christians, including ministers, who don’t share my alarm at the reign of Digital in our common life. They wouldn’t exactly endorse spending four to eight hours (or more) per day staring at screens; they don’t deny the ills and errors of pornography and loss of attention span via social media and other platforms. But they see bigger fish to fry. And besides (as they are wont to say), “It’s here to stay. It’s a part of life. We can live in denial or incorporate its conveniences into church life. It’s inevitable either way.”
Personally, I think that’s a steaming pile of you-know-what. But at least it’s consistent. For anyone, however, who shares my alarm at the role of Digital in our common life—our own, our neighbors’, our children’s, our students’—then the inconsistency of the church on this topic is not only ludicrous but dangerous. It’s actively aiding and abetting the most significant problem facing us today while pretending otherwise. And you can’t have it both ways. Either it’s a problem and you face it head on; or it’s not, and you don’t.
Second: Here’s an exercise that’s useful in the classroom. It helps to get students thinking about the role of technology in the liturgy.
Ask yourself this question: Which forms and types of technology, and how much of them, could I remove from Sunday morning worship before it would become unworkable?
Another way to think about it would be to ask: What makes my church’s liturgy different, technologically speaking, than an instance of the church’s liturgy five hundred years ago?
Certain kinds of technology become evident immediately: electricity and HVAC, for starters. In my area, many church buildings would be impossible to worship in during a west Texas summer: no air and no light. They’d be little more than pitch-black ovens on the inside.
Start on the other end, though. Compare Sunday morning worship in your church today to just a few decades ago. Here are some concrete questions.
Could you go (could it “work”) without the use of smartphones?
What about video cameras?
What about spotlights and/or dimmers?
What about the internet?
What about screens?
What about computers?
What about a sound board?
What about electric amplification for musical instruments?
What about wireless mics?
What about microphones as such?
This list isn’t meant to prejudge whether any or all of these are “bad” or to be avoided in the liturgy. I’m happy to worship inside a building (technology) with A/C (technology) and electricity (technology)—not to mention with indoor plumbing available (also technology). Microphones make preaching audible to everyone, including those hard of hearing. And I’ve not even mentioned the most consequential technological invention for the church’s practice of worship: the automobile! Over the last century cars revolutionized the who and where and how and why of church membership and attendance. (In this Luddite’s opinion, clearly for the worse. Come at me.)
In any case, whatever one makes of these and similar developments, the foregoing exercise is meant to force us to reckon with technology’s presence in worship as both contingent and chosen. It is contingent because worship is possible without any/all of them. I’ve worshiped on a Sunday morning beneath a tree in rural east Africa. The people walked to get there. No A/C. No mics. No screens. No internet. Certainly no plumbing. Not that long ago in this very country, most of the technology taken for granted today in many churches did not even exist. So contingency is crucial to recognize here.
And because it is contingent, it is also chosen. No one imposed digital technology, or any other kind, on American churches. Their leaders implemented it. It does not matter whether they understood themselves to be making a decision or exercising authority. They were, whether they knew it or not and whether they liked it or not. It does not matter whether they even had a conversation about it. The choice was theirs, and they made it. The choice remains theirs. What has been done can be undone. No church has to stream, for example. Some never started. Others have stopped. It’s a choice, as I’ve written elsewhere. Church leaders should own it and take responsibility for it rather than assume it’s “out of their hands.”
Because the use and presence of digital technology in the church’s liturgy is neither necessary nor imposed—it is contingent and chosen—then the logical upshot is this: Church leaders who believe that digital technology is a clear and present danger to the well-being and faithfulness of disciples of Christ should act like it. They should identify, recognize, and articulate the threats and temptations of digital dysfunction in their lives and ours; they should formulate a vision for how the church can oppose this dysfunction, forcefully and explicitly; and they should find ways to enact this opposition, both negatively (by removing said dysfunction from within the church) and positively (by proposing and modeling alternative forms of life available to believers who want relief from their digital addictions).
What they should not do is say it’s a problem while avoiding dealing with it. What they should not do is leave the status quo as it is. What they should not do is accept Digital’s domination as inevitable—as somehow lying outside the sphere of the reign and power of Christ.
What they should not do is look the other way.
