Technology is a wonderful gift if used appropriately as a tool rather than depended on as a crutch. As a means to interact and communicate with people that a generation ago were barely more than legend, there hasn’t been so important an advance since the Romans paved the roads of antiquity. As a means to know God there hasn’t been so distracting a force since Nimrod’s tower. Knowing ‘about’ Him has taken the place of knowing Him, and many in the world away from God have been hardened to the gospel by their familiarity with it’s robotically summarized details.

Much as the computer and internet have dispassionately conspired to produce a generation of electronic geniuses that can’t make change at the register, they have also been used to oversimplify to the point of heresy the truths of God’s plan. Why linger prayerfully over a passage of scripture and wait for the Spirit to lead into the truth of a particular spiritual question when a convenient few clicks on the keyboard (remember those, tablet jockeys?) brings a sterile, distilled and summarized list of options without delay – from which the answer closest to one’s preconceived notion can be selected as validation. In such an environment, even the Cliff-notes seem deeper than necessary.

The proverbial genie is out of the bottle on universal availability of information – that’s fulfillment of prophecy (Daniel 12:4). What is vital in the face of this nullifying influence is for the Church, filled with the Holy Spirit, to lean into the command to make disciples, not just skilled religious cyber-librarians. Deep still calls unto deep, and no algorithm can ever answer that!