Pray For Technology (?)
Posted on March 14, 2006
Fellowship was down Sunday morning, which is obviously the least opportune time to be down. I’m not involved with Fellowship directly, but I’ve read a couple of the stories of churches being affected by their outage. (here and here) I am aware of at least one other very large church having power outage issues last Sunday morning and I just now read of Travis’ run in with a major power outage. His occured yesterday (Monday) but still, it’s crazy. Jason and Brian both had other issues, besides just F1, as well.
Brian’s thought crossed my mind yesterday:
But given Jason’s story, I somehow have to wonder if some sort of spiritual warfare was going on Sunday. There were other stories of technical failures at Crossroads on Sunday. (e.g. The projector in the auditorium somehow lost sync and the image kept slowly shifting to the left). I wouldn’t put it past the forces of evil to stage a massive attack in many places of worship across the country on Sunday. Why this Sunday in particular? I don’t know. But the devil usually has his reasons.
It does seem like more than coincidence.
I know many churches have teams that pray for the pastor and for the people coming to church that day, before and during services, but does anyone pray for the technology? Why not? We, as the church, are becoming so incredibly dependent on technology on Sunday mornings, yet we basically assume it’s not going to break. The reality is, these are machines and they break. You turn a projector on and blow a bulb or turn a PC on and the power supply goes or the power in the server room goes out or the power in the entire building.
This is just a thought off the top of my head, so it may be kind of out there, but I think we need to lift this technology that we are depending on, up to God in prayer and allow Him to use it for His glory to reach His people.
Clearly, churches use technology as an aid to reach people, in many ways, and when it breaks, we look bad, plus whatever it is that is not working becomes a distraction.
By the way, I just have to brag on the church that we have started attending in the last couple of weeks, child check-in was flawless again on Sunday. The pen that was tied to the clipboard where I wrote my daughters’ names down worked like a champ! Clearly, I may be in a place that has a lot of potential to integrate more technology.
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4 Responses to “Pray For Technology (?)”
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Jim,
Great idea. I think I will start praying for our technology, because, as you have pointed out, when it works it is great but when it doesn’t things get a little crazy. We work so hard to plan and prepare for our weekend services and something weird like a power outage, tripped data cable, misaligned label printer, etc. can realy sway our outcome.
Long live the pen & paper
[...] About 2 weeks ago, I posted this, raising the question of why don’t we pray for our technology. I think it’s a valid question and something that we need to take seriously, and I have never seen anyone do that. The point is that when there are technical difficulties, worship may be interrupted, or a whole myriad of other things. [...]
I can relate so closely to this. We often have some kind of technical glitch each Sunday that causes some kind of misscue or other challenge. I often wonder if it’s ok to lay hands on an inanimate object and pray for it! Seriously though, we are so dependent on technology to create atmousphere each Sunday. I think that a pre-emptive approach is good though, I know that the Spirit has warned me about equipment that needs to be sorted out ahead of time. It’s much easier to troubleshoot something during the week than mid-service!
Church of tech…
Reading about the replacement of Cologne’s cathedral window with pixel-themed coloured glass made me realise how close we are to following tech as god.
……