Pray For Tech
Posted on February 28, 2007
Do you pray for the technology in your church?
This may be a foreign concept, but think what happens when there’s feedback from the mic or static or the mic cuts in and out or stops working all together? What about when one of the projectors goes out or when the computer running the projection software is dragging and the words are not displayed as they should be? Consider what happens when your child check-in software isn’t working correctly. There is one word to describe all of this, distracting.
Can satan use technology to distract from the message he doesn’t want you to hear? You better believe it.
I wrote about this topic about a year ago, here and here and there were some good comments, as well. Instead of restating the same idea in a different way, I might as well just quote myself from last year. This is from my post from March, 2006:
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.
This time, let’s take it a little farther, beyond the weekend services.
There is a lot of technology that the church staff relies on during the week, some is obvious and some is very much behind the scenes. Here’s a list off the top of my head:
- computers
- hardware
- software
- copiers
- printers
- palm pilots
- voice mail
- websites
- internet
- blogs
- network
- wireless networks
- servers
- backups
- updates
- Active Directory
- MS Exchange
- anti-spam
- anti-virus
- anti-spyware
- ChMS
- much much more!
Do you pray for all of these things within your church? Should you? That’s between you and God. But, try this little experiment: ask any pastor or staff person how their day is going when they have an issue with any item in the list above and let that be your starting point.
I promise you that any kind of distraction, due to technology breaking or not working quite right, takes the focus off of what’s important and puts the focus on what’s broken.
Typically, pastors are trained and educated to do pastor things, but they are usually not all that technically skilled. In the past couple of years, I would say there is a shift toward some pastors being more technical, but just slightly. Pastors need to be able to focus on the things that are important to their ministry and technology, when working properly, enhances ministry.
My heart and passion are for the church and technology and it seems that I should dedicate some time to praying for these things. I haven’t done well in following my own advice since I first wrote that post last year, but I feel like I’m coming out of the so called wilderness, in regard to church.
Maybe I wrote this for my own sake, as a reminder to focus on what’s important to me.
Maybe it’s a reminder for you, too.
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