Is Technology an Injustice?
The book Outspoken has many thought provoking articles for the church creative. One that stood out with me addresses a wonderful movement in the church that has inadvertently resulted in some unbalanced thinking.
Katie Strnadlund‘s article, Sweet Tension: Creativity vs. Justice deals with the question of money spent on technology and creative projects compared to fighting injustice around the world. Katie is a church creative and admits to struggling with this from time to time, but she seems to have found a good balance within her reasoning.
God has called us to gather together as believers and that requires us to be able to effectively communicate with one another as well as those who aren’t part of our community.
It requires technology. The level and expense will vary with each congregation depending on the personality of the attenders and those in their community. What another church across town or across the country is spending their money on is not for us to criticize, unless of course it is a blatant and obvious miss-use of funds. Katie goes on to say,
It’s not an either/or situation, it’s both/and. God commanded us to ‘go into all the world’ and also encouraged us to ‘not give up meeting together.’
The Passion Conferences are a good example of this balance. They place a high emphasis on giving to stop injustice around the world, but the conference sessions are ripe with plenty of screens, lights, and sound. Their website is innovative and streams the sessions. They could have given all that money to fight injustice. But wait a minute, they have, haven’t they? They’ve invested it into conferences and the internet to reach people around the world with the gospel and the fight for justice far more effectively than had they given all the money away.
Katie sums it up well,
Let’s do both and do both well, not one at the expense of the other.
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from my notebook 