Mobile Ministry Magazine

If you are in or near mobile, then chances are you are around a lot of voices. All of these voices vie for your attention - whether its a call, text message, music and multimedia, and even the vibration of something happening towards the former three items. Its because of this personal and very immediate stimuli that mobile has been a disruptive technology for so many people. Its introduction to life has literally changed every culture that it had touched.

Though mobile changes a lot of facets of life; there will be some areas where the technology enables the change that was already simmering, and others where people will find innovative uses of tech that more or less works along with the technology.

What I like though is the understanding that tech isn't the answer. It requires a response, and that response will change our lives. If you will, the tech points the very need that individual and communities would have. I like how this article puts it:

...The mistake both the utopians and neo-Luddites make is by giving too much credence to the idea that technology can fundamentally change human nature. For every article about how Twitter will save the world, a cyber-fatalist will argue that smartphones have turned us all into zombies. Both are wrong. It is not technology per se that has the power to change the world (for good or bad), but rather the innovation and creativity of the people enabling and using it.

Of course, technology isn't the answer - its just a tool, and one that ends up being more or less another manner of bringing the reality of our human-ness (or brokenness) closer to one another. We have to be adept with these tools, but really understand that for that it is, its just another part in that story of how technology has threaded our lives.

Hence why I like mobile (as a tool, media, and movement). It causes us to think about the personal application of technology, and how life ensues afterward.

Hence, why I really like what could happen in the Body. It doesn't take much to see that mobile has and will continue to not just foster new communication activities. It will also add a bit of spice towards how the Body adapts to and molds culture around it. I see mobile merely pointing a way to innovation - so that the voice of the Christ remains not just something people are going to hear, but be able to hear to the point of wanting to do life on different - God's - terms. How the Body uses mobile to tell and share its story will show this voice of innovation, and life around the Body will then be threaded in His effectual graces.

Labels: innovation, mobility, tech