Having finished reading You Are Not A Gadget, I am sitting in this space between imagination and reality. In a lot of respects, I am back near that place I was when MMM started, I am thinking about this question of mobile and whether the religious community is ready or equipped to answer it.

What is that question? It is a simple but profound: what happens when our tools become appendages then become doorways of experiencing faith in ways that are virtually real, but altogether a different lens than anything before it?

Dangerous question isn’t it? I am literally asking if we understand mobile and all other digital contexts not as they can become a part of our faith language, but that they develop interpretations and experiences of faith that have no grounding in what is understood now as “faith practices.”

Am I proposing that mobile, and later personalized virtual computing (augmented and virtual reality), will derive experiences that will be considered “living out/by faith” even as they have nothing in common with current faith practices outside of a shared history and end-expression*? Yup. And this scares the mess out of folks.

Take mobile. In every interview that I have done for mobile ministry, the question has come up if I can see there being a time when some aspect of mobile tech will take away the treasured face-to-face interactions. I always am careful to ground the answer in context – it depends on the environment and the faith practice/behavior that needs to be exercised. The answer isn’t will it, but rather in what contexts will it. Looking at it that way is exciting and scary… and it is this that we have to address.

Is your faith so grounded to a specific context that you can’t live outside of it? Or, is the way you would like to live out your faith so undefinable by the dominant digital faith contexts that you know that you feel and act out of a limited and unfulfilling spirit? Or, maybe this tweet better fits, “A friend calls mobile the “appendage,” does your church/ministry have a gym for that appendage or is it relegated to a diff zoning ordinance?”

For many people, there is little to no difference between online and offline expressions of faith. Does the description of your faith end where virtual reality begins, or can you confidently walk through the door of mobile/augmented reality/virtual reality and translate the beauty and immense glory of God into something unique yet altogether familiar? Expressions change, faith keeps a consistent and definable fingerprint.

*One can, and many do argue that if the apostles were to be ported to today’s time period that they would have a very hard time identifying a Christian inside the context of a church service, but would more readily see Christ-following in “secular” functions such as the United Way, Red Cross, etc.?