Mobile Ministry Magazine

Seeing mobile technology through the lens of Scripture

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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Body (2.0) Actions

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Monday night, I was talking with a baristia at the coffee shop that my church has Bible study at and she was very happy about her mobile phone. She uses a Palm Centro on Sprint and has enjoyed what it brings to her life. Being a high school senior, I was able to point her towards ways her phone can help her transition towards college, but I also noticed how it was very much a lifestyle device for her. To hear it in her words, it was not an attachment to how she lives, but it was a part of it. An essential thread even.

This look at mobile technology as part of one's lifestyle is a fairly new phenomena. For people roughly in my age group (I'm 29), we grew up literally watching tech be what it is now. I've had both penmanship and keyboarding classes. I've used the Dewey Decimal System, Infosearch (or was it InfoTech), to Google/Yahoo for various searches. I've gone from no planner to Radio Shack planners to Palm PDAs to smartphones. In literal terms, I am a part of a generation that has grown up with the DNA of mobile and web technology under a lot, and this presents a line above and below of how tech is viewed.

As the church, we are in a similar time period. A lot has changed very fast and we now have to adjust to increasing streams of connectivity that are in our ministries, families, schools, and governments. We have to brace for informational security, just as much as we push for or against net neutrality. We are on the verge of a major shift with computing and life as we know it - its a lifestyle now, not a choice.

It would be easy to just make the next steps in this of trying to just wait it out and then use and do what's popular. But my heart is that we as the Body would do more than just anticipate what is coming, but we would already be working in it. Whether that is a community-ran blog on social and educational issues that interfaces with thought-leaders and the classroom, or just advancing the use of VoIP to connect families whose jobs have disconnected them from their countries of origin. We have to address what is given to us, but we also have to push for where God meets us in this.

You see, one of my passions is to see the Church literally get to the point where our use of mobile and web technology is a direct reflection of the love, justice, and mercy that God granted us through Jesus Christ. It was this vision that cast me onto the Internet to begin with. We are at the point where this can be our Body 2.0, or just a old media shunning the inevitable change. Something to think about the next time you stop for coffee and the baristia is taking your order with a mobile instead of pen and paper.

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