Cell Phone Technological Changes and the Church

Today I bought our second cell phone, a blue Nokia 3100. Our first cell phone, also a Nokia, died last Saturday. It was a great phone that lasted 5 years without any battery replacements or repairs. When we bought it in July 2000, it cost around 100 euros and was on the cutting edge of what was a new techology called bi-bop.

Ironically, our friend Charles got a look at our first phone last Friday night and teased Nicole about it being so large and old. We joke about being able to date movies by the size of the cell phones that you see.

Because we've been with Orange telephone for 5 years, we had earned enough points to only have to pay 15 centimes (around 20 cents U.S.) for our new phone. It has a color screen, while the old phone had a type of greenish background with black lettering. It is about 2/3 of the length of our old phone and considerably lighter. The sound quality is better as well. This phone is a tri-bop, which potentially allows us the possibility of using in the U.S. With all these improvements, this new phone was at the bottom of the Nokia phones at the agency. It doesn't double as a digital camera or Ipod. We just wanted a inexpensive phone.

For cell phone technology, 5 years is an eternity. Who knows what bells and whistles cell phones will have in 5 years? Hopefully, it will be possible one day to use one cell phone to call and receive calls from anywhere in the world for a very low cost.

In today's world, 5 years is also a long time for a church. The world is around it is changing. However, some local churches function as if things don't change. They are like museums of culture from the 1960s. They are like people who still use a typewriter, listen to the old 33 records, and only sing the old hymns.

Other churches have made changes, but their changes still are lagging a generation or two behind. They are museums to the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s. They might have a cell phone (or a fax machine or computer), but an old, old one (like I had). They might have evolved from hymnals to some 1980s worship choruses on the overhead projector. It struck me recently that I first sang Graham Kendrick's "Shine Jesus Shine" 16 years ago in 1989 at the Love Europe conference. That song is ancient now.

But like old cell phones, fax machines, and computers (that were once new and state of the art), church programs and structures can show signs of aging and need to be replaced. What God blessed in 2003 might be totally ineffective in 2005 (or 2006).

Certainly, technology should serve the church, rather be its master. Churches shouldn't just purchase new technology just for the sake of being state of the art in that way. For that is pure vanity. However, the church often lags behind the world in terms of seizing the potential applications of technology for kingdom purposes. Or what has worked one year becomes a hardened tradition impossible to change for the future, even whe n something better has come along.

This is why Jesus's teaching on wineskins is still important today.