Blessing and Curse

 It is long been observed that technology can be both a blessing and a curse. We know that there are huge benefits that are ours because of the technological advances of recent decades. But we equally know that there are also many downsides. Before the present pandemic hit, it was widely suggested that amongst the negative impacts of technological developments was the fact that there was so much more physical distancing of people; people were relating with others less face to face and more online.

Now - in these strange days of restrictions on our meeting with others - that assessment seems rather ironic! We are required to keep physical distance and are restricted from actually meeting too many others. And so the internet has become a lifeline for us. Just imagine if this pandemic had hit 20 years ago... how would we have kept in touch, conducted worship, held meetings and so on?

But 'we have the technology' (for those of you old enough to remember, that is a quote from the seventies TV show ‘The Six Million Dollar Man’). And so we who are Ministers can record our services and people can share in worship via the internet or we can stream our actual services from church and so on.

And so it was that last Thursday I was recording Sunday’s worship in the empty church building when my laptop fell off the stand on which it was perched as it was acting as my 'tele-prompter'. Disaster! My laptop was pronounced dead at the scene.

And suddenly I discovered just how much of a 'necessity' having this laptop is in my ministry! Of course, there are other computers in the house and most of my work was backed up in the cloud (or physically). But nonetheless, this is a major inconvenience.

Technology? I love it and I loathe it... but I can't live without it.

But nor do I co-exist with it very easily or naturally. I remain a wee bit of a technological dinosaur, and one thing I have concluded during this pandemic time is that the church of tomorrow will need to be much more tech savvy than it is now or than I suspect I can be. That is but one small example of why it is that the emerging church that must surely come to birth in days to come will not be best served by the likes of me.

I must begin to plan to step aside and make way for a new generation whom I will support and for whom I will pray. But we are now in a new world, and it will not be my world.

 But all of that ‘stepping aside’ is for another post.

 For the moment, whether you love or loathe technology (or – like me – sometimes one and sometimes the other!) I invite you to ponder what life would have been like during this pandemic had it not been for computers, social media, the internet etc. If all this had happened in 1990 and not 2020, what would our lives have been like these last nine months?

 That very thought leads me to give thanks for technology!