I was visiting with the pastor of a church where I was the guest preacher. He lamented that the youth there didn’t seem connected in worship. “I don’t think they care about ‘community’ the way we used to,” he said.
But something about this common lament didn’t strike me as quite right. “There were a ton of youth up in the balcony in the 11:00 service,” I ventured.
“Yes, but – didn’t you notice? They pulled out their cell phones and started texting right before the Scripture reading,” the pastor said. “They do the same thing every week. And they hold their phones right in front of them, as if they want me to know they are not paying attention.”
“Right before the Scripture reading?” I asked. “Any chance they have the text on their phones, and are following along?”
The pastor was silent for a moment, head bent, looking down into his folded hands, considering. “You mean,” he said, lifting his chin and looking me straight in the eye, “You can put a Bible on a phone?”
An important charge for all of us is to go out into the world and notice how new technologies are re-framing the central notions of our faith. What constitutes “community,” for example, is shifting. When someone is absorbed in a screen they could, of course, be shoe shopping. But they could also be nurturing a community. By way of cell phones, internet connections and tiny, powerful computer chips and courtesy of Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, connections to friends and family are carried around in our pockets and handbags as well as in our hearts. For many, communing with others via social media is more natural than talking on the phone, hanging out by the water cooler or gossiping at a church potluck.
Perhaps these more recent patterns of communing will give us fresh ways of understanding some age-old teachings of the church. The asynchronistic engagement with “Facebook friends” from places far and wide, for example, might help us imagine what it “looks like” to be part of a the “communion of saints” that transcends time and space.
My guess is that all kinds of theological understandings are reconfiguring themselves, regardless of our cluelessness or disapproval. I think of those youth in the balcony and wonder: How are they engaging the Bible differently than I always have, as they follow the reading on their phones? Do they think of the Bible as something “solid” they can study, mark up and claim as their own? I notice most churches still hand out printed Bibles to celebrate the completion of confirmation class. Maybe electronic Bibles and study resources should be gifted instead. People of all ages who use their phones to access biblical texts might enjoy using Bible apps to compare versions or to look at translations of Greek and Hebrew words.
We need to ask ourselves some hard questions: Are we curious about how tech-savvy children of God see the world? Are we willing to try on their perceptions and values? Are we open to re-learning from them how God’s living, dynamic, ever-new Word will not be domesticated by words on a page? Might those who engage the Bible digitally have insight into the truth of this that others of us do not?
I ask these questions in hope, not because I think new technologies are necessarily better than old ones, or that new understandings of “community” or “canon” need replace those that have endured for a while. I ask these questions in hope because I’ve noticed that, for every negative comment I hear about culture gnawing away our church, there is someone sitting up in that balcony, her phone held expectantly before her, wanting to hear God’s Word.
CYNTHIA RIGBY is professor of theology at Austin Theological Seminary.
