The Next Story: Life and Faith after the Digital Explosion

by Tim Challies

It lets us personalize our lives and our relationships, to respond to what we want when we want to. By looking at pornography, we can control our sexual encounters, never having to deal with a spouse who has a headache and never having a partner say, “No, I don’t want to do that.” By worshiping at a cyberchurch, we can control who worships alongside of us; we can control our commitment, showing up only when we want and participating only as much as we desire; we can control our time, choosing the time and date that works best for us. By giving us control, our new technologies tend to enhance existing idols in our lives. Instead of becoming more like Christ through the forming and shaping influence of a church community, we form and shape and personalize our community to make it more like us. We take control of things that are not ours to control. But God never calls us to a life of ease, a life in which we maintain control and do things on our own terms. He puts us in marriage relationships, in friendships, in church communities, for his own reasons; he puts us in such relationships to teach us how to love one another and more and more resemble him in his great love. Could it be that our desire for control is short-circuiting the process of change and transformation God wants us to experience through the mess of real-world, flesh-and-blood, face-to-face relationships?