Last week, I listened to an interview with Paul Kingsnorth, author of Against the Machine, on Socrates in the City on my device. You can find it on YouTube—it is worth all 1:07:40 of your time. In the interview, Kingsnorth rightly suggested that our screens are keeping us from 4 P words, and at that moment, I thought: (1) he is right, and (2) I must share this with Berean.
P#1 is people. I see this every Sunday morning. I see adults (not children) glued to their screens, utterly oblivious to anyone around them. Is this you? Is your first instinct, when you sit down in the sanctuary, to look at your phone? In the sanctuary—a place—you are surrounded by people, humans who love you, can help you, pray for you, encourage you, and on and on. Yet you prefer a flat screen. Something is wrong with us. Are you permitting your screen to separate you from the body of Christ?
P#2 is place. In this case, the place is Berean. But it is more than Berean—it is a larger issue. We would rather stare at something happening inside a device than at the place where we are actually standing. We do not look up and around; we stare at the object that is eighteen inches in front of us. This is your church—do you notice when things change from week to week? That is your neighborhood—the place you live. Did you notice that the Browns painted their front door red? Did you notice that the entire auditorium was painted from ceiling to floor? Did you notice that the pulpit has been changed? Screens are limiting our interaction with the world around us, and it is not good.
P#3 is prayer. When was the last time you came into the sanctuary and prayed? Our devices call to us, and we listen and obey. We cannot hear the Holy Spirit compelling us to pray to God because our devices demand one more minute of our time. We cannot put them away. We think we need them. We might want to look up a Greek word on www.blueletterbible.org during the sermon. We use the possibility that we might need to look at the Hebrew as justification for why this screen must go everywhere I go. It cannot be left in the glovebox of my SUV.
P#4 is the past. Remembering the past is biblical. Yahweh told Israel to set up markers so that when their children asked, they could tell them about what happened. Remember. Do your children remember? Is the novelty of the immediate present inside your device keeping you from the past? People talk about the past—but we don’t talk to people. Seriously, I am not exaggerating. You can feel it in the sanctuary on Sunday mornings. It is palpable. Don’t ask my name. Don’t speak to me. Don’t get between me and my screen. Don’t you dare expect me to stop playing Candy Crush to have a conversation with you.
Berean, is it an idol? Our devices are demons that keep us from the people around us, the place we are presently in, and our God. Can we leave our devices in our automobiles? Can we?
Are you willing to commit to praying when you enter the sanctuary? Are you willing to rebuke your device when it calls to you for more of your time—“Satan, get thee behind me”? Are you willing to engage in a conversation about the past when you ask someone, “How was your week?” Parents, are you willing to insist that the entire family, while driving to church, look outside at the world God made and the people Christ died for on the way to the campus? Does anyone play “I spy with my little eye” anymore? How many souls will be in hell because of a device that kept them from hearing the gospel preached in their hearing? Will it be yours?
