We are often lost because we do not know our destination. Unless we know where we want to go, we may not know whether we are progressing or regressing.
When it comes to parenting our children in a digital age, it will not be enough to simply react to the latest Disney LGBTQ propaganda, or forbid our children from using a particular app, once we hear of how it is abused. These responses are merely reactive, and do not look ahead to where we wish to go. Furthermore, like frogs in a pot, we may be acclimatising to what is bad for us, and tolerating all kinds of things that are spiritually toxic for our children. Judging technology and its dangers by the current fad or danger is like judging traffic from your car’s dashboard. You will see some dangers, but you need an aerial view to really understand what is going on.
We must begin by asking, what sort of disciples are we trying to make? What is essential to the makeup of a healthy, mature disciple? We can then proceed to ask, how do our technologies help or harm? Let me suggest seven qualities of a worshipping disciple.
1. We wish to shape people who can admire and adore through intense and sustained attention. The Christian life is one in which God is revealed for our admiring attention. But He is revealed to us in ways that require concentration, focus, and the prolonged gaze of the soul. A worshipper understands he presents a sacrifice of praise to God: his costly attention, admiration, focus, and desire. God is not revealed in fleeting, second-long flashes of eye-candy, or amusing action. People who are used to multi-tasking, aimless scrolling and divided attention will find worship very difficult.
2. We wish to shape people who can imagine through words, not primarily through visual stimuli. God is revealed through the inspired Word, and therefore people who cannot understand through metaphor, simile, analogy, or other literary devices will be hamstrung when it comes to seeking to know God. Further, skimming text rapidly seems to be the opposite of those skills needed to carefully discern meaning in a text.
3. We wish to shape people who can follow arguments, reason well, and detect the relative reliability of sources. Good reasoning requires strong attention, good focus, and the ability to control distractions and interruptions. To be discerning and to exercise sound judgement is a skill, but one that is developed through the right kind of exercise.
4. We wish to shape people who love others in living, face-to-face relationships. Relationships do not thrive when characterised by exhibitionism, voyeurism, envy, boasting or gossip. Further, people who wish to escape to where they can live vicariously through their ‘digital presence’ are retreating from real relationships.
5. We wish to shape people who embrace spiritual disciplines such as daily Bible reading, Bible memorisation, daily prayer, regular church attendance, and fasting. A life of procrastination, time-wasting, and addictive behaviour does not foster self-denial or discipline.
6. We wish to shape people who find their identity in historic Christian culture, and identify with the church’s past as much as they identify with their own moment in history. Neophilia (the love of the new), and an unfavourable prejudice against what is older will mean a person can only locate themselves in the fleeting and continually changing world of online (secular) culture.
7. We wish to shape people who have some aesthetic sensibility and discernment. That is, people who can spot the beautiful from the tacky, the sublime from the sentimental, the genuinely helpful from the merely nostalgic. They will need this to discern good hymns from bad, helpful Christian music from cheap and tacky kind, thoughtful children’s ministry from monkeying around, appropriate Christian architecture from the gaudy or the mundanely ugly, and so on. Judging beauty is a muscle that develops with use, and atrophies when never called upon.
Once we have pictured this young disciple, we can begin to decide what the digital diet will look like.