Gospel Hope in a Digital Age with Brett McCracken
Today’s episode with Brett McCracken explores the positives and negatives of technology and the Christian’s spiritual formation. We pray this conversation helps you to think critically about this topic in your own life and points you to the God who is sovereign over all the technology that has ever existed in our world.
NOTES & QUOTES
“Where God has you as a physical being in a physical place in the world matters. And insofar as you embrace that, you will flourish because you will be used by God to be his hands and feet.”
“Embodied community in a local church, for example, there is going to be more friction. There's more potential for pain. There's more awkwardness, . . . but that’s a good thing because it’s a human thing. God did not design community and the church to be like an Amazon Prime experience of one-day delivery at your convenience. Discipleship is a process. It's a hard process. It's a slow process.”
“All of us are just going to spend our time looking at our phones with every gap in our day that we have, and only if you intentionally choose not to do that will you not do that. It has to be an intentional choice.”
“We need to kind of train ourselves to go against our human nature, which is that we don't want to notice God. That is the pattern throughout scripture, right? In terms of the infidelity of God's people. It starts when they just don't acknowledge him, or they forget him. They forget to notice him. And so much in the world is just this constant kind of temptation to like, look at, give your attention to other things than God, right? And in its worst form, it becomes idolatry when we're like literally worshiping other things than God. And I really do think like the smartphone, the scrolling, the algorithm, it is a form of idolatry because what we are doing when we're scrolling all those interstitial moments of our lives, it's bad what we're doing, but it's worse what we're not doing, which is we're not giving due attention to God.”
“I struggle with this. As someone who's a Christian and I'm very aware of my need to be with God and my desire to be with God, I still struggle to carve out time every day to do it because life is so busy and the phone just presents this ever-present temptation to optimize every moment.”
“God is jealous for our full attention. He wants us, he wants time with us, he wants our attention. And the phone is keeping us from that.”
“We've lost the ability to be unmediated for any amount of time. But it's those unmediated moments that I think can be the most nourishing for us because it's time we can be in prayer, it's time we can be alone with our own thoughts, which is such a valuable thing.”
“Attention is the currency of spiritual formation. Like where we give our attention is where we will be formed relationally and spiritually… Our spiritual vitality depends on the time and attention we're giving to God.”
“For all their faults, know, social media, smartphones, AI now, I just have to believe that God is going to work. He's going to redeem them for his purposes.”
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
What does your relationship with technology look like? Is it simply a tool in your life, or has it become something larger?
If you are on social media, take a serious look at how you present yourself. Does this “version” of you align with the way you act and treat others in your own home and in your own local church?
What is one way you can champion embodied community over virtual community?
What are the main vehicles for feeding your soul lately?
Evaluate your waking hours. How are you spending them? What is shaping you?
What might you do or implement based on what you learned in this week’s episode?
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Journeywomen interviews are intended to serve as a springboard for continued study in the context of your local church. While we carefully select guests each week, interviews do not imply Journeywomen's endorsement of all writings and positions of the interviewee or any other resources mentioned.
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