From the Huffington Post this morning, “Churches Adopt Technology to Reach out to Congregants”
There’s a great deal of good ministry to be done with technology, and the article addresses quite a bit of it: streaming services so shut-in parishioners can visit, making sermon notes available, and even tracking conversations with the pastor on Twitter. But I get a little worried when I read things like this:
“When Theryl Jones moved from Peoria, Ill., to Atlanta recently, leaving behind her home church, St. Paul Baptist Church, she said it was comforting to know that her pastor was just a few mouse-clicks away.”
The Benedictine monastic order has a rule about stability; that is, once you settle on a place where you take your vows, that’s the place you stay forever. Moving around is considered disruptive to developing faith.
For average Christians, I think the case for stability could be made in two ways: either this technologically-enabled connection to a former church is good because you maintain a connection to the pastor who knows you and who you trust for guidance, or it’s less good because as you join a new church in a local area, (which I think people always should) it allows you to compare the new minister to the old one and avoid developing a trusted and stable relationship there.
As a minister who’s looking at a transition period over the next year, I’m not sure how to process this thought. I want to maintain connections to my students so that I can use the relationships I’ve built over the last seven years to continue helping them, but I dont want to undermine the next minister’s ability to do his work.
This is one of those topics that ministers haven’t had to deal with as much in the past, but on which an honest conversation (forced now by the emergence of these technologies) is probably overdue.
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