This is part two of our summer series, How Shall We Live in the Digital Age?—a collection of short pieces and excerpts from the June 2025 Ex Fonte, exploring how Christians can and should navigate the ever-changing digital landscape.

Inventions—human contrivances made incarnate like the printing press or the camera—have power, but not a conscience. It is the mind and thoughts behind the human inventions that become either the blessing or curse of humanity.

Never have the stakes been higher as in the case of modern technology. Technologies extend and increase our abilities to move, to see, to organize, or even to think and heal. But there are also caveats to consider.

In this issue, Ex Fonte takes a deep dive into the gifts, traps and implications of the digital world we inhabit, including its uses and abuses. My true confession is that when technology becomes demanding, sending me unwanted notices or messages, I get irritated. Going on a walk with my wife, talking about our children or the church, we are at times interrupted by my wife’s meddling watch: It looks like you are going on a walk, would you like to record this?

So, I don’t have an Apple watch myself, and I have dropped out of using most social media because of its meddling and time-consuming nature. These forms of applied technology are all about money: The more clicks and the longer the attention, the more cash someone is earning. At times I have wanted to throw my phone in the ocean.

Then there is the other side of the technological coin. I can take pictures of beautiful sunsets and sunrises with that same phone without having to remember to take my camera everywhere I go. I get Easter greetings from friends in Cambodia and Singapore and Hong Kong. I can do a quick search at most any time to find out the comparative racial mix of Philadelphia and Boston, or the percent of Christians in Zambia.

I love technology. I hate technology.

Technology, like an amplifier, increases human goodness and human fallenness. People are coming to faith in Jesus and being discipled in restricted countries like never before thanks to technology. People can have access to the Bible—access at all times and in all places. Yet, as an amplifier of human fallenness, we contend with technology’s downsides: the plague of pornography, a crisis of deception and distrust, and the loss of billions of dollars through computer viruses and “attacks,” not to mention countless other risk factors, many of which are explored in this issue.

This brings us to the Christian response to this new threshold we face. Human thoughts, and even feelings, are being expressed by human-made inventions. We have machines with personalities! (See the upcoming excerpt from “A Conversation with Grok.”) We must ask ourselves not only how we should respond and live with this universe, but how our churches ought to guide our congregations. Technology, particularly in the form of social media, can do more of the discipling of Christians than Scripture, prayer, and worship. Are we being formed how to think and respond by the ubiquity of social media and not by the ubiquity of the presence of Christ? These platforms are, after all, a constant presence “speaking” to us and eliciting our response.

Can we do better as believers, churches, and leaders, discipling our communities as lords over technology and servants of the Lord?

Subscribe to Ex Fonte Today