Psalm 119: Our Churches' Growing Reliance On Technology

The overhead projection of scripture is destroying the church as we know it. There will come a time—and I realize almost no one reading these words believes this—when you won’t have an iPad. You won’t have a smartphone. You won’t have a PC or laptop or digital anything. It will just be you. You and a prison cell. You and a heart monitor. You holding a loved one's hand as they transition to meet God or meet judgment. What will you say? What song will you sing?

I remember when we used to sing.

Our mothers and their mothers sang out of necessity. To pass the time. To vent frustration. To cry out to the Lord. And they knew the words. Many of us sang out of despair. Many, still, sang out of *defiance.* We sang in the streets. We sang on our meager porches. We sang On The Battlefield. In the hospitals. In the prisons and jails. Jesus Is On The Mainline. These precious pieces of our heritage we now snicker at and kick around.

We don’t know the song lyrics. Well, many if not most cotemporary hymns have way too many lyrics to begin with. Praise and Worship should be about meditation and, by nature, simple and repetitive enough so that most anybody can catch on and join in, and so the words—the *words*--can dig down deep into our thinning, into our hearts. But we don’t know the words to even the most basic, most simple worship songs. Songs which should live within us, within our culture. Which only proves we do not sing these songs on our own. We read the lyrics off the JumboTron while being entertained by the singers and the light show and the dazzling digital animated backgrounds. Then we climb back into our cars and blast Lil’ Wayne. This is what we do. Our culture is dying if not dead mainly because of car stereos and smartphones. We unplug (some of us) long enough to suffer through an hour or two of what we call “worship” service, even though there’s no actual worship going on. A few hugs and handshakes, and then back to the subwoofer. The kids’ earbuds go right back in, assuming they ever came out. And we resume being brainwashed by the world, a 24/7 steady intervenus drip of poison.

I don’t even sing anymore. I used to, before this dreadful town and it’s half-assed religion killed my spirit. I used to sing around the house, around the neighborhood. I’d be up in my room singing for no other reason than that I sang. I loved to sing. And I was singing to Him—to God. Not concerned about my performance or whether or not the Church Folk “got’ me. Now living two-thirds of the way across the country, my experience is most people who sing in churches do so for the wrong reason. There’s all this ego, all this competition. As a teenager I washed dishes for a few summers at a Christian summer camp, cleaning pots so huge you literally had to climb into them to scrape the bottom. And I sang. I sang so much and so often and so loud I’m sure I annoyed most anybody in earshot. I frankly didn’t stop to wonder or worry whether or not I was annoying anybody. Singing was what I did. All the time. And I knew the words.

Singing helps us remember. Helps us learn. Learn who we are, where we came from. Helps us to make choices about where we’re going. But we really don't sing anymore. We mumble along behind the crowd while the entertainers entertain us. And we don’t know the words because we haven’t been forced to learn them. They’re right there—up on the JumboTron. And we have no incentive to learn the words because we haven’t been taught what real worship is or why it’s important or how it benefits us. I don’t hear that teaching from black pulpits anymore. I see black churches increasingly emulating the white Entertainment Church model, with stadium seating and laser shows and multiple JumboTrons. Cappucino in the lobby. For too many of us, going to church is exactly like going to the movies. Our loyalty to our churches works much the same way. “What’s playing over there? Maybe we’ll go over here this week.”

Likewise, we don’t learn scripture anymore.
Growing up, there was one bible and one translation—the Authorized King James. Worshippers clustered in the pews to share bibles if someone did not bring one. Now there are so many different translations that memorizing scripture has become a real challenge. I am not a quotologist, I have to look stuff up. But the verses I do know, and the verses I do look up, are in the King James. Not because I am one of those KJV-Only extremists, out because that’s the bible I grew up with. And it was a book. A thick, dog-eared, aging stack of paper glued together at the binding. My friends and I competed to see who could lock in the pastor’s text first, who could find that obscure passage of scripture and stand to their feet. The faster you stood, the more studious you appeared (at least to the teenage girls we were trying to impress). During boring sermons, I’d casually read the context preceding and succeeding the key scripture. As I grew older and learned more about theology and doctrine, I’d run through my Thompson Chain Reference KJV, connecting the dots to the pastor’s sermons and gaining a broader understanding, a deeper drink from the well. This habit, common among myself and my young saved friends back when I was a teenager, is all but nonexistent now.

Now everybody’s got a smartphone. I look around the sanctuary, and most people have simply stopped carrying bibles altogether. I’d guess many don’t even own a bible—a book, a stack of papers glued together at the binding. What they have is a gizmo. They tap in the verse, and there it is. And most people don’t even bother doing that. Why? Because so many black pastors now strive to be like white pastors, undermining faith in God by not requiring their members to actually read and study scripture. Instead, they want to be like white folk. They’ve got the JumboTron. And they’re killing Christianity with this infernal technology just so they can keep up with the white folk.

We don't learn song lyrics. We sing these empty and convoluted, poorly-written and un-anointed “hits” by these phony, hypocritical “Gospel” artists. We want to be in the trend, sing the latest stuff. The lyrics are almost always poorly written and way too many of them. The words do not burn in our hearts or grasp hold of our thoughts. They don’t inspire us. We forget the words the instant the JumboTron fades to the next glitzy image, visuals so dazzling that the sight of the pastor simply standing before us is no longer enough to capture our attention.

We know nothing about scripture because we don’t read the bible. We watch the JumboTron. Here’s this passage of scripture. Then fade to the dazzling light show. The scripture never takes hold. We didn’t have to actually turn pages to look it up, so we do not see any before and after—any context in which to appreciate God’s word.

Many of our pastors believe this is progress. They are just being led around by their noses and, to my experience, most do not give this business a second thought. They dismiss me as extreme if not ridiculous even as they lithely go about the business of destroying the Gospel they claim to cherish.

Turn It Off: Embed scripture everywhere except in the seeker's heart.

Pastors: Turn The Mess Off.

The only reason you have it, the only reason your church invested thousands of dollars in equipment and software, is because you saw this at a white church. You saw it on TV. You saw somebody else doing this. You’ve given this absolutely no independent thought beyond trying to be “progressive” and/or compete with the next church down the road. The overhead projection of scripture is destroying the church as we know it. Entire generations of “Christians” are being raised on sound bites and light shows. Used sparingly, the overhead graphics can be a powerful tool in praise and worship and sermon delivery. But, in order to call ourselves “Christian,” the word of God must become embedded in the hearts of the people. Most every white pastor I’m aware of is failing miserably at this, relying far too much on the JumboTron, MediaShout and all that mess. Sure, put the announcements up there. Put nursery alerts to mothers up there. Sparingly, and only when introducing new music, put the lyrics up there.

But force your people to actually open a bible. Tell them their iPad or smartphone is not enough. There will come a time—and I realize almost no one reading these words believes this—when you won’t have an iPad. You won’t have a smartphone. You won’t have a PC or laptop or digital anything. It will just be you. You and a prison cell. You and a heart monitor. You holding a loved one's hand as they transition to meet God or meet judgment. What will you say? What song will you sing?

Pastors: you are teaching your people to rely on mess. They don’t know scripture. Worse, they do not know where to find what bits and fragments of scripture they do know. They’ve never once turned a page in a bible. They’ve input a search string into their gizmo. They’ve sat in your church while you’ve entertained them. I believe a great many pastors—legions of them—will someday stand before God, Who will require an explanation of why they were such bone heads. These are stupid, stupid men who do not consider the consequences of their choices. Thy word have I hid in mine heart, David said.

Turn the mess off. No JumboTron. No cell phones. No iPads. Encourage the people to bring an actual bible and to learn how to actually read it. This mess you’re doing, flashing the little chunk of scripture n the screen, is Satan’s deception, watering down the message of Christ. And you’re spending thousands of dollars to make that happen. Pastors: you are destroying Christianity. In these last and evil days, our harvest is multiple generations of fair-weather Christians who know absolutely nothing whatsoever about the bible. Paul and Silas sang hymns in prison. Without access to the sacred scrolls of the Torah, Paul wrote some of the most profound and most elegant and timeless words. No iPad. No smartphone. No JumboTron.

I see a pastor heading toward the pulpit with an iPad and I think, What an absolute disgrace. The iPad is a great tool for sermon notes and what have you. But under that iPad there needs to also be an actual bible. A stack of paper glued together at the binding. Pastors: people need to see you turn pages in that book. Need to see you walk with that book. If all they see is your iPad, that is the behavior they will emulate. And rather than explore, rather than browse or learn the mysteries of what God has to say in His holy word, the people just input search algorithms, going directly to your passage of scripture and then—as many as not—pretending to read scripture o these device while they are actually texting or playing video games waiting for you to shut up.

Pastor: you are destroying Christianity. Turn the mess off.

Christopher J. Priest
12 February 2012
editor@praisenet.org
TOP OF PAGE