Information Technology and Spread of Gospel
Name
EDUC 3009 - Technology and Education
2022
Information Technology and Spread of Gospel
According to Bolu CA (2011), Step into an average evangelical church today and one is liable to
encounter a high-tech audio/visual experience on par with a rock concert, perhaps with a pastor
using an iPad Bible or taking questions from the audience via SMS or Twitter. Or maybe the
pastor is actually speaking from a screen, as in the increasingly prevalent multi-site church
model or Internet campus phenomenon.
Bolu CA (2011) further asserts that beyond the Sunday church experience, the evangelical
Christian presence in new media spheres is formidable. The Christian blogosphere is thriving,
with sites like Between Two Worlds (Justin Taylor) and Jesus Creed (Scot McKnight)
sometimes posting more than a dozen times a day, while group blogs like GetReligion, First
Things, and the Gospel Coalition curate a broad assortment of Christian writers, journalists and
thought leaders to feed a steady stream of faith-oriented news, theology, and prognosticating to
increasingly broad and avid readerships. Evangelicals—particularly pastors and
authors/bloggers/speakers—have also been early Twitter adopters, and now arguably constitute
one of the most thriving subcultures in the Twitter verse. Pastor Rick Warren, for example, has
more than 152,000 followers on Twitter. Evangelicals have also embraced new media
communication platforms like YouTube video and iTunes podcast audio, in many cases with
great success. Pastors like Mark Driscoll at Seattle’s Mars Hill Church and Matt Chandler at
Dallas’ Village Church routinely rank among iTunes top podcast downloads.
According to Williams TC (2008), Christians have, in large part, embraced technology and
mastered its numerous applications and efficiencies. Perhaps because the outward-focused,
spread-the-Gospel mission of the church fits so nicely with the world-flattening, mass
communication potential of new media technology, the marriage has been rather seamless.
Doubtless, much good has come of it. The global availability of Christian resources via the
Internet—sermons, blog discourse, pastoral training, networking—holds exciting promise for an
increased unity among the worldwide church. Technologies like Skype and iChat have
revolutionized the way missionaries abroad can communicate with family and supporters back
home.
According to Wyche P (2010), Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites allow for
more regular communication, updates and community-building between church leaders and their
flocks, and a broader sense of connectedness between previously localized communities of
believers. Much more could be written about the many ways in which technology has benefitted
the church. No assessment of this subject matter would be valid that did not admit from the
outset that indeed, technology can and will do great things for Christianity in the 21st century.
But this essay is not primarily about those things.
According to Uwaje C (2010) throughout history, technology has never been value-neutral.
There are almost always both good and bad things frequently unintended on both accounts about
new media or technological advances. We must recognize that both benefits and burdens inhere
in every technology, apart from the content it delivers. Wyche P (2010), all media work us over
completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological,
moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected,
unaltered.
According to Ukah AF (2003), we may certainly debate whether or not McLuhan’s pseudo-
technological determinism is an overestimation. But given the fact that the western, modernist
perspective on technology has largely been defined by a Jetsons-esque utopian ideal the idea that
technological innovation is synonymous with moral, social, and psychic progress as Neil
Postman suggests—we are perhaps better aided by a gut-check critique that takes a step back
from the wonders of technology and asks questions about how they might be negatively
impacting us.
This study seeks to highlight some of the unintended consequences of the church’s embrace of
recent social media communication technologies, not in effort to dismiss outright the usage of
such technologies, but simply to raise a few warning flags so that we might think critically about
how we can cautiously utilize such things while recognizing their limitations and downsides.
2.4 Technological Paradigm Shifts
According to the report released by Internet Evangelism Coalition (IEC), Internet Evangelism
Day (2011), though it is probably correct to think of our current shifting context as a unique
historical phenomenon, this is by no means the first paradigm shift that has had a direct impact
on the biblical text. During the Old Testament period, biblical books were written and
transmitted on scrolls. Because it was impractical for a single scroll to contain the full contents
of most biblical books, any notion of the biblical text as a whole was by necessity conceptual.
According to Williams TC (2008) around the first century CE, the birth of the codex represents a
seismic paradigm shift in the way written material was produced, transmitted, and understood by
the typical reader. By at least the fourth century, the entire biblical canon was able to fit on one
physical codex, bound together with contextual relationships ordered and solidified. Readers of
the canon striving to read individual writings in light of each other were greatly aided by this
technological innovation. Though the specific content of the canon varied in different faith
communities, it was easier to proclaim the Scriptures as a whole when they were bound together
in a single codex. The rise of Gutenberg’s printing press during the
According to Uwaje C (2010) reformation era standardized the book form and allowed for the
unprecedented dissemination of published material. This remarkable invention created the text-
based culture that has endured for over half a millennium. This set the stage for the eruption of
new media.
With the rise of computer technology at the end of the twentieth century, a new way of
communicating was born. Though there are many obvious similarities between old and new
media, recent developments represent something unique.
According to Wyche P (2010), one obvious feature of this new climate is the digitization of
many paper-based formats. The ability to digitize a codex means that the intrinsic connection
between a book and the print form, previously understood as inviolable, is weakened.
Experimentation with digital manifestations of former staples of the print-based paradigm is
common. Increasing numbers of magazines, newspapers, and journals are being offered
exclusively online. Though e-books have been on the radar for a number of years, the success of
recent e-readers such as Amazon’s
Wyche P (2010) further asserts that Kindle and Apple’s iPad have demonstrated that the practice
of reading books electronically is here to stay. While the digitization of the codex is an important
feature of our current climate, the destabilization of texts perhaps best represents the drastic
nature of the shift. The advent of the search engine revolutionized how many people use the
According to Williams TC (2008) internet and also modified the way those users access and
interact with data. Most text on the Internet is malleable, able to fit into whatever mold the given
medium requires. It is no longer necessary to access an entire work or document, as search
engine technology enables rapid keyword searching and access to related content via an intricate
web of interconnections. As information continues to proliferate, possible intersections of
loosely related data on the information superhighway are legion. The movement from text to
hypertext thus creates a new technological environment that represents a challenge for readers,
including those interacting with the biblical canon. A digitized and destabilized Bible exists in a
different way than in a physical codex form. In recent years there has been a trend towards what
is called “cloud computing,” a phrase that describes the relationship between users and their data.
In this model, users input data to web-based services and then draw it out of “the cloud”
whenever they need to access it. Biblical readers who make use of this type of technology likely
have also made adjustments to their reading habits. For these users, the biblical text exists in the
cloud alongside terabytes of non-related information.When reading the Bible online or on a
mobile device, most of the time there will be rival texts vying for the attention and focus of the
reader. The hyper-texted and inter-linked nature of most of the web will require a reader to
exercise consistent discipline if he or she desires to read a large portion of text without
distraction. Other options are always on offer and only a click away. In this context, the proverb
of the day might appear right below your nephew’s birthday pictures, that bit of commentary on
the book of Revelation comes just above your friend from high school’s comments on the season
finale of LOST, and the Psalm you read a few moments ago gets buried in the Facebook feed just
as quick as the embedded You Tube video that played while you were reading it. The lure of the
link is a siren song often underestimated by casual users who are sometimes unaware of the lack
of focus they devote to sustained reading, World Bank, World development data (2011).
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