Let’s discuss iFear or Windows phobia. I’m not taking sides in whether an iPad or a Surface is better. I don’t care whether you have a Mac or a PC.
I hear some say, “I don’t understand computers.” This is iFear! Let’s define iFear or Windows phobia, not as the inability to understand computers or things associated with them, but avoidance, often for entrenched misconceptions.
You might still use a landline to call your children.
Do you say that drums and electric guitars are of the devil and that sacred music should be sung to an organ like they did in the days of the King David?
iFear isn’t ageist. I know both young and old, who resist the change that comes too quickly with e-communication, whether a Kindle e-book or Twitter. Some of it is iArrogance or iSnobbery, as the young sneer at the old. Some of it is PC obstinance or PC stuck-in-the-mud as we grow old and won’t change.
God will always have you run at your fears, or repent and clean the mud off your shoes, so you won’t get the floors of change dirty. This is what He does.
God have not given us a Spirit of iPhobia. But a Spirit of love, power, and a correct response to change. – 2 Timothy 1:7 (OGV)
Let’s do a Christian technology review. Some of us – young and old – don’t like e-books. We love to turn pages. There is something comforting about actual paper. Yet a book as we know it – pages stacked – was a new form of technology as opposed to a scroll 2,000 years ago. This new technology spread because of Christians. Consider: It’s easier to look up chapter and verse in a book as opposed to rolling the pages of a scroll.
When Christians began to adopt books, did someone say, “But, I love the feel of paper rolling between my fingers”?
Same pattern with movable type and the first printing of the Bible. And yes, someone did say, “What! Scripture in the hands of the common people? Let’s burn the culprit at the stake.”
Gutenberg paid the ultimate price for change!
Can we stop saying that we are too old, or I like the way it used to be, or I need someone young to show me? Can we realize that all of us can acclimate to Zoom with minimal anxiety? Can we just get on with technology?
Pastor Grant, what is the purpose of this absurd “Interruption”?
Along with actual books and the printing press, history records Christians being first adopters with hospitals, colleges, both organs and electric guitars, along with the scientific method, and a good friend of mine (as a Christian) invented CD-ROM formatting.
So why not Zoom, Vlogging, podcasts and international online one-on-one discipleship using First Steps?
Because of what happened in 2020, 2021 will not be the same as 2019. Should followers of a Lord who wants us to disciple the nations, be stuck on an airplane wearing a mask, when Americans can disciple Russians or Russians disciple Filipinos – right now from your house?
You just have to figure out how to turn on your computer.