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 intervenes 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
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