Saturday, August 9, 2008

Technology and worship

Since when has worship become so dependent on technology?

Luke and I recently mounted a new widescreen video projector in the church sanctuary.  As with anything "do-it-yourself" project, there were some minor glitches.  For example we had to adjust the mounted projector to fill the screen, we had to do some signal checks from different computers and finally we had to change the screen resolution from 800 x 600 to 1280 x 768 dpi.  Since Luke is a tech savvy guy I figured things would be fairly straightforward.

They weren't.

Something went loopy with our song projection software.  We tried to recover the song database last night.  We gave up at 11:15pm without a resolution.

I came home, frustrated and annoyed, wondering when church worship became so dependent on technology.  Does technology enhance or detract from our God directed worship?  Is what we call "Sunday morning worship" is better defined as a Christianized theatre production?  Do we gather primarily to proclaim the goodness and sovereignty of God, through Jesus, or are we more interested in being satisfied that the "Sunday morning show" was worth the hour and fifteen minutes we spent at church?  

For myself, I'm not sure I can answer that question yet.  I'd welcome your thoughts from wherever you sit.

1 comment:

Tim Good said...

Gosh that is a giant question for me right now too.

worship became tech dependant when church became attractional (yes that is a you know)

Look around an most new churches that are being built - they look very similar to theatres... I just looked at a catalogue showing speaker installations in various venues - you had to read the label to know if it was a church or a performance theatre.

If you haven't read Shane Hipps book "The Hidden Power of Electronic Culture: How Media Shapes Faith, the Gospel, and Church" I strongly recommend it.

If you like that...there are others that have really influenced my thinking.... so much that I am about to stop working in the Church technology business because I don't know if I agree with the way the church is going.

Related Posts with Thumbnails