TechnoBabel

We live in an age of exploding technological advance. I don't about you but my brain reels from trying to keep up with it all. Increasingly I find myself wanting to find somewhere peaceful to go and have a little lie down. The trouble is that this particular trouble will still be there when I wake up. In the service industries it's becoming harder by the day to secure an office job if you don't have a reasonable level of competence in most Microsoft Office programs. A few years ago I counted myself one of the enlightened because I knew how to switch a computer on and understood how to get a simple spread sheet going. These days you need to be able to database, word-process, desktop-publish, net-surf, program personal macro routines in VB.....zzzzzzzz.

 Excuse me. Just dropped off. I'll put the anorak on again and get back to looking interested in the subject. Cheap digital technology has been the driving force behind much of the changes we are seeing in society; it is a new industrial revolution. We can all recognize the shifts in working patterns,  we can see science altering even our food with genetic engineering, and our homes are changing too with mobile phones, CD  music, computerized car engines, so on and so forth. Where will it stop if ever? There are researchers working on digital chips which can be embedded in the forehead which will contain all our personal information, our credit card details, and which it is hoped will eventually link to centralized information databases. It'll be a little like going on the internet without all the hassle of switching on the desktop PC.

 All this has profound significance for the Church. This digital technology is all about information, bytes, data, and shifting it around. God is in that business too, and if he's in it then we're in it also. Genesis chapter 1 tells us that God created the universe by speaking, "And God said.. and it was so." Speaking is nothing more than the sorting of bits of information and shifting it around. In modern language we might translate Genesis 1 thus, "And God fed the data in and switched the program on...and it was so." The great fall could be described as the first bug in the program - Microsoft, eat your heart out! It's no wonder then that Jesus tells us that we do not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God. It's information and how it's used that is the theatre of battle between good and evil. The Bible, God's word is absolutely fundamental to the spiritual war that we fight and is, as Paul says in Ephesians, our sword, our only offensive weapon.

 This brings me to the internet. All this talk of warfare and microchip marks on the forehead was getting a bit heavy and morbid so it's time to bring it back to something more parochial and mundane. I like the internet and I know that a growing number of you at Bunyan are connected too. Once you overcome the jargon and the technophobia it's great to plug into all that free information and send e-mail messages around the place (I never could cope with stamps anyway). Chez Clube, we pay bills over the internet, renew library books, keep in touch with friends in the four corners of the world, do a touch of shopping, read the broadsheet newspapers... you've got the idea. It's also a useless place to find good Bible information. Yes, I did say useless.

  As we all know Jesus had one overriding priority during his earthly ministry which was to teach, a process which again involves the broadcasting of information. In Mark's gospel account, Jesus faces a crisis in his ministry three times and on every occasion the issue is teaching: the world wanted him to be a politician or a miracle-working doctor, but Jesus wanted to speak. As his resurrection body, the church has got to have this same sense of priority in its work: not songs, not healing, not social action first, but teaching. We are to teach insider and outsider alike. Now the internet is a great place to teach. It is after all, primarily a place where people go for information rather than entertainment. So what's wrong with what's on the internet.?

 Most Christian content on the WWW is advertisement for material - churches and ministers who want you to buy Christian teaching. What God gave them for free they want to make money out of. And you try finding good expositions of any passage in the Bible. In all the time I've tried I just can't find any - they don't appear to exist. The Seventh Day Adventists make a good shot at it and so do some Roman Catholic sites, but Christian sites dealing in the truth alone, no ! You'll find plenty of people involved in that old non-issue, science versus creationism. You'll find churches announcing their existence, including some UK Baptist congregations. You'll find lots of Toronto-style charismatic content, lots of one denomination having a go at another, and atheists having a go at us all. But you won't find any teaching. Buy the book (and make me richer) is the only message you get.

 So what do we do about this? It's easy to say, "foul!" but much harder to put things to rights. Well, a number of us in the church have internet providers who offer free space to set up your own web sites. Bunyan as yet has no web site of its own. Why don't we do what nobody else is doing?