I am an avid online computer user. As a free-lance missionary stationed in a relatively peaceful developing country in the 21st century, I have 64K ADSL piped into my residence over the land line from Uganda Telecom and broadcast wirelessly throughout the house. When I jumped on the MacBook yesterday and didn’t have access, I remembered it was the 6th and our prepaid monthly subscription had once again escaped my watchful eye and needed a recharge asap. I threw my son in the car, made the five minute drive to the service center in town, paid much too much cash to the teller, and immediately the gmail notifier on my wife’s Dell XPS verified we were back in action.
I use Twitter and Facebook to catch up with new and old friends and post updates on our lives in Uganda. I make full screen video calls on Skype (username: earwickers) and regularly keep in touch with hundreds of friends, family, and supporters via online email marketing software. I keep a blog (that you’re now reading), follow about 35 others’ blogs in a feed reader, constantly update a website, and even send international SMS/TXT messages from this handy machine. I have videos on YouTube, use an online music organization software, have five email addresses, four online banking accounts, and four sites I visit monthly to make charitable contributions to ministries our family supports. I download podcasts with iTunes to keep current on the teaching of our local church, and have downloaded a BibleReader onto my BlackBerry to make good use of daily wait times. I chat with missionaries in Romania, New Zealand, Kenya, and the United States via Gmail Chat, and can send my rent payments to my Dutch landlord through Western Union’s website.
These are all wonderful tools that a modern-day missionary family can use to keep from the “out of sight, out of mind” mentality that plagues church/missionary relationships and stymies spiritual, emotional, and financial support, and these implements greatly increase productivity of various projects. But any ministry apparatuses of this nature have the potential to sap time and energy away from the real work of service.
Occasionally when I “stumble” around the web, or read others’ blogs, I find a plethora of babble about how to increase your Twitter followers, enlarge your online presence through daily blog comments, or best practices for Facebook pages and profiles. These advice logs would be fine if relegated to the corporate advertising world or multi-level marketers, but I’m reading sites of Christian ministries and local churches who are spending increasing mass amounts of time in the cyber-world that modern society is rapidly disappearing into. Just yesterday my friend Ejnar described the population of his native Denmark as empty shells, increasingly becoming like the machines they daily bow before. Another fellow missionary reported that the average American young person spends roughly 30 hours per week on the world wide web, not including other media (television, movies, and music). I’m guessing this figure is not any different inside or out of the Kingdom.
What if the Church of the Living God spent just 25% of that time per week in solitary prayer, waiting on the voice of Jesus and simply being with Him? How would our lives be transformed to start each day with an hour in the Secret Place? Is increasing your online presence as valuable as the expansion of His presence in your life, family, ministry, and business? Is making silly comments on friends’ ramblings so important that we miss a daily hour abiding in His unfailing Word? I think we understand the power of prayer, Bible reading, and worship in our busy minds, but our daily time log tells another story altogether. Our priorities have shifted from rising early to seek His face to staying up late to seek friends on facebook. The minutes of contact we might have had to broadcast the everlasting Gospel to passersby are now spent “tweeting” what we are up to (or not up to) at any given time. We eagerly check a roster of regular bloggers to discover the opinions of man, but forget to check with the Holy Spirit for His wonderful counsel and excellent guidance.
Maybe it’s our self-sufficiency that deceives us into putting other gods before Him. Or maybe we are bored of God’s presence after our multiple failures to hear from Him. Whatever the case, we must make a massive movement back to waiting on Him and obedience to His directives.
I’m very blessed to not live in the 1800s where hand-written letters took three months to cross the ocean, and I’m clearly not advocating a boycott of the internet or calling for the destruction of smartphones. But as disciples of Jesus and ambassadors of His Good News, let us have our priorities in order and not make our profusion of ministry tools an end in themselves to the detriment of abiding in Christ.