 Let's pray. Gracious God, Almighty Father in heaven, as we come to you in the name of Jesus tonight, I pray that you would bless this dear brother, and soon the panelists will come up. And I pray, Heavenly Father, that you would just energize, synergize, that you would work in a very mighty way as this discussion is engaged and some teaching is given, some practical lessons are shared for us tonight. Would you bless Brother Kyle and bless all of these panelists for your glory? In Jesus' name I pray. Amen. Amen. I'll bless you. I bring you greetings from the thriving, tiny little town of Guy's Mills, Pennsylvania. I live there with my wife, my three children, and split my time right now between my work at Faith Builders Educational Programs and my studies in Church History and Theology. A little bit on my background in technology, I've got a degree in computer science in 2005 and spent four years exercising that degree as a network administrator following my graduation. And after those four years, I moved from administrator to user, and I'm now using computers to direct the communications efforts at Faith Builders Educational Programs. So I use computers a lot, I use them as a tool, and I'd like to think that I've gained a little bit of experience on how to use them well, and sometimes I've even experienced how not to use them well. So we aim for this panel to give you some practical advice. We aim to at least introduce ways of discipling your thinking, ways of discipling the way you use technology. And before the four panelists come up here and join me and we interact as we present positions, before we do that, I want to direct our thoughts and direct our minds a little bit by using just one word and a phrase, by talking about those for a little bit. My aim here is to stimulate our thinking and by no means to conclude it, because we're not going to exhaust this topic in one panel discussion. The word is this, revolution. The French Revolution, first, was a roughly 10-year period in France that changed you up forever. Land was freed and old systems of feudalism were dismantled. The king was unseated and the citizens claimed their voice. There's changes of government, there's changes of authority. The Catholic Church was driven out. There was mass killings of clergy, looting, auctioning of church property. There was changes of religious life, and again, you see that change of authority coming in. You could say that royal and Catholic heads were both rolling. There was old ways of thinking, there was old ways of life, business, religion, and living that were being pulled out, pulled out by the roots, and they were torn down to make new ways for new ones. Briefly, revolutions are unsettling times. Revolutions are chaotic, revolutions are disruptive, revolutions are uncertain. You don't know what's going to happen when you're in the middle of a revolution. Now today, we're living in a second or a different kind of revolution, or maybe it's not so different. This is the digital or the information revolution, and like Gary's told us earlier today, that the pace of this revolution is staggering. The pace at which change is happening and the advances in technology that are overtaking us are nothing short of staggering. We've witnessed many movements in our time. We've witnessed the movement in economy, the rise of technology giants like IBM, Amazon, Alphabet, or Google, or Apple, which just became the world's first company with a value of $1 trillion. We've moved from the assembly line to the screen, where most Americans now spend the bulk of their working days, and outside of their working days too. We've moved from the landline to the cell phone, and then we started reaching and reaching and reaching once again for first one smartphone, and then another one, and then another one, and now that we've got a smartphone, we keep on reaching for them. It just began in 2007 with the first iPhone, and now today, 11 years later, 2.53 billion people in the world have a smartphone. We've witnessed great achievements in health care, sciences, agriculture, communication, and manufacturing. Some have taken on the mission to themselves of seeing some of these benefits as they see them, and providing access to them globally, right? So you have global access to the internet as becoming some people's life mission. Some people are elated with these advances. The profits of post-humanism anticipate the merging of man and machine into something new, a God-like being, always on, always connected, and supremely aware. Yet, on the other side of this, there's rumors afloat. There's rumors of digital dementia, the severing of calls from effect, distraction, addiction, teenage depression, adult negligence, and derailed childhood. We've forgotten our bodies. We've cut ourselves off from the people that are immediately around us. We've lost our literacy. We've fed our craving for approval, and we've become more comfortable nursing our secret vices. We are hyper-connected and paradoxically lonely. We have unimaginable volumes of information at our fingertips, and we're strangely confused. Some are greatly concerned. So maybe all I mean to say is this. The information revolution, just like other revolutions, has brought chaos, uncertainty, and disruption. Old ways of thinking and living are being torn out, and new ways of thinking and living are being put in. A thought-provoking article in the National Geographic summarizes our situation pretty well, where the author writes, we may not know yet where we're going, but we've already left where we've been. So this time, metaphorical heads are rolling, just trying to make sense of it all. That's the word, revolution, now the phrase, brooding potential. So let's back up. Let's back way, way, way up. Let's back up to the very first things. Let's go all the way back to what you could see as another time of confusion and potential to put ourselves into a bit of context. Let's go back to Genesis 1, and I'm going to be using one way that some early church fathers interpreted Genesis 1, and we're going to lay that aside how we think about our own revolutionary time. As some of these church fathers saw it in Genesis 1, God created a cosmic wasteland. The earth was without form. It was created. It was created by its word. It was created, though, without form and void. There was formlessness. There was voidness in the Hebrew tohu wabahu. There was raw material, confusion, chaos, or in the presence of God, possibilities. The spirit of God moves or hovers over the face of the turbulence, and God draws creation to order. Where there was formlessness, there is distinction. Where there was voidness, there is green hillsides. There's teaming seas, jostling cattle, there's man, there's woman. And where we see this pattern, we see God's glory. Where you see this movement from this order to the order, from chaos to meaning, from randomness to confidence, barrenness to life, you've seen God's glory. You have to catapult forward then through the glory of Abraham's faith, his obedience, the glory of deliverance from Egypt and the glory of the law, the glory of entrance into the Promised Land entrance anyway. And all of this anticipates the glory of Jesus and his birth, his life, his actions, his teaching, his death, his resurrection. We have seen his glory. The knowledge of the glory of God is in the face of Jesus Christ. So there's a sense in which as you move along the way of the scriptural story, you see God continually creating his creation. He's continually changing the potential of uncertainty and ambiguity and meaning, confidence in life. This pattern over and over and over again. So we can as we encounter technology, the fear of revolution and its uncertainty, we can recoil into fear, we can lapse into paralysis, or we can trace and enter the arc of God's continual creation, discerning, embracing, rejecting. And perhaps the spirit broods over our little information revolution too. And where we see chaos, confusion and uncertainty, he sees potential for order, meaning, confidence and life. Please stand for a moment and let's pray. Father, we are your creatures. You have made us with your hands. You have made us for your glory. Inflame our hearts with your love. Refine our thinking. Strengthen our bodies for the purpose of your glory. Amen. Please be seated. I'd invite the panelists, all four of you, please come up. I'll offer just a few words of introduction to the panelists here and then they'll be taking five minutes each to present a position and then there'll be interaction and following that will actually address the questions that you all have. So very briefly, Gary, you've been introduced already. You've traveled far. His travel has exposed him to a lot of hand-wringing on issues of technology and he's working on a book on the topic. Chris Blake, welcome. Chris is from Hartville, Ohio. The way he said this, he thinks that the Anabaptist Church is about 40 years away from mainstream culture, trailing it, whereas maybe the evangelicals are something like 20 years behind. Harry Argo, we've heard him talk already. Harry is convinced that the media-saturated world we live in affects us. And the question you hear him asking is, well, what are we going to do about that? Kevin? Shane? Kevin is from Lancaster, Pennsylvania. He became a computer fanatic, self-described at a very young age and he's seen the full spectrum of technology, its benefits, and its detriments and so that's caused him to think a lot about it. The panelists, please present your positions in the order you are up here and then following that we'll have some moderated discussion. I think all of us here this evening understand that our spiritual lives and our congregations are being challenged by technology. And tonight I'm going to argue for the need of personal, face-to-face accountability. We talk a lot about filters, a lot about accountability programs. Basically what we're trying to do is use machines to control machines. I'm not opposed to that in a thriving community. My concern is this, that machines alone will not do the job. You know, this thing of accountability, it's not as easy as it first appears. It's easy to talk about the need for face-to-face accountability, but I personally believe that we should have relationships with others that are strong enough that they can tell by our accountants where we are spiritually. Now, you know, it's one thing to talk about accountability. It's another thing to be asked hard questions at certain times in our lives. I think there are, every one of us, there are certain times in our lives we're hoping that certain questions don't come. That's just where we're at as humans. But it means wanting holiness in our lives, in our personal lives, desperately enough that we're willing to take that. We're willing to listen to the admonishment and challenge of others. I want to just mention this regarding pornography. There are many young men that have struggled with pornography, and I've talked to some who long for accountability. When someone confesses pornography, the battle isn't finished. It's actually just beginning, and they need someone to walk with them ongoing, probably the rest of their lives. Pornography does something to our minds that's serious. It traces something there that you're going to need spiritual help and someone walking with you. Our churches today, I feel like, are doing a very poor job of walking with people, especially in our Anabaptist settings. So how do we implement accountability? I think local brothers meetings can be effective if it's not too large of a group, but I want to propose that it's even better, and maybe including this, to have one person at least that is open at any time to ask you difficult questions that you're vulnerable before that person. So groups can be helpful in a larger congregation, two to five people. I think it has to be regular, it has to be planned, it has to be something that you know is going to happen. Why do we neglect accountability? I'll say this too. I think it's good to have a list of questions. I think it's helpful to make out your own questions. Each of us are tempted in different areas, not just the internet. There's other areas as well where we need accountability in. Why do we neglect it? One of those reasons is simply fear. It's just simply raw fear. We need to have a desire for holding us greater than that fear. Sometimes though we come from settings where accountability has been twisted or misused, I think that's a possibility in our lives where maybe someone used it in a way that was not with love. But I want to go back just before I sit down and say this. There's tremendous blessing. And you'll see it in the second chapter, in the fourth chapter of Acts, of a community that was pulled together in love. They were open to each other. They put everything they had on the line. They were willing to ask each other difficult questions. They were together geographically. They were together in vision and purpose. They were willing to put their entire lives before the others. Briefly, I'm asking for this. I think our brotherhoods need to think very seriously about learning to communicate at a deeper level. Good evening, everyone. My name is Chris Blake, as Colin mentioned before. A bit more context about me. I've been developing software for 10 years or so. I work for a small international Israeli company called Tufan. We work in network security. I want you guys here to consider a story. And I apologize if you've heard me tell this before. But suppose an alien that had minimal contact with humans came, and they came to this Kingdom Fellowship weekend. And they saw people who were very well-intended and very well-meaning to live out a guide glorifying lifestyle. And they heard for the Harry talk, for the Harry talk, and they heard all of these discussions. And they don't really know what our technology is, but they hear phrases such as, this is something akin to cigarettes. This is something akin to a Trojan horse. We talk about these things and these ways that, yeah, we all know technology is bad. We all know there's dangers. We all know there's this. We all know there's that. And so these aliens, they come. They spectate us. They hear us talk about this technology thing. And then they figure to themselves, well, smoking gives you cancer, Trojan horse. Every man, woman, and child was killed. Technology, from the way that these people are talking, we should be done with this. We should never use anything like this. And then they see us all leaving tomorrow. They see us turn on our GPS's. They see us taking selfies by the lakes. They see us Snapchatting or WhatsApping our friends. And there's a dissonance that they face. They're asking themselves, these things give you cancer. We've heard the conversations. Everyone is talking. These things are so bad, yet everyone here has this just weapon. Everyone is giving themselves cancer. What's up with this disconnect? And so I think that there is a little bit of a disconnect. I think that we come here with our preconceived notions, ideas, and opinions. We hear things we kind of already know. We pay almost a lip service to it, and we leave exactly the same. So I think that we need to talk about this giant underbelly of things that everyone's already thinking about, everyone's already doing. I was speaking with someone, and she mentioned that it's here, this technology beast is here to stay, and it's in the room. And yes, we know it's bad. Yes, we know it's wrong, but we're all still using it. Now, a sound position is to just completely throw it out. And if there's some here that do that, that's a sound position. But for the rest of us, I think we all have these questions and these desires, especially people in who would consider themselves youth in my age group. And we have these deeper thoughts and these deeper questions, and we don't really know what to do, because yes, we come and we pay the lip service, but we want and need something deeper. I think there's a bit something more than rules. I think that instead of just being a pendulum swinging back and forth, just reacting to reacting to reacting, I think that we need to stand on principles, because after the cell phone, there'll be virtual reality. And after virtual reality, it will be augmented reality. And after that, your brain will just be uploaded to some computer somewhere. So if you make rules here and today, the last, but maybe for only the next five years, I think we need principles. And one principle that I use when I'm discerning what is good or bad technology usage is I call it the principle of production versus consumption. What am I doing with this technology? What is my intent for using this technology? Am I just consuming content? Or am I consuming with the intent to produce? Or is this something that is directly producing? So I'll give a quick example of that. I could go home, I could watch three hours of Netflix, and that would be three hours used for consumption. Now, consumption is not an inherent evil, but in excess it is. As an alternative, I could have used that three hours. I'm not a carpenter, but I'm interested in carpentry. So I could have used that three hours or even two or one hours and looked up a video on woodworking, basic woodworking, DIY. So as a result of that, there's a clear delineation of what I can do with my time. And so it places the emphasis on us and what sort of person we want to be instead of, is this technology good? Is this technology bad? Who do we want to be at the end of the day and how we get there? It's not necessarily consuming a mindless amount of technology, but it's not playing board games all the time either. So I think there's a healthy medium. And as I've expressed before, I think we need to stand on these principles and we need to open up and have these discussions that we're all thinking of. I'm Harry Argo, and my interest in technology as I did it as a profession, information technology, simulation development for the military, and also did youth work and was interested in the impact that media has been on both youth work and on evangelism and missions work. So develop some theories and speak on it quite often. My thought for tonight is this question of change again. Socrates, one of the first great, some people call him really the first philosopher, he wasn't the first actually, but he had an interesting argument. Socrates was against writing. The Greek alphabet had just come into existence, where really the beginning of the oral era, I'm sorry, the end of the oral era and the beginning of the written era, where cultures now were changed by this ability to write down information, which most cultures, it was very difficult, the scribes did it, but with the Greek alphabet, writing became democratized, meaning you just learned 26 characters, you learned to write, but he argued against it. One of his main arguments was that if we can just look in a book somewhere or something is written, we won't remember, we won't commit things to memory, we'll lose our heritage, we'll forget who we are. As a Greek people, it will change us. We had the written era, which I spoke of, he entered, we had philosophy explodes into existence. Sciences explode as this writing is able to capture information and teaching changes. The world really changed. From then we moved into another era, well many sub eras, and that was the print era. That's where the Gutenberg printing press made reproducibility really infinite in a sense, that books were being churned out, people became readers. Culture changed, we actually moved into the modern era of logic and even our theology was very systematized because of writing, the world changed again, leading to the industrial revolution and so on. And as communications scholars talk about now, we're moving into a new era because of media technology. We're moving into what's called a secondary orality because people now tend to watch, instead of being deep readers, spending hours reading and thinking deep about concepts, we now think at a shallow level, text level. We're now impressionistic as opposed to logical, we're really moving, it's not the same orality as the pre-print reality, we're in a different reality, a different orality. And my issue I bring up, similar to that of Socrates, is what are we able to remember now? Because the computer technology does all the remembering for us, sometimes we don't even know our own phone number. Growing up, we used to know 10 or 12 phone numbers. We don't know even our own, but that's a small issue. The second is, what's happening to our thinking? Are we becoming a shallow thinkers? Because we're dwelling now at a shallow Facebook, text, social media realm. And the third change is communication. Since we are now more passive receivers of technical communication, instead of well-developed oral communicators to our people around us, our neighbor, our friends, what is this doing to us? And along those lines, since we are now depending more and more within the church, depending more and more technology to do our work for us, are we going to spiritually atrophy? Are we thinking now we can win the world to Christ through the internet? We can spread the gospel out there and with the clicks on a keyboard that I can send it around the world and people will all come into the kingdom and be disciples. And are we gonna forget that no, the work of the discipleship, it's hard work. It's troubling at times, it's time-intensive, it's a commitment to another person to meet the commitment of bringing them up in the faith. Are we gonna atrophy? Are we gonna even forget the concept of disciple-making? That's the concern I bring up, even with all the goodness that the internet brings us, which I haven't, I don't wanna tell you that I'm a lewdite that I wanna attack media. I want us to question what is happening to us as we use it. So that's what I ask in synopsis, what are we losing within ourselves as we are gaining other things through the internet? Thank you. So ever since the Renaissance, especially, men have been seeking for a comprehensive answer to the solution to all the world's problems. And by this point in time, most philosophers, I believe, would admit that they have failed. Secular humanistic philosophy has failed to provide any kind of comprehensive, unified solution to all of the world's problems. So what does that mean? Does that mean that we're now ready to embrace Christ? Does it mean that we're ready to submit to the Father and actually come back to where we need to be? Unfortunately, the answer in a broad scope in the world scene is no, we're not any more willing to come back to the source of life than we ever were to begin with. Rather, we like, even if we can't prove that the world is getting better, even if we can't prove that we have an answer to all the world's problems, we like to nurture a sense that we actually are. And so to illustrate this tonight, I would like to unveil an image for you. And this image I am going to call the lady progress. The lady progress. So we see here, and I'll flash it quickly to the panelists behind me so they can engage with this. This is a combination of the Statue of Liberty as well as perhaps something of maybe Lady Justice since she is blindfolded. You see here, she's holding out devices. And I believe that our devices are something of the forefront of the feeling of progress that people are feeding on in these days. It's not actually any kind of solution to the core problems that we have as humanity. However, it's something of an alibi. It makes us think that we're getting somewhere because hey, the new iPhone just came out and it can take way better pictures and it can take 4K video and it can tell you the next date of an asteroid attack or something like that. Anyhow, so this is the lady progress. The problem is that there's a sinister side to all of this progress because for every attempt that man has made to make the world better, they found themselves and their efforts thwarted by sin. See, resource hoarding, oppressive regimes, slavery, illicit abuse and misuse, these things never go away. And in fact, they're only becoming more and more potent as we give ourselves more and more capacities and potentials through these devices that we're making. And even for those of us who are trying to use technology in good ways and effectively as tools for a good cause, we find that for some of us, it feels like these very things that were intended to make life better and easier are actually making life a bit more hectic and a bit more difficult. Sometimes these inventions that were intended to actually make life more succinct, we find that we feel like we're competed with them. We're struggling to keep up with all the revolution that's been described. So I would like to give you a few pointers of how I believe we can confront this ideology and use technology effectively. So first of all, I would like to introduce to you a tool, a new invention that I have that I've brought along tonight. This invention looks like a normal vice grip, but the reality is it's not. It's embedded with all sorts of little nerve reactors here that give you the sensation of biting into a Snickers bar every time you close these handles. And furthermore, the tighter you make it, the better it gets. Okay, who wants to take this home with you? I think you would be crazy. Nobody wants a vice grip like this and I don't think anybody in the right mind would and why not? The reason is because a vice grip is a very clear illustration of a tool. It's intended to get a job done. A vice grip gives you the feeling of pleasure through the work it accomplishes, but that's the difference between a vice grip and a smartphone. This gives you pleasure through the work it accomplishes. This gives you pleasure through accompaniment. Okay, so how do we bring this into perspective? That's it? I'm at five, okay. Very quick points here. I think we should treat technology as guilty until proven innocent. The reason why is because all of life should be driving towards a particular purpose. That purpose is to love God and love your neighbor. Another way to say this I think is to be reconciled to God and to be agents of reconciliation. So we should run all of our technologies through the living sacrifice acid test. Is this helping us be living sacrifices? Number two, do not use technology to combat technology. Okay, there's no replacement, and we talked about this for deep intentional relationships. Cultivate them, utilize them. My heart was broken when I heard recently of a well-respected minister who fell into the vice of pornography because he was experimenting with internet filtering technology. This is a tragedy and it's an example of us attacking the problem in the wrong way. Number three, keep technology on the margins. It shouldn't be the core. If you're gonna use it as a tool, use it as a tool and lay it aside. In our house we use a cell phone table. You can use a cell phone basket. Keep the smartphone where it belongs. Not always within reach. Number three, stay in control. Take control of every device. Imagine yourself like you're driving a rototiller. That rototiller is gonna wanna leap out of your hands and go flying across the yard if you don't firmly keep your hands on the handle. So take this device or this technology or whatever it is and treat it in the same way. Don't let it get away. Take ownership of it. If you want more advice about how to use internet tools and take control of them, I suggest the good resource integrityonline.org. It's a great collection. Learn to say no, okay? Technology is surrounding us with all sorts of opportunities to satisfy our appetites. It's like we're living in a house that is kitchen the whole way and it's always producing our favorite foods. That's gonna show up on your gut after a while. If you give into that and we have a media gut as well. And lastly, I would like to say budget your time and your splurges. At our house we have sugar day on Saturday. We have a great pancake feast to celebrate being together as a family for the whole day and it's a wonderful time of celebration. We try not to eat a lot of sugar otherwise. And accordingly, in a similar way, I have news day on Monday. Now, here's the solution. We've all been talking about this weekend and that is the suffering church, the kingdom of God. This is the answer to the world's problems.