Technology

G turned 16 today. We had a nice dinner at Olive Garden followed by cake. He also passed his driver's license test today. Scary.

I was surfing this evening and stopped by the UM Reporter Blog. From there I went to this article by Gordon Atkinson. He speaks about his church's first web site, built when no one knew what the internet was.

Back when I was not much older than Grant, I played with my first computer. It was a Radio Shack version, with a dark screen and green letters, I think. I could make it calculate the area of a triangle. Wow.

I took Computer Science in college. Most of it was classroom work. I worked in the computer lab for about 20 minutes during the whole course, and probably finished the semester being able to calculate the area of a triangle. Wow.

During my Master's degree work, I taught biology labs and was forward thinking enough to manage my gradebook using a compute progam. I had to go to the library to have access to a computer, and everything was stored on a big floppy disk. Later, toward the end of my graduate work, I used a computer in the science building to do graphs for my thesis. They were drawn by a plotter that used pens.

And so it went. I worked my way through DOS, monochromatic monitors, AOL, basic windows, and computers with less storage space than my iPod has now.

I sit here with a computer on my lab on which I can watch a movie or do much more complicated procedures than the area of a triangle. Really, I'm not that old. There has been that much change in the last 20 years. Amazing, if you think about it.

I wonder if that is why it is so hard sometimes for the modern church to adapt to technology, especially if there aren't that many young people involved. Change is hard anyway, and it has been speedy over the last few decades. Does it take extra pushes from people who see the advantages of up-to-date web pages and email announcement lists to make things happen? How long will it take for everyone to realize that even older people (not all of them, but at least some of them) have email addresses and search the web? Do we have a responsbility to keep up with technology to reach the limits of evangelism?