church

Standing in the seventh floor of a massive building which houses the controls and operations of a large telephone company, I could not help looking around and snooping into the staggering amount of electronic equipment and looking at the millions of meters of cables running all over the place.
And as I looked a this mammoth operation which is just a portion of the controls required to operate all of the telephones this company handles, I could but reflect on what it involves to live in our society today.
Just over a hundred years ago if we needed to talk to someone we would just go visit him, or in the cases of people separated by great distances, they would write a letter, which would take from days to months to reach the person in the other end depending on his or her location.
Today if I want to see my family I turn on my computer and call them, and in an instant I can speak with any of them and see them. In fact video conversation has become the thing of the day, and many communication companies are already offering the services which allow you to talk to anyone in the other side of the globe through your television set as if you both were sitting in the same room.
I just got me a new cell phone a few days ago, and I got the same unit for my wife, and as we played with them yesterday we realize we can make video calls, so we spent some time calling each other for not particular reason, so we could play with our new toys and see each other while we talked on the phone.
And this is all wonderful, for technology has brought us closer, closer to our families and friends and closer to the world, I have been recently talking to families and friends whom I had not seen for decades, and I manage to minister to several people all over the world on a daily basis thanks to the power of technology. The distance barrier is broken, communication has reached gigantic milestones, and, if the Lord tarries, I still believe it will continue to grow to the point of anyone being able to literally be in the same room on a moment’s notice with someone else sitting across the planet through virtual holographic imagery.
These great advances in technology have affected our thought patterns, our attitudes and our behavior, although we may not realize it in the onset. But how have they affected our identity? And most importantly, how have they affected the kingdom of God? And what price, if any are we paying for all of these advances, what are the consequences?
I remember as a child I used to play telephone with my friends by attaching two cans to a string, at that time it never occurred to me that it would be necessary to equip several large buildings with a gigantic infrastructure and thousands of electronic gadgets, and to spend many billions of dollars in operations, just to talk through a string.
On a large scale, we have built our society around it, and we have become enslaved by the usefulness and convenience of technology, especially communication technology. We have become dependent on technology to such an extent, that we are no longer able to perform if we do not have it around us. Even as we go on vacation, or to a place of relaxation, we carry with us the computer and the cell phone and many other gadgets which hold an invisible string to which we are attached.
These advances have certainly allowed us to accomplish many positive things for the spread of the gospel; we can do today, in one day, what took months and even years to do just a few decades ago.
And many regions which were unreachable just a few years ago are today connected and hearing the word of God through radio or television or many other means which were not available then.
Yet this trend has caused a loss of innocence around the Kingdom of God. The availability of so many resources so quickly, has overwhelmed the world and it has brought the moral standards of man to dangerous levels of decay. This deterioration has slowly and unavoidably affected the brethren. Like a virus the negative influences of this realm of illusion has penetrated the church, and through a constant attack on the will of the individual, especially the young, which is being continuously bombarded by sexual and covetous innuendos it has brought less than desirable changes in the way many Christian gatherings and organizations go about doing what God has called them to do.
We hear it on the radios we see it …