“Put that time-wasting machine away.” – Grammy Pratt
That’s what my wife’s grandmother used to call cell phones and screens: time-wasting machines. She meant it. Anytime a phone appeared at the dinner table, she’d point it out and tell us to put it away. And honestly, a lot of the time, she was right.
But I find myself asking: is she always right?
When it comes to technology, especially in ministry, the bigger question for me is: Can these “machines” ever be more than distractions? Could they become vehicles for the kind of healing we are actually longing for?
My Vocation as a Pastor
At my core, I’m a local church pastor.
My days are filled with the ordinary and extraordinary work of shepherding a community: preparing sermons, visiting member on their back porch, praying with families in hospital rooms or in my office, leading Bible study, showing up in our city, meeting people for coffee, sitting with folks in their grief, and celebrating their joys.
The local church saved my life. When I was a child growing up in a home marked by struggle and addiction, it was the people in a neighborhood United Methodist church who chose to love me. They welcomed me as a brown and talkative kid. They gave me belonging when I didn’t have it anywhere else. That community became the place where I discovered what it meant to be loved, and it has marked me ever since.
So now, as a pastor, my deepest desire is to create that kind of belonging for others. I want the church to be a place where people know they are loved by God and by one another — where healing isn’t an idea but a lived experience.
That’s why technology is such a complicated subject for me. If it’s going to have a place in my ministry, it must serve this mission of love and belonging. It has to matter here, on the ground, in Harrisburg, PA, in the life of a local congregation, among real people with real wounds.
My Relationship with Technology
I’ll admit: I’m not the most digitally engaged person. I use email. I post church updates to social media. And then I close my laptop. At home, our family tries to take a minimalist approach. My four-year-old doesn’t have access to devices. We watch movies together, but we don’t let screens babysit.
For me, technology has mostly been a tool for efficiency. AI helps me rework awkward sermon transitions and cleans up my emails. These are helpful, but they’re not transformative. They don’t touch my soul.
And yet — I can’t shake the thought that maybe there’s more. Maybe technology could be used for healing. Some of my colleagues in the Phygital Fellows are experimenting with this: curating digital spaces where people pray, grieve, and find hope together. Watching them gives me a sense of possibility, even if I don’t yet know how it could work in my own context.
So, I find myself somewhere between Grammy Pratt’s skepticism and my colleagues’ bold experiments — asking questions, holding curiosity, and wondering where God might already be at work in the digital space.
The Questions I Can’t Stop Asking
Here are some of the questions I carry. They aren’t meant to close the conversation. They’re meant to open it. They’re the kinds of questions I hope the church keeps asking as we discern the future of ministry and technology together:
Could AI ever be used in a way that deepens my pastoral vocation, rather than just making me work faster and harder?
How do I know when AI’s help with sermon prep crosses the line into using other people’s thoughts rather than mine? How wrong is that?
Is there a way for technology to foster soul-level healing — not just productivity or reach?
What would it look like for a digital tool to be designed specifically for prayer, lament, or reconciliation?
How do we hold onto the beauty of embodied, incarnational, face-to-face community while using digital tools together?
What does it mean to love my literal neighbor in a world that keeps pulling me toward digital ones? Can we love our literal neighbors with technology?
Could the next generation, already anxious from constant screen time, discover new forms of peace through technology instead of more stress and comparison?
How do we discern when technology has caused enough harm to say, “This tool has no place in the church”?
What practices could help pastors inhabit digital spaces faithfully without being consumed by them?
Is there a way for technology to redeem our attention instead of fragmenting it?
If salvation really does mean healing, could technology ever participate in the healing of the cosmos?
These are not questions of dismissal. They are questions of hope. They come from a deep love for the church and a desire to see people experience soul-level healing. Because Grammy Pratt was right?
Sometimes
There’s no doubt technology wastes our time. But it is as simple as she meant it and incomprehensibly more complicated.
As a pastor, I don’t want technology just to make me more efficient. I know it can carry the love and healing of Christ into people’s lives. Is it for me and my ministry, right now? That’s what I’m still wondering about, and maybe that’s enough.
Because maybe the better question isn’t “Is this a time-wasting machine?” but also “How can this tool be part of God’s healing?
I think it is so valuable to engage the questions of people who are more tech minimalists. Thank you, Kris, for jumping into this group and being a fresh voice and perspective.