San Francisco: Ancient and New Technologies

Jeremy Steele

This post should probably start with a disclaimer. San Francisco is the only place I’ve ever lived where I felt like I truly fit in. I love the area—the brilliant nature, the innovative culture that spills out of Silicon Valley, and the way the weather is almost perfect 360 days a year.

Our trip to the Bay Area leaned heavily into the “-igital” part of the Phygital Fellows program. Between our first gathering and this one, we’d met on Zoom, texted, emailed, and chatted on Slack—sharing our passions, exploring theology in the digital world, and cheering one another on as we launched new ideas and communities.

There’s a popular misconception about Silicon Valley. People think it’s a fast-moving place where ideas turn into products without much thought. That couldn’t be further from what I’ve experienced—or from what we saw on this learning journey.

Our time began with a conversation led by Sue Phillips, who invited us to look backward before we looked forward. She spoke about the “ancient technologies” the church has used for centuries—things like communion, liturgy, song, and silence—all designed to help people connect with God and with one another. These are spiritual tools, she said, refined across generations. And maybe, she suggested, our digital tools are simply the newest expressions of that same human desire to reach for the sacred.

From there, we stepped straight into the modern world of innovation. Tiffani Jones Brown welcomed us to Dropbox, where she spoke about the company’s creative culture and its mission to design technology that helps people collaborate meaningfully. That theme continued later that evening in Oakland, where we shared dinner with King David Walker and members of Embrace Community—a congregation reimagining church life in one of the most diverse, dynamic cities in the country. Between bites of Calabash’s incredible food, we talked about the challenges of building belonging both online and in person.

The next morning, we traded city streets for the quiet beauty of the Presidio, with its windswept cypress trees and views of the Golden Gate. There we met Evan Sharp, co-founder of Pinterest, and Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, who spoke about the spiritual side of creativity—the mysterious moment when inspiration feels like grace, and how designing for connection can itself be an act of love. Later, Dacher Keltner, a psychologist who studies awe, helped us name what had been building all week: that deep sense of wonder that arises when you realize you’re part of something vast and interconnected.

By the final day, that theme of awe had taken root in me. After our closing session, I led an optional trip south to Silicon Valley, where we stopped by the modest garage where Apple began, and the sleek headquarters of both Apple and Google—the modern cathedrals of our digital age. But the moment that will stay with me wasn’t made of glass or code.

It was standing before the Methuselah Tree, an ancient coastal redwood near Skyline Boulevard, estimated to be around 1,800 years old. I stood there thinking about how many generations have passed since it first sprouted—how it has weathered fire, fog, and human history, still alive, still reaching for the light.

In that moment, everything we’d seen came together: the ancient and the new, the physical and the digital, the rooted and the restless.

Standing under that thousand-year canopy, I thought back to Sue’s words about communion and liturgy—technologies of connection that have stood the test of time. The livestream, the podcast, the app—these too can become sacred spaces when they help us touch something real and eternal.

That’s what this trip reminded me of. Beneath every innovation—whether it’s carved in wood, spoken in prayer, or written in code—is the same longing that’s as old as the redwoods: the human desire to reach toward what’s holy.