Tech for Transformation
Rimes McElveen
Most technology trains us to measure ourselves against something.
Against other people. Against productivity. Against popularity. Against efficiency. Against influence. Against the impossible standards of whatever curated version of life happens to be flooding our feeds that day. Even wellness technology often quietly operates this way. Optimize yourself. Improve yourself. Track yourself. Perform yourself.
But Christian formation has never primarily been about comparison. It has been about alignment.
That distinction sits near the heart of Plumbline, an app I am developing with Christian young adults in mind.
The image itself comes from an ancient construction tool. A plumb line is nothing more than a string and a weight, and for millennia, builders have used it to determine whether something was true, straight, and trustworthy enough to last. Before levels and laser instruments, builders would hang a weight on a line and allow gravity to reveal what was actually aligned and what was not. It is a simple tool, but an essential one. Structures depend upon it. A foundation footing or a wall slightly off at the beginning could compromise everything built upon it afterward. The plumb line was not a tool for decoration or performance. It was a tool for alignment, helping builders construct something sturdy enough to endure over time.
One place this ancient technology appears in Scripture is in the book of Amos, where the prophet describes a vision of the Lord standing beside a wall with a plumb line in hand. In the vision, God is not simply inspecting for perfection or measuring performance. The plumb line serves a symbol of alignment, integrity, and faithfulness. This prescient imagery is echoed in the New Testament as a means of understanding God dwelling among God’s people in Christ, and later, the Holy Spirit. The metaphor matters spiritually because it reframes the spiritual life away from comparison with others and towards alignment with the life, love, and way of Jesus.
The Christian life is not ultimately about constructing an idealized version of ourselves. It is about aligning ourselves with the life of Christ and the movement of the Spirit within us and around us.
That is a very different posture.
It is why the mechanics of Plumbline matter as much as the philosophy or theology behind it.
What strikes me most about the app is that it is not infuse users with more content, easy answers, or three-part solutions to life’s difficult questions. It simply supports rhythms of attentiveness to one’s life and to God’s presence along the way. The structure itself gently redirects users away from the fragmentation of modern life by slowing them down long enough to notice what is happening within them and around them in concert with God’s movement in the world.
The app centers three daily invitations to pray and reflect.
The first is to Awaken, which engages the daily Gospel reading from the Revised Common Lectionary. Rather than treating scripture as disconnected inspirational content, for a spiritually pithy dopamine dose, it roots users inside the shared rhythm of the Christian calendar. Users are not reading and praying alone. They are joining Christians around the world who are moving through the life of Jesus together across seasons, weeks, and holy days, year-round.
The second rhythm, Sustain, engages the Psalms in the middle of your day. There is something reassuring about returning to the Psalter amidst ordinary life. The Psalms subvert superficial spirituality. They make room for grief, joy, confusion, anger, hope, exhaustion, praise, lament, and longing. They connect us with our neighbors almost instantly. The Psalms also connect us with the essence of the human experience as we hear the echoes of struggle and flourishing, fear and triumph, verse after verse. They remind us to bring our actual lives before God instead of a curated versions of ourselves.
In the evening, users are invited to Reflect. A process rooted in the Ignatian Prayer of Examen. They pay attention to moments where they sensed God’s nearness or absence. Their own brokenness and gratitude. Seek grace, and anticipate God’s direction for the day ahead. Then they capture those reflections in the simple architecture of the space provided within the app.
None of these practices are new. They are ancient spiritual tools and technologies if you will that millions of people who have aligned their lives with Jesus have trusted to help them discern The Way. That is the point. How can we lean into the wisdom and witness of the past to discern God’s presence in our lives today, and tomorrow, and the next day?
Plumbline is not trying to invent a new spirituality. It is attempting to recover ancient Christian practices of reflection inside a world increasingly hostile towards reflection and the intentional life. What makes the app especially interesting within the larger Phygital conversation is that it does not reject technology. It redirects it. It appropriates it for human flourishing and nurturing the emergence of the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.
Most digital spaces are designed to fracture attention. Plumbline instead attempts to cultivate attentiveness. That is a fundamentally different vision for technology.
Perhaps nowhere is that clearer than in the “Let Your Life Speak” feature.
Over time, the user captures their reflections, prayers, dreams, hopes, and self understanding. These reflections become their own journal of spiritual maturation in their own language and idiom. After weeks or months or even years, users can click the Let Your Life Speak button at the center and their reflections for a certain period of time are distilled into a word cloud. An artfully cast image of their collected reflections keyed to high-frequency words or themes. The effect is subtle but powerful. Users begin to see patterns in their own lives reflected back to them. What themes keep surfacing? What fears? What hopes? What griefs? What celebrations? What desires? What prayers? What joys?
It is not AI predicting their language. It is a representation of their actual life experience reflected back to them in support of their growing self-understanding and life-inspired discernment. It captures the user’s own language and behavior. It is truly a reflection of what is real and not a prediction or projection of what could be.
That is important because so much of modern life conditions us to listen outwardly before we ever listen inwardly. We are expected to absorb everybody else’s expectations before we ever pause long enough to notice the deeper currents shaping our own souls and discern a life of meaning and significance from within.
The Quaker phrase behind the feature, “Let your life speak,” captures this beautifully. The question is not simply whether your life appears meaningful from the outside or signals virtue to others. The deeper question is whether you are listening closely enough to hear The Truth your own life is already speaking, your True Self, given from Above, artfully and wonderfully made, when you were knit together in your mother’s womb. Most likely, it is already telling you who and whose you are, and what you’re meant to do.
That kind of reflection and soul-level listening is increasingly rare. But it remains one of the most necessary spiritual practices for our flourishing in this present age.