The last question to our panel (context) which is the title of this blog post was open-ended in nature. I took it as an opportunity to share two major concerns I have for technology in discipleship. The first one relates to parenting and the use of technology. The second one concerns church data and the use of technology.
I was a family pastor for many years and have always been interested in parenting through different seasons of technology development. Our kids graduated from high school in 2008 and 2010, so their first phones were flip phones. They used them a lot to text their friends, so we had to put boundaries on their access to their phones at night. They were also not allowed to look at them at school.
The convenience of the smart phone along with the attraction of social media in the early to mid-2010s took the challenge of technology for discipleship in families to a completely different level. I've been in small groups with parents as they have tried to navigate the challenges of social media, access to pornography, and much more. They have had to be the pathfinders in an extremely dangerous world.
The good news is that a lot of work is starting to be done by churches and other organizations to equip parents to better understand how to navigate the impact of technology on their kids. But, this trend is still in its infancy. There needs to be a lot more work done in local churches in this area.
I often remind people that we have had the privilege of living through several decades of entrepreneural development of software to solve ministry problems. The result has been a continual proliferation of applications and apps for everything from content to missions to communication.
While I love the initiative and innovation, my concern for a long time has been with the diffusion of data. By that I mean the data we have on people and processes is so spread out across different applications, that it is very difficult to consolidate and use it in a meaningful way beyond basic communication.
For instance, if I want to send a text or email to the parents of kids who registered for Youth Camp and haven't yet paid, it is really important that registrations, payments, household relationships, report capabilities, and communication tools are all aligned. Or, what if I want to see the difference in giving methods and amounts between people who serve on a regular basis compared to those who don't? Or, maybe based on their age and generation?
There have been several approaches to solving this problem. The most popular one is trying to link all data sources together using what's called an API (Application Programming Interface). This is how companies that are acquired are merged together. Modular software systems are built similarly. This makes sense for business purposes, but data is still spread out, and the same data resides in different places.
Our approach has been to build all the functionality in one system. There is only one instance of attributes like birthdays and email addresses instead of many linked together. This makes sense to us, but I think how data is managed across all ministry and discipleship platforms is still very much in flux.
As we look to the future, there are both scenic and ugly possibilities for the use of technology in discipleship. And, the path we choose will determine the destination we reach both as parents and as church leaders.
