I love my family, so living 1,000 miles (exactly 1,000 miles according to Google Maps) from them is rough on all of us. Of course, my sister serves with STEP here at ALERT a couple months a year, and other family members show up on occasion (right now, my brother Daniel is attending the Quest program as a student).

I do call home often, but lately I’ve discovered a far better option: video chatting with iChat.

While at work, I can pull this up and talk to my family, share pictures, watch videos together, and have something much closer to a face-to-face talk. Definitely makes the days go by easier.

When I look at the internet and other technology today, I see powerful tools that can be leveraged to deepen relationships. Used carelessly, these tend to proliferate shallow, meaningless friendships. However, today’s social technology provides us with the opportunity to foster conversations and shared experiences on many levels and create meaningful relationships even over large distances.

Discipleship is a function of Christian community—Christ’s followers living together in close relationship. While that once required geographical proximity and functioned in the context of a geographically local church, we now have the opportunity to make disciples and sharpen one another irrespective of physical location.

Regrettably, this opportunity is being wasted. My generation seems more interested in using social technology to virtually throw cats at each other, build up virtual mafia mobs, conquer virtual kingdoms, and in general invest a great deal of time and energy into something that will reap zero eternal reward and zero tangible earthly reward. Rather than focus on what is eternally significant, most of my peers seem intently concentrated on the completely trivial. The antidote to this, in my mind, would be the corrective influence of older Christians who can provide a more balanced perspective on what is important, what is lasting, and what is merely a fad. Unfortunately, many older American Christians have lost their credibility while pursuing the American dream. They lack influence in the digital realm because of their unwillingness to engage in it. Understandably, many older men & women reject the internet and social technology because it is used for so many wasteful purposes. Certainly, there are huge amounts of risk—risks of wasted time, risks of corrupting influence, risks of lost privacy. However, most of these risks exist in any missionary context. When Paul was reaching the city of Corinth, many of these same dangers existed there.

Risk averse Christians are faithless Christians, and without faith it is impossible to please God.

What this older generation needs to do is reach out to younger people. They need to humble themselves and allow “digital natives” to teach them how to use social technology. Younger Christians need to humble themselves and let mature older men and women teach them how to build relationships and use time wisely.

Ultimately, the Church has a phenomenal, unparalleled opportunity to promote the Kingdom through real, tangible relationships freed from geographical limitations by technology. Where the slaves of darkness use it for evil, we can use it to spread light.

John Piper sees two responses to the emerging world of internet interactions:

One says: These media tend to shorten attention spans, weaken discursive reasoning, lure people away from Scripture and prayer, disembody relationships, feed the fires of narcissism, cater to the craving for attention, fill the world with drivel, shrink the soul’s capacity for greatness, and make us second-handers who comment on life when we ought to be living it. So boycott them and write books (not blogs) about the problem.

The other response says: Yes, there is truth in all of that, but instead of boycotting, try to fill these media with as much provocative, reasonable, Bible-saturated, prayerful, relational, Christ-exalting, truth-driven, serious, creative pointers to true greatness as you can.

I, obviously, choose the latter. I yearn for more Christians to be better stewards of the tools available to us.