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“Me & The Screen | At Church”
Categories: Me & The Screen, Sunday Family Report articles, wisdom
What are you going to do with your phone today? Especially while you’re here at our assembly?
A year ago, we ran a series of essays about Christians and smart-phones. Here, I’d like to just offer a little wisdom about how those devices should and shouldn’t be present in our church assemblies.
Basically, it comes down to this: When you’re here for worship, be here to worship. Keep your focus on the things of God—his nature, his word, his blessings, and his people. Let’s leave life’s lesser things to get our lesser attention.
Texting—whether for fun or for work—can almost certainly wait until the service is done. Gaming can wait. Emails, to-do lists, and social media can all wait. Why? Because the things of God are simply so much more important than those.
We should also bear in mind that young hearts are being continuously formed by what they see in the behaviors of older saints around them. So if they see us choosing to be inattentive to the things of God, they learn from that. They learn whether God and his ways matter most to us, or whether those things can simply be ignored.
Obviously, with this writing, I’m not making a ruling that no one should bring a phone to church—there’s a QR code right here that has to be scanned with a phone, and I think there are other things that they’re useful for in this setting. But I do think that we need to be wise with all the ways that we do and don’t use them when we’re in a worship setting. The word, the worship, and the people of God should always come first.
- Dan Lankford, minister
