Lately in our church gatherings when I’ve been reading from the Bible I just pull up the text on my iPhone and read it like that. I never carry a Bible with me these days and don’t use my old blue NIV much at all either. It has served me faithfully for around 25 years, but now even at home I sit with my phone or laptop and use them in preference to the hardcopy.
Its just words – and how you access them doesn’t matter right?
I believe that’s a completely true statement, but this morning in church as two different people read the Bible – one from phone and the other from book I noticed that I felt different.
It felt strange seeing ‘the Bible’ read from a phone, whereas seeing it read from a leather bound book felt ‘right’ and maybe even curiously more authoritative…
What’s with that hey?…
I am guessing its just conditioning. Similar to what someone might experience if they went from spending all of their life meeting in a cathedral to meeting in a family room. But it also served as a reminder that these familiar physical objects, spaces and experiences trigger things in us that may be helpful or unhelpful to what we are trying to achieve.
I imagine we will see more and more Bible being read from phone, iPads and the like, but I imagine it will take a while to ‘adjust the settings’ in our psyche to give it the same legitimacy as hard copy.
Funny creatures aren’t we…
A friend posted this. Similar topic but a much more preacher-centric stance.
http://preachersmith.com/2011/11/26/5-reasons-to-use-your-bound-bible-not-your-smartphone-in-church/
Actually, I have a hypothesis… that things are innately positive, neutral or negative (on a continuum), depending on what action they have when left alone. E.g. plants are positive – to create more negative than positive effects something has to be done to them (cut down and made into weapons, moved to a new continent where they become a weed). I think technology is on the negative side of neutral – one has to invest quite a lot of energy into it to create positive effects, let alone a net positive profit. So I’m a luddite – but look at us, how we have screwed the world through the development of technology. Viva the Industrial Revolution.
If my hypothesis is correct, it might matter how we access words. But I don’t know. And I use google now, not a concordance 🙂