OPPORTUNITY IN AN ONLINE AGE
BY JONATHAN KRAEMER
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n the spring of 2020, the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 to be a pandemic. As countries locked down, churches scrambled to provide the Word of God for their parishioners in order to sustain their faith in the face of the crisis. Recent technological developments allowed churches to move online quickly with as little as a cell phone and a Facebook or YouTube account. Suddenly, almost overnight, video sharing services and social media were flooded with faithful Lutheran content—from devotions to Bible studies to sermons to whole worship services. The Canadian Lutheran covered the story of that mass adoption of technology in the March/April 2020 article, “LCC Congregations Reach Out: Online Ministry During the COVID-19 Crisis.” While this may have been surprising, history shows that Christians have often made use of the most recent technology to spread and uphold the Word of God. As they have done so, they have had to grapple with the implications of that
technology. The church has had to learn how to capitalize on the benefits of new inventions, while at the same time mitigating their negative aspects.
NEW TECHNOLOGY & THE CHURCH Believe it or not, the book or “codex” (the technical term) is the first real technological innovation Christians made use of in the early years of the church. Before that, the scroll was used to record God’s Word for worship and study. Christians, though, preferred the codex. It had been around for some time, but was used more for private notebooks than for works of literature. Christians used the codex to record the Holy Scriptures for a number of reasons that might seem obvious to us. It was cost effective because it was less expensive than the scroll THE CANADIAN LUTHERAN January/February 2021
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