I heard Andy Crouch speak at the New Room Conference in Montgomery, Alabama, this past week, and I’ve been thinking about his message ever since. Crouch has a way of naming something many of us already know but don’t necessarily want to admit: technology is doing something to our culture and world. Our phones, social media, artificial intelligence, and the constant availability of information and entertainment are shaping the way we think, relate, work, parent, worship, and live.
I think he’s right to sound the alarm. In fact, I probably need to hear some of what he is saying more than I would like to admit. At the same time, as I listened, I found myself wanting to offer some gentle pushback. Not because I think our relationship with technology is healthy, but because I’m not sure withdrawal from technology provides a complete answer.
Maybe that’s partly because I’m a millennial. I remember dial-up internet, landlines, MapQuest directions, and a childhood before smartphones and social media. At the same time, nearly my entire adult life has existed in a digital world. Technology isn’t some strange new thing that recently invaded my life. It has been woven into how my generation works, communicates, learns, creates, maintains relationships, and increasingly practices our faith.
So while I resonate with Crouch’s concerns, I struggle when the Christian response to technology begins to sound primarily like withdrawal. I don’t think the answer to technology is simply less technology. I think the harder (and perhaps more important) work is learning how to put technology in its proper place.
I don’t want my phone running my life, and I have intentionally started putting boundaries around technology because I know myself well enough to realize that willpower isn’t always going to win. I use the Freedom app to block distracting apps and websites during certain parts of my day. Sometimes I physically leave my phone in another room. I’ve turned off unnecessary notifications and try to create spaces where a screen isn’t automatically invited into whatever I’m doing.
There are dozens of ways we can do this. We can charge our phones outside the bedroom, establish phone-free meals, put devices away during conversations, delete apps that consistently consume more of us than they give back, or create specific windows for checking email and social media. We can take a digital Sabbath each week. We can choose a physical Bible or book when a digital version might be more convenient. We can even relearn the increasingly strange art of standing in line, sitting in a waiting room, or drinking a cup of coffee without immediately reaching for something to occupy our attention.
I actually think Crouch’s work is incredibly helpful in pushing us toward practices like these. We need boundaries because technology companies are very good at designing products that make us want to keep using them. Intentional limitations can help us reclaim our attention for the people and things that matter most.
But none of that strikes me as anti-technology. It strikes me as learning to use technology rather than allowing technology to use me.
This is where I found myself wrestling with Crouch’s message. At times, his approach can come across less like asking, How do we faithfully live with technology? and more like asking, How much technology can we remove from our lives? Those are related questions, but I don’t think they are the same question.
Complete (or even near-complete) digital isolation may work for certain people, families, or communities. There may even be seasons when some of us need something close to it. But I have a hard time seeing withdrawal as a compelling long-term vision for the Church in the world we actually inhabit.
Millennials are digital. Gen Z is deeply digital. Gen Alpha is growing up in a world where the distinction between “digital life” and “real life” will probably make increasingly less sense. Artificial intelligence is only accelerating that transformation. We can lament parts of that reality, criticize what deserves criticism, and challenge the ways technology can dehumanize people without pretending the digital world is going to disappear.
More importantly, I don’t think we can disciple people in a world we refuse to enter.
If the Church’s primary message about technology becomes “put it away,” I’m afraid it will increasingly fall flat. That isn’t because younger generations are incapable of recognizing technology’s problems. Many of us are painfully aware of the anxiety, comparison, distraction, loneliness, and exhaustion that can accompany digital life. But technology is also woven into how they communicate, learn, create, work, build relationships, and understand the world.
The more interesting Christian question, at least to me, is not simply how we use technology less. It is how we use the tools of our age without allowing the tools of our age to use us.
Christianity has never primarily been a religion of escape. Jesus prayed for His disciples, “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” There is something about that prayer that feels increasingly relevant to our digital lives. The goal isn’t necessarily removal from the world around us. The goal is learning how to live faithfully within it.
That means I think Christians should be present where people are actually gathering. If conversations are happening on social media, we should probably be part of them. If AI is reshaping education, business, communication, creativity, and nearly every industry, Christians should probably be helping shape how it is used. If younger generations are asking spiritual questions through YouTube, TikTok, podcasts, Reddit, ChatGPT, and whatever comes next, the Church cannot afford to retreat into increasingly analog spaces and wonder why nobody followed us there.
The Church has navigated technological shifts before. The early Church benefited from Roman roads and systems of communication. The printing press radically changed the distribution of Scripture and Christian ideas. Later generations eventually embraced radio, television, websites, podcasts, livestreaming, and social media. None of those things are the Gospel, and neither is artificial intelligence. They are tools and, in some cases, roads that allow the Gospel to travel places it otherwise might not.
The challenge is making sure we don’t confuse the road with the destination.
Artificial intelligence makes this conversation even more complicated because there are legitimate concerns that Christians should take seriously. We should talk about truth, human dignity, intellectual laziness, job displacement, deepfakes, privacy, bias, creativity, and what happens when we outsource too much of our thinking to machines. Christians should be among the people asking the hardest questions about what these technologies are doing to human beings.
But skepticism doesn’t have to become rejection. AI can help people learn, translate languages, make information more accessible, and help small organizations accomplish things that previously required enormous resources and time. It can assist people with disabilities. It can help pastors organize information, brainstorm ideas, communicate more clearly, and spend less time on administrative work. There are undoubtedly possibilities we haven’t even imagined yet.
I’m particularly fascinated by what this means for evangelism and discipleship. Someone who would never walk through the doors of a church may still ask an AI a question about God, Christianity, Scripture, suffering, prayer, or Jesus at two o’clock in the morning. They may search YouTube for a sermon before ever attending one. They may encounter a Christian through a podcast long before they meet a pastor. They may watch a thirty-second video that causes them to ask a spiritual question they have avoided for years.
I want Christians to be present in that world.
I’m therefore less interested in whether Christians can avoid AI and more interested in whether Christians can model what wise, ethical, distinctly human use of AI looks like. What does it look like to use these tools while maintaining our creativity, relationships, critical thinking, spiritual practices, and humanity? That seems like a conversation worth having.
Perhaps this is where I land a little differently from Crouch. I don’t want technology to be my master, but I also don’t want fear of technology to determine how I interact with the world. Both extremes can control us in different ways. One tells us that we cannot live without technology, while the other can make us believe that faithfulness requires avoiding it.
I think Christian freedom offers another possibility: I can use this without belonging to it.
That requires discipline, and discipline will look different in different moments. Sometimes faithfulness means using Freedom to block an app because I know I will otherwise waste an hour scrolling. Sometimes it means leaving my phone in another room so I can actually be present with the people in front of me. Sometimes it means closing the laptop, taking a walk, reading a physical book, sitting in silence, or allowing myself to be bored.
But sometimes faithfulness might also mean opening the laptop and learning how AI works because this technology is going to shape the people I’m called to serve. Sometimes it means using social media creatively to connect with someone who would never encounter my church otherwise. Sometimes it means recording a podcast, sending a text, joining an online conversation, or experimenting with a technology I don’t completely understand yet.
The important question isn’t simply whether the device is in my hand. The question is whether I am intentionally choosing how to use it or whether it is quietly choosing how I live.
This is ultimately where I think the Church’s conversation about technology needs to go. We don’t need uncritical adoption of every new device, platform, app, or AI tool that arrives. We also don’t need fearful rejection of them. We need formation that produces Christians capable of discerning what is good, what is harmful, what needs boundaries, and what can be redeemed for meaningful purposes.
We need Christians who know how to sit quietly without their phones and Christians who know how to create excellent digital content. We need pastors who can preach without asking AI to do their thinking for them and pastors who understand AI well enough to help their congregations navigate it. We need parents willing to tell their children, “No, you don’t need a screen right now,” while also preparing those same children to become wise, discerning, creative, and responsible digital citizens.
We need churches that create sacred spaces where technology disappears into the background, where people look one another in the eyes, share meals, worship together, pray together, and remember what it means to be embodied human beings. But those same churches should also be willing to enter digital spaces because that is where millions of people spend significant portions of their lives.
I left New Room grateful for Crouch’s challenge. His warnings are worth hearing, and I suspect many of us need to take them more seriously than we currently do. I certainly do. My pushback isn’t that he is wrong about the dangers of technology. It’s that I don’t think the Christian vision for technology can end with using less of it.
The deeper invitation, in my mind, is to become the kind of people who can hold technology with open hands. We can receive what is good, reject what is destructive, establish boundaries where they are needed, and use these extraordinary tools in ways that serve our neighbors and point toward Jesus.
Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha aren’t waiting for the Church in an analog world. They are already living in a digital one. I don’t think our calling is to stand at a distance and shout warnings about everything that is wrong with it. I think our calling is to enter that world wisely, faithfully, and distinctly Christian—without becoming captive to the very technology we’re using to reach it.