What Role Should Technology Play in Missions?

What role should technology play in missions? 

Technology is something that God has graciously given us so that we might speed up some of the work that we presently do. So, if I want to write a paper and get it out to people, I can type it on a computer and I can get it out to the globe relatively quickly. And so, in that way, tech is helpful.

So if I'm a foreign missionary going to the field, technology can be helpful to me in a number of ways. One, it can be great communication or a bridge to my home church so that I can keep up with them and update them on what I'm doing. At the same time, it can be equally problematic in that it can distract me from the task that I'm doing.

Technology can be helpful as I'm doing translation work, as I'm entering a written orthography into a computer, and as I'm trying to translate the Bible into that. I can keep those records much more quickly and easily accessible to me and other missionaries as we work together. So, technology can be helpful in that way.

But technology cannot replace the very difficult face-to-face work of just getting to know people and their culture and their language and communicating with them as friends, as brothers in the Lord. Technology is not a good medium to put between the minister of the gospel and the person being ministered to.

There's really two things I want to get out of the way between myself and a hearer. The first thing I want to get out of the way between myself and a hearer as a minister of the gospel is me. I want to get me out of the way. Whenever I occlude the gospel message by trying to water it down or make the other person like me, I've put myself between the message and the hearer.

And secondly, I want to get any kind of technology that serves as a medium that keeps me at a distance from the hearer out of the way as well. I want to be near to them. I want to speak face-to-face to them. I want them to hear me as one embodied man to another so that they really come to know me and I know them and I'm able to speak clearly to them.