Digital Day 25

Some quick reflections from CV’s Digital Day 25; it is an event encouraging and challenging the church to think about how technology might be used missionally.

Innovation

There was a big focus on innovation; using the tools that we have to be bold, to take risks, and to use the technology that God has given use to innovate.

Al Gordon kicked us off with this challenge that he reminded us that from the beginning of time to the end of time God is creating something new. God is at work; and that is something that God built into us as image bearers of Him. He challenged us to think that in an age where robots and LLMs will hallucinate, humananity is given the ability to dream. The Spirit gives us direction to do something new, to innovate. How might we move forward in that?

Greenhouse

One of the key ideas that came up again and again in people’s talks, was the importance of taking the time, and making the space to experiment. For example some of the key projects that have come out of Biblica’s technology team has been as a result of the a small, cheap, R&D project to test and validate concepts.

Tyler Prieb described this space as ‘the greenhouse’ when you have space in your system for new ideas to grow, develop, be resourced, supported, etc. It reminded me of the work that we did with Discipleship Tech a couple of years ago at BUILD to reexplore how syncing could work - a quick hackathon project, with a couple of extra weeks worth of work to test and validate if an idea had legs.

Combine Harvester

The closing address was from Tracie Edmiston
who brought a couple of reflections from Jude; one of the ideas that will stick with me was her observations from Joel 3:13:

Swing the sickle for the harvest is ripe

The sickle was the harvesting tool of the day, it was a tool that allowed for a quicker harvest, but it was still a very manual process. Perhaps if the passage was written today it would read ‘Get out the combine harvester because the harvest is ripe’.

The key thing isn’t the technology that is being used for the harvest, its the fact that the harvest is ripe and ready. The technology can create space for a more effective harvest… how might we utilise it for mission?