Adam Holz wrote a blog on the Dalai Lama’s Instagram account last week. He included some really cogent thoughts from the Dalai and Pope Francis, both of whom have embraced social media but caution against its overuse.
Now another religious figure—Mark Driscoll of Mars Hill Church in Seattle—is talking about social networking. In fact, he says he’s stepping away from social media for the rest of the year, and perhaps longer.
“The distractions it can cause for my family and our church family are not fruitful or helpful at this time,” he told his congregation in a letter, according to Christianity Today.
It was part of Driscoll’s effort to, as he writes, “reset my life,” a reaction to a string of controversies surrounding he and the church he founded. He declares that his “angry-young-prophet days are over,” and he’s attempting to refocus his attention on Mars Hill.
“I don’t see how I can be both a celebrity and a pastor,” he wrote, “and so I am happy to give up the former so that I can focus on the latter.”
Big decision, that—and incredibly countercultural these days. In an age where many youth believe celebrity is the end goal, here’s a man willing, he says, to give it up.
The decisions he made were, of course, very personal. There are lots of famous Christians out there who don’t feel any celebrity dissonance. There are lots of people who find that social networks actually offer a platform to think and to talk about God.
But Driscoll recognized that something, for him, was out of whack with both of these elements. He analyzed his priorities—the things he really cares about—and culled stuff that didn’t quite fit with them.
We’re in the midst of Lent right now, and probably some of you have given up something: meat or chocolate or, who knows, maybe origami. Typically, we strip away something we enjoy because we know, deep down, that it can get in the way of our relationship with God. So perhaps it’s not too surprising that so many of us have given up some form of tech.
According to a study by the Barna Group, 31% of us have pushed some form of technology away this Lenten season—besting even the abstention of chocolate as this year’s most popular fast. About 16% have committed to giving up their social networks. Another 13% gave up their smartphones. More than one in five gave up video games, and nearly one in 10 (9%) gave up the Internet altogether. (Those people will obviously have to catch up on this blog later.)
This isn’t to say that tech is inherently bad, any more than chocolate is inherently bad. But I think most of us know its pull. We know that how we interact with it can become a habit, even an obsession. And when that happens, our relationships can suffer—particularly are relationship with God. We can forget that He put us here for a reason, and that reason goes beyond sending a clever tweet or hitting level 32 on that game we love so much.
I didn’t give up anything for Lent this year. But perhaps I should’ve. I can’t give up the Internet, of course … I’d be out of a job if I did. But games? Tweets? I think those things can become more of a distraction in my life than an augmentation of it. Perhaps we could all stand to examine what we do with our spare time and think about what might need to be reset.
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