Technology is greatly helping my faith, and here are just a few of the ways, big and small, in no particular order, that we love technology:
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (Mormon/LDS) is big time into genealogy/family history, and you can imagine how computers and the internet have helped that work. We can also share our gospel message online through www.lds.org and www.mormon.org and many individual websites, blogs and YouTube videos.
Mormons who have family members serving missions in distant countries have a much easier time keeping in touch through email. Visiting teachers set up appointments by texting — so much easier than playing phone tag. (What is a visiting teacher? In a nutshell, women in each congregation make monthly visits to each other, to see if there are any needs, to fellowship each other, and to care for each other).
We can easily find copies of talks and articles online rather than searching through the indexes of old magazines. Same thing with church lesson manuals — I teach primary (like Sunday School for kids under 12), and I never touch the bulky lesson manual, I just download and print each week’s lesson from a website. We have all our scriptures online, complete with footnotes, and we can even have them read aloud to us (probably called text to voice, but it sounds like “reading aloud” to me). This is cool for many people, for many reasons, including my 31-year old son who has a disability and doesn’t read well.
Each congregation has a website with a list of members’ addresses and phone numbers, and a calendar of activities — it’s so much easier to look this up online rather than search for the paper phone list. If I’m on vacation and want to attend church, lds.org will show me the location of any LDS meetinghouse in the world. If someone moves, their membership records can be requested by their new congregation with the push of a button rather than weeks of waiting for them to arrive from the previous congregation through the mail.
If I want to donate money to the church Humanitarian Fund, or the Perpetual Education Fund, or the latest building on one of the BYU campuses, I can do that easily online, rather than hand writing a check and addressing and stamping an envelope. If I want to contact my bishop and say “Hey, Bishop, the Artflinger family could use some help because the wife is looking for work and the husband just had a hernia operation,” I can send the bishop an email, which he can read and respond to at his leisure (a little inside joke, as Mormon bishops have no leisure) rather than bother him with a phone call. And speaking of looking for work, the LDS church has a wonderful and effective employment program that makes heavy use of internet resources.
We share information online about food storage and emergency preparedness, about Christmas, Easter, or Independence Day music for the choir, about fun activities for Family Home Evening, about tying knots for Boy Scouts, about first aid for girls camp (and once I had to look up “how to get rid of lice” when girls camp had to be cut short after an unfortunate infestation was discovered in a cabin) and about planning family reunions, lots of family reunions.
My personal favorite — when our church holds General Conference twice a year, we don’t have to travel to Salt Lake City to hear the talks, we don’t even have to put on Sunday clothes and drive to the nearest church to listen to the satellite broadcast, we can just log on to www.byutv.org and watch in our pajamas.
If you’re not LDS but want to know something about the church, you can look it up online at www.mormon.org, discretely and anonymously, without worrying that missionaries will be on your doorstep the next day. Unless, of course, you want missionaries on your doorstep, which can always be arranged.
And all this is just the beginning.
Of course, our faith is also challenged by technology. Mormons waste time online like anyone else. (Though my husband and I suspect we are the only parents to ever have an adult child tell us he wouldn’t be attending church one Sunday because his guild was having a raid). And we are impacted by cyber stalkers, identity theft, online gambling, and pornography, just like everyone else. Because Satan loves the new technology, too.
