John Dyer has been a technology creator for over 20 years. His research focuses on the intersection of faith and technology, including Bible software, digital ecclesiology, artificial intelligence, and transhumanism. Dr. Dyer is a professor at Dallas Theological Seminary and an author. In this interview, John talks about his recent book, People of the Screen: How Evangelicals Created the Digital Bible and How It Shapes Their Reading of Scripture, and discusses the non-neutral nature of technology, the differences in how people perceive scripture on print vs. screen, and compares Bible reading apps and software available.
Want to learn more about John? Check out his website, and also his project, Y’all Version.
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Radix: Thank you, Dr. Dyer, for being willing to share some of your thoughts with us, especially about your new book, People of the Screen. Because of your experience—in technology, theology and culture studies—your words and wisdom are so appreciated. To start off, could you tell us a little bit about yourself and how you got to wanting to write this latest book of yours?
JD: I think I had these two parallel tracks going on in my own life, the one being a kid growing up in the eighties and nineties with early personal computers; and experiences of having my dad come home with a modem and saying don’t touch this, and then me immediately ripping it open and trying to figure it out, and panicking when it didn’t work.
Radix: [Laughter]
JD: So I have always loved that side of making, creating, and just using the whole technology world. The other track was me growing up in a Christian home, a somewhat broken home with painful things, yet a home where following Jesus was seen as worthwhile. Those were the two tracks.
When I was out of college I took a job as a youth pastor and didn’t make enough money to live, so I took on a job as a web developer on the side. These are two different things! Occasionally I would make something in the web-developing field that was explicitly Christian—a website or whatever—but I didn’t think of Christianity and technology as operating together. Though I did think of technology as being a neutral thing. When I went into seminary I remember there was this one prof who said that assuming technology was simply neutral was one of the most dangerous beliefs a person could hold. Whereas I believed that what made the end product good or bad was what it was used for. Anyway, all that changed my trajectory on thinking about technology. So I began to read everything I could. That led me to thinkers like Marshall McLuhan and Heidegger and others. But I was also searching for more than just the theoretical; I wanted to look at real data from real people, today. And I saw that the sociological side of research really did that. So, when I was doing my doctoral work I was really interested in this question of technology and theology and looking specifically at the question of what happens when we read the Bible on screens and what all the things are that are happening societally. This, of course, is a really complicated question, but all that was what made People of The Screen.
Radix: I think it’s fair to say that your book is aimed a good bit toward the evangelical audience. At least there are a lot of themes that resonate in evangelicalism. Because—and I say this delicately—evangelicals aren’t especially known for their historical knowledge of Church history. Can you give us a bit of a background on the change from scrolls to screens?
JD: When we think back to the early first century, everyone who had anything important to say put it on a scroll. So people were aware of parchments and tablets as different forms of technology. Interestingly, Christians all used parchment and codex, but not scrolls. There are no New Testament manuscripts that were in scrolls. And that’s this first moment where you go, man, the medium that we use does really seem to be a significant part of what we’re doing, and our embodiedness and embeddedness in the world really matters.
So we could fast forward and talk about the printing press and how that changed the world—which it did —but I think we are at one of those moments, now, where we are at this big digital turn. We have everything from screens to the internet to audiobooks, plus, now, all the AI questions and issues we are seeing. What I think matters is how we react to appropriate those things and realize that they are not in any way neutral. They do affect authority structures and what we see and what we don’t see. It’s important that we think reflectively about technological change in general with society, but then again how we react to and appropriate it. I use those two words specifically because we do react to technology, but we also appropriate it, and we do it at the same time. Those are really important insights into our value systems: knowing how we go about interacting with the world, how we deploy our values—and what they actually are—along with knowing what our stated theological positions are. All that comes out in the way that we act. And this all relates to evangelicals and the movement toward digital Bibles.
Radix: In your book, you provide a lot of theological reasons for the desire to spread Bible literacy.
JD: I try to do an abbreviated version of whatever evangelicalism is, and one of the interesting things about trying to track evangelical histories is that you also have to track who’s telling the history and when they’re telling it. All this, in some way, was kicked off not in the 1700s by Jonathan Edwards and George Whitfield, but in the 1970s by Jimmy Carter, when he called himself an evangelical, and then scholars were saying, well, what is this thing? So, then we have to go back and retell the story.
I think almost all of the scholars that have looked at evangelicalism will ask: is this just politics or is this theology? It’s probably some of both. One of the central themes that seems to be important is just what an important role the Bible has for evangelicals in their belief. I mean, there are other words that get mixed in with evangelicalism, like inerrancy—though it often depends on which side of the Atlantic people are on. But, the importance of the Bible and Bible teaching as being something that leads to an encounter with Jesus is something deeply held in evangelical culture and history. There are, of course, different underlying questions that need to be asked, but if you were to ask the average evangelical where they get their knowledge about God, they would say, immediately, from the Bible. And if asked, how do you tell someone about God? The Bible, again, would be the answer. So there is this assumption that knowledge of the Bible is a good thing for people. That is why, whether it’s radio broadcasting to places where the Bible isn’t allowed, Bible websites, Bible apps or whatever, the point is that getting scripture in front of people is key; it’s a positive thing.
Radix: And this leads to the question about technology not being neutral, that knowingly or not, technology shapes us, even in getting the scripture into us.
JD: In my previous book, From the Garden to The City, I made the argument that when looking at the overall biblical story, and how God looks at creation and calls it good, we can see that the process of making is good! And technology’s a big part of that making and creating—thus, it can be good thing.
And so I would say that technology, theologically speaking, is a good thing because it’s connected to what it means to be human. Because we aren’t just body and soul: we are body and soul connected to creation, and through what we ourselves create. At the same time, I want to point out that technology is non-neutral. So let’s take something like a shovel, as it’s a pretty safe example. When we use a shovel we can change the world; we make holes where there weren’t any before. And yet, at the end of the day, after using our shovels, we are changed too. Our hands get blisters, and blisters become calluses, and our muscles change, etcetera. The point is that we change with the use of our technology. Now, nobody is really worried about using shovels. However, when we are talking about the more complicated kinds of technology that we use today, there are more formative effects taking place. And formative is the keyword. Plus, I’d add that there aren’t people with PhDs in attentive computing who are trying to get us to use shovels more often!
Radix: [Laughter]
JD: So, the kinds of things we’re using today are quite different, and it’s worth exploring. And there are a lot of things to break down. There are the differences between instruments, devices—or what we’d call tools—and how they can change us; how they can shape our physical bodies or shape how we think. One tool shapes our arms and one shapes our legs, but it’s a little harder to think through the technologies that might shape our minds or our souls. It’s a little harder, yet again, to think about the ones that would shape our relationships. And then, even harder still, to think about changes to society through those structures.
When we think about electricity or interstate highways and how if the interstate goes this way versus that way, it might leave a whole group without connection. We can look back at the history of America and realize that where highways were sometimes chosen to be built was done in very racialized ways. We need to think carefully about all the issues that are connected with relational structures. The point is that technology becomes a key tool of power for bigger structures, and can reinforce and reinvigorate really negative forms of power. That’s just a brief, really quick introduction. But there’s a lot of intersection between society, culture, and technology that we should always be thinking about.
Radix: Are you hopeful about the state of how people will use technology? I think, in reading your book and listening to some of your other presentations, you have a hopeful tone in all this. Am I right in that assumption?
JD: I would like to anchor a hope in knowing that God is taking care of the trajectory of the world at large more than in any one particular thing. Because there is a lot of stuff going on right now, such as the economic issues and all that. History in general is full of ups and downs; civilizations rise and fall. But when it comes to technology, there are good things that it can be used for. We obviously know that using it for consumption and self-promotion isn’t good. At the same time, we can use technology for good things, creative things, if we are mindful. I think that we can be in the world yet not of the world. And the reality is that we can’t fully retreat and unplug from everything. But if we have boundaries, like I do with myself and my own kids, we can benefit from technology. We just have to avoid succumbing to the negative parts of it.
Radix: I really appreciate your emphasis on making and creating. I think of people like Makoto Fujimura or Andy Crouch and others who point out the importance of culture creation. Or how Crouch says, essentially, that if we are tired of the bad culture, the answer is to make more of the good kind. It’s not that complicated! Anyway, I appreciate that you aren’t viewing technology through a constant hermeneutic of suspicion, but that we can use technology in a good way if we are careful and conscious of the dangers.
JD: I think we can run into what we might call instrumentalism, where we can say, “As long as I am using something for good and not bad, it’s okay.” For technology, that might be turned into simplistic thinking like, as long as I use my phone for Bible reading and not pornography, then it’s not really exploitative. Because the reality is that there are still some deeply formative aspects of modern technology, whether your newsfeed is purely for some sort of religious content, or for political content, or for entertainment content. It’s the form that’s shaping you as much as the content. And as long as we remember those two things, then I think we’re able to make somewhat better choices. Because being part of the world—even in loving my neighbors—is going to include some aspect of technology. We can’t just avoid it altogether.
Radix: Your latest book includes a lot of data and stats from a variety of places, and it answers many questions about what differences arise from reading print versus reading on a device. First, though, what led you to ask those questions? What were your thought processes?
JD: To start, I had actually made some of my own Bible software. So, like all programmers and Bible lovers, I wanted to know what was available, what I would want to have as a reader, and why the programs were available the way they were. And just to go back a bit, and speaking to technologies, the Bible, as something that everybody has access to, really didn’t go back to the printing press in the 1500s, or even to the 1800s. It wasn’t until the 1900s that people started to get their own personal copies of the Bible. And that matters, because now evangelicals have terms like “quiet time” or “devotional,” but that concept didn’t exist all that long ago. Before that, most people’s experience of scripture was something that was read in a community of faith, which means it was heard and not read. And so even our comparison of print versus screen is really just this little short, couple-hundred-years comparison. We’re not really thinking about the last four or five thousand years of faith. These big questions were really interesting to me.
So in the book, along with my own reflections, I also interviewed many people from different walks of life, including software developers and pastors. I’d ask them what they thought was important to think about in terms of Bible reading—whether that was from the developer’s end or from the user’s end of things.
Radix: The first question I got asked when I was talking to friends about your book was: When it comes to reading comprehension, which is better—print or screen?
JD: Before we talk about the Bible, just to give you a real quick, forty-year history: people have been doing reading studies for a long time, comparing print reading and screen reading. In the eighties, when the screens were big and chunky, the scores were always way lower for on-screen reading. What you see is that over time, as screens got better and more portable and eventually took the tablet format, the scores between print reading and screen reading get really, really close. Where you don’t see it as high is when someone’s reading an ordered story, like a narrative of some kind. In that case, people reading print can order the events and the story better.
We think that’s because of that tactile page-turning thing. The other thing is that people on screens still score a little bit lower on comprehension because we’re trained to scan on screens.
Radix: Right!
JD: So if you put people with a screen and people with a book together and you tell them to read some twenty-page text and then ask them to answer some questions, the print readers will take a lot longer to read it, and the screen readers will read it faster and yet they’ll score lower. But if you tell them they only have twenty minutes, then they’ll both take the full twenty minutes and they’ll both score really close. So part of it is just our default behaviors. You know, you and I are both looking at screens right now, and if we look at the whole screen, there’s just a lot of stuff going on, and we have to train our minds to ignore a lot of words on our screens. So, when we are reading scripture—which is supposed to be a holy thing—we can often go into scan mode. It’s a reality.
For some pertinent data I found a sample group of two hundred people from several different churches, half being offered print and the other half using whatever device they had. On average, all the screen readers scored lower than the print readers. However, when it came to gender, men scored lower on reading comprehension than women. Now, there are other factors to take into account, like age differences and how the gender of younger children affects reading. But just to answer your questions broadly, it does seem like we all have lower memory retention from screen reading. Part of the lower retention is because of our reading habits—specifically scanning—whereas if we intentionally read slower, we can have better retention.
Radix: When it comes to reading, I totally prefer a book. It’s the tactile thing, the writing in the margins, remembering which side of the page something might be on, but it’s interesting that we can train ourselves to get better screen retention.
JD: Speaking of another interesting thing, I noticed that there are differences in how people remember their first digital screen Bible. I’d ask people, “What’s your first memory of the digital Bible? What was it like when you went from your print Bible to your screen Bible?” A lot of times, if the people were under sixteen, they would say, “I don’t know a world where I didn’t have a Bible on my phone,” or whatever. The point is that many have always lived in a multimedia Bible environment. Sometimes, if they were a little older, maybe in their forties or fifties, and weren’t religious for most of their life and only recently called themselves a Christian, or those who had recently encountered scripture, they’d say something similar, that they’d always known the Bible in a multimedia way.
Radix: Interesting. This touches on aspects of embodiment. I vividly remember when I got my first Bible. It was a gift from my parents and it was a big deal. But then I didn’t grow up with the virtual stuff, either. I wonder about the importance of the tactile and “realness” of that as compared to the virtual, screen stuff.
JD: Here is something else that’s worth thinking about: the evangelical tradition has typically been one that is skeptical of institutions and of embodied things, per se. They would reject the idea that they have a liturgy in church, yet most evangelical churches actually do have a kind of liturgy. They have three fast songs, three slow songs, an announcement, and a sermon.
Radix: [Laughter]
JD: And yet, with that said, even among evangelicals there is an appreciation for embodied experience, especially when it comes to what some scholars would call the iconic value of the Bible. James Watts talks about three dimensions of the Bible: the hermeneutical dimension, the meaning dimension, and the performative dimension, meaning what we do when we publicly read or carry a Bible through a congregation. The desire to carry a Bible might be because the person is in a more liturgical setting. Also there is an iconic value connected to the physicality of the Bible which represents something special. To the evangelicals, who are typically less physically oriented when it comes to worship, I would ask them in interviews: What does the Bible mean to you? Some of them would hold up a physical Bible and shake it and say, “This is what it is.” There is this deep value of the physical—maybe not in other elements, but definitely in that one. And so to move from print to screen loses some specialness.
Yet, for most people, their phone is just about the most sacred thing they own. Not sacred in the religious sense, but in terms of being the thing they value the most. Just look at how anxious we get when the phone’s power gets below 20 percent, or when it’s not close by. While we don’t think about a cell phone as being sacred, we spend a lot of sacred energy on it.
Radix: I recall a fairly respectable study that was done a couple of years back that stated that people, if given the choice between losing their wallet or their phone in a mugging, would hands-down prefer it was their wallet.
JD: Because all the stuff in the wallet feels like it can be replaced, but the stuff on the phone is me. I wonder how much anxiety we suffer because of devices. Not only do they hold some of our identity, but they also regularly tell us about all the horrible things that are happening in our world.
Cell phones are bound up in our identity and relationships and all of those things that make us human. As an aside, I think evangelicals are more prone to be less connected with the physical aspects of religion. We could just look at what happened in evangelical churches during the pandemic. The evangelicals were much more willing to make the move online. They were already poised that way because they had the flexibility of technology built in—it was just a pivot because they already had so much stuff online already. The same concept applies to the people making the move from print to screen as well.
Radix: One of the interesting things in your book was how you showed how perceptions changed when it came to people reading on-screen or on-page. Can you talk about that a bit more?
JD: This was one of my favorite parts of what the research turned up. Connected with the memory retention aspect, I was curious about how different mediums, print or screen, affected interpretation and whether there might be spiritual implications too. I had people read the book of Jude, because for most people it’s a bit unfamiliar, and that unfamiliarity was desirable for the study. At the end of the reading session, I’d ask them how they felt when they read it. And this is where I think the really interesting results came in, because there was a big difference between print and phone screen responses.
The print readers would typically say they felt like Jude was about God’s judgment, whereas more of the phone readers would say, “I feel like this is about God’s faithfulness.” And that’s a really interesting difference. But where it becomes even more interesting is when I asked them how they felt after they finished the reading. The print readers who said the book was about God’s judgment would typically say that they felt encouraged by reading it. The phone readers, who said that this was about God’s faithfulness, said they felt discouraged and confused. When I saw that, I thought I was really on to something, because that difference has a lot of implications.
So here is my hypothesis, and it has something to do with the associations we have with these different media. When we think about print, we have the connotation of something pretty fixed, solid and maybe more authoritative, and something that we can trust and rely on, even if it is a bit stodgier. However, our phones – along with being associated with our identities, in some ways—are connected to a lot of our anxieties. The other thing is the connection between much of the online pop representations of scripture, as seen on Instagram memes or whatever, generally moralistic and therapeutic, like “The plans I have for you are for good,” or “You can do all things through Christ.” These are all good, but there isn’t a full range of scripture represented in them. What we don’t see are the more judgmental verses and the ones about God’s justice. When we think about what we read in print, it also includes the kind of verses that aren’t all sunshine and butterflies. Having the full spectrum can leave us feeling more secure in the world; whereas the God of the screen is one that is “nice,” but can make you feel a little sad and insecure.
Just to clarify, those variances in perception aren’t because of the text, or because God is different, but is due to how we are filtering the text through our devices; and this goes back to technology not being neutral, nor the medium through which we access the scriptures. We are being shaped through the technology. We just need to be aware of that when we choose how we read scripture.
Radix: Something else you talk about in the book is the connection between the apps, software, and the business aspects. Some might have concerns about the mixing of Bible literacy and profit motives. Can you alleviate some of those concerns? Or give clarity on the ways Bible software organizations work?
JD: On the developer side of things, there are three or four business models for viable software. One of them is just for customers to straight-up purchase the software, just like you purchase a video game. That was the first kind of desktop model. Then there’s the advertising model that you might see on a website like biblegateway.com, where it’s funded by ads at the top, so every time you look at a Bible verse you might get an ad for some Christian product. The third model is donation-based, which is what you see with youversion.com, where it’s all supported by donors. There isn’t any kind of transaction between the user and end product, but something is still being paid for somewhere. The fourth model would be more of the open-source free platform, like e-sword.net and other applications out there.
When we look at those various models, there are obviously pros and cons and some deeply held beliefs behind all of them, but somewhere along the way someone is paying for the technology. So the question is, what is it that they’re buying? And, of course, the person who’s paying for a website with ads is the advertiser. Which means they are paying for attention. When it comes to donation-supported software like Youversion, that’s harder to answer. Along with providing information about downloads and which scriptures get more views—which is useful—the donors who are paying for Youversion are ultimately wanting the Bible to be accessed by as many people as possible because they fundamentally believe that it is important.
Then there are the types of Bible software that a person buys outright, like a book. That would be programs like Logos Bible Software, though they have faded out over the last few years. And then there are products that are a mix of paid and subscription.
And all these different models shape what is offered and how the product is prioritized. So, for example, with online sites with no ads, there is no need for a viewer to move between pages; you can just infinitely scroll. But if the site is dependent on ads, then the viewer will need to go to a new page.
Now for Youversion, which wants to make sure that people read the Bible as often as possible, what they do is introduce things like Bible reading plans and having friend-linking options within the app. The friendship connection has proven successful in increasing Bible reading; that’s why in the app homepage that option is there. Both of these options help to keep bringing people back and reading scripture.
Radix: So, concerning Youversion, you’re saying that the idea of creating a kind of community does increase reading?
JD: Yes. And sometimes it’s easy to be skeptical, but when I interviewed people, I’d get those who would say they were connecting with their mom more than before, or that they found themselves connecting with random people and making a real connection on the Bible app, even becoming friends with people in some cases. That’s really interesting to me because it shows that technology can facilitate these anonymous connections that wouldn’t have been there before. In a way, it might be like how Alcoholics Anonymous meetings work, where only sharing certain aspects of ourselves can make us feel a bit freer to share. I think it’s similar online, maybe making us feel free to share too much! But in other cases, it can be really helpful. So, all that to say that we need to be careful about how we critique the online community. It’s really worthy of its own study. The community aspect really does drive engagement. And not just the Bible, but other devotional reading, such as Lectio Divina, and many others. So, if organizations think that engagement is a desired outcome, then developers will keep doing the kinds of things they are doing.
Radix: If you could speak directly to developers, what would you want to tell them to think about, theologically and philosophically? Also, what would you want people to know about the developers?
JD: First, I’d say that when I interviewed a number of developers, I found men and women who really love technology, really love the scriptures, and really want to follow Jesus. When I saw this, I was encouraged. And these people were reflective as well. They were open in saying that they were creating a product that needs to be sustainable, but they also want to help people in some way. They really care deeply about people. My thought for them is to keep going. Like, go for it, right?
At the same time, there are the concerns about what can be lost in technology. The various aspects of a tacit reading experience for instance. We don’t really know just what the experience of handling the Bible, physically, can impart to us. And it’s very complicated because humans acquire knowledge in a plurality of ways. So we want to be careful in thinking all these things through, as much as we can, and not go on blindly ahead.
When it comes to profit, it’s tricky. We should absolutely be thinking about souls over profit, but there are very real, pragmatic things to consider. Then too, there is the issue of creating patterns in app users, or whatever other physiological effects are created by device reading, that might not be helpful. Like, just because the software is encouraging someone to keep clicking on to the next chapter, we have to ask ourselves, is that good? I mean, we have to discern what God’s will is in all of this. But, I really do appreciate what developers are doing. I count myself as one of them, as both a technology creator and a technology critic.
So I get to play both roles, and it’s a lot of fun.
Radix: I saw that you have this cool Bible website called yallversion.com
JD: Yeah, this was a really fun project. So, for all Bible readers, it’s important to know that Older English used in the King James Version had different words for the word you in both the singular and the plural. In fact, thou is the singular and you is the plural. And in Greek and Hebrew there are also these two different forms of plural and singular you. But in modern English, we have just put that all down to you. In the South we have this term, y’all, which is a contraction of you and all. In the West sometimes people will say “you guys,” but that’s a very gendered term. And so you are starting to see y’all move out of the South, and even out of the U.S. as a positive term for referring to a group. What Y’allversion does, working from the Greek, is replace the word you, when it’s plural, with y’all. And then, if you are in a different region, like maybe Pittsburgh, you can select it to use “yins”, or if you are in Chicago, you can change it to “yous guys,” or if you are in the UK you can change it to “you lot.” So there are a bunch of different regional dialects you can select from. It’s a bit limited in doing imperative commands, but I am working on version 2.0. Anyway, it’s one of those places where I get to use technology to help people see God and God’s people in a clearer way. And I think there is a lot of room for that level of experimentation.
Radix: Very cool.
If you were able to have all the pastors in a room, and they had to listen to you with a smile—because when smiling we are more receptive—what would you want to tell them?
JD: Two things come to mind. One is that the scriptures talk a lot about money, and I think the reason is not because money is good or bad, but because it’s not neutral. Whether we have money or we don’t, talking about it forces us to ask different questions, and we form our life around that. I think in many ways technology is one of those things for us today that we’re constantly forming our lives around. And so just like the scriptures talk a lot about money, I think that we should talk a lot about money and technology with our people, and explain to them how deeply formative they both are. Moral things are really important, but we also have to consider what shapes us. Technology can shape us more than we think.
The second thing, when it comes to technology and how it relates to scripture reading, is to show. Don’t just tell, but show. Ask people to do an experiment with themselves and their reading habits. Ask them to, for one week, read the Bible on their device, and then the next week read it in print, and then get them to see what happens. You can give people all the fancy theoretical studies and show them charts, but what counts more is to actually encourage people to change their behavior. Because until someone actually tries something, they might not know. A good example is asking people if they can go without their phone for twenty-four hours. Most people will say “Oh, yeah, sure.” But if they actually try it, it’s a different story.
So, to the question of whether people should read their Bible on a phone or not: I don’t think there really is a yes or no. I think it’s always going to be a multimedia thing where we are going to use a little bit of this and a little bit of that for different things. As I talk about in my book, when I asked people what medium they prefer for different styles of reading – studying, researching, devotional, whatever—they all had very clear answers. They’d say that print was good for one thing, or computer for another, or a device for another. But when I asked what they really do, they’d say, “I grab the nearest available Bible.” In my book, I call this the NAB version.
Radix: [Laughter]
JD: But people just grab whatever is handy, right? It’s whatever is there, and most of the time that is their phone. And I am not being anti-phone! I just want people to be aware of that. So my encouragement to the pastor is, you know, talk more about technology, and give people some experiments to try out that will help them see what it is they are doing.
Radix: I wonder if I could ask you the same question, but this time aimed at the congregants. Like, what would you tell them to think about—and maybe even about the difficulties that pastors have that most people don’t consider?
JD: I think pastors are in a difficult spot today, especially because one of the effects that social media has contributed to over the last twenty or so years is polarization. I’d say that whatever it is that you feel today, whatever position you hold, you probably hold it more strongly now than you did ten years ago. And that’s partly Twitter’s fault, partly the Russian bot’s fault, all of those things. So when you approach somebody who’s in a leadership position, be cognizant that they’re often constantly facing people that are on opposite ends of the spectrum—and that hold those opposite ends more strongly than they did in the past. So, I would say, if you can, maybe dial back the strength with which you hold that position and rethink what’s kind of central and what’s peripheral. And you know, probably more things need to go on the periphery, and fewer things need to be in the center.
Also, keep in mind that pastors and leaders are constantly dealing with people that are just on the edge of blowing up. Part of that is this whole technology world. And I don’t mean to blame it on technology and say it’s purely that, that it’s technology’s fault and the technology’s bad. But technology certainly contributes. So, I think just giving our leaders a little bit of grace is really needed. And, certainly, when they need to be confronted, they need to be confronted. But sometimes we need to just back off a little bit and simmer down before we go and share a piece of our mind.
Radix: Really timely advice. Thank you.