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See also
past Church
Computing
Logging Off
I am not by nature a "techie" person. I never tinkered with cars as a teenager;
I never built a ham radio; I never knew what kind of woofers or tweeters I
should have for my stereo system. I could barely change a tire or get the
phonograph records in an agreeable pile on the turntable spindle. And I was never
sure what "CQ" meant on shortwave radio.
But I did want to drive a car, listen to music, and occasionally roam the world
via shortwave radio. So I had to learn how to do a few things with a car, a
stereo, and a radio.
Faster and Easier? Yes!
I am a person who wants to do things with as little effort as possible, so when
I realized that technology could do things faster and easier, I became more of a
techie than my nature would dictate.
Automatic transmission? Absolutely! Who wants to keep stepping on a clutch and
moving that stick around every time you leave an intersection?
Push-button radio? What took them so long? Why should I have to twirl that dial
to change stations?
Electric typewriter? Yes! A portable Smith-Corona made typing articles easier,
especially when someone invented that "correction" cartridge to white out
errors.
| I bought my first computer
in 1981. It cost $5,000 and had about one-twentieth of the computing
power available today in a machine that costs less than $700. |
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So when computers arrived in the newsroom of the newspaper where I was working
in 1979, I saw a chance to do lots of things faster and easier. Because others
were not so quick to cozy up to green letters on grey screens and get friendly
with floppy disks (remember them?) I suddenly found that I had become a techie!
That led me to write some articles in church magazines, a little book on desktop
publishing, and this column. Many pastors and other church leaders were
wondering about how to use this new technology or whether it was worth the money
and effort. I believed that it was and wrote columns urging people to log on and
make the computer a tool for ministry.
I bought my first computer in 1981. It cost $5,000 and had about one-twentieth
of the computing power available today in a machine that costs less than $700.
The printer (another $400!) took 2-1/2 minutes to print a page in that fuzzy
dot-matrix type, and the page frequently jammed. When I added a modem a year
later, connections were most unreliable, and when I traveled it took ten minutes
to send a 900-word story back to my editors. The "portable" computer weighed
seventeen pounds and would barely fit under the seat of an airplane. It had a
five-inch screen! Everything was that eye-straining green on grey until Apple
developed a computer called Lisa, which had black letters on a white screen and
cost twice as much as an IBM machine. There was no Internet.
Evolving Issues
Today, almost everyone has logged on. (I know an excellent pastor who doesn't
and writes his sermons on yellow legal pads, but he is a special breed, and he
retires this year.) Everyone knows about RAM and ROM memory; CDs and flash
drives have replaced floppy disks (you know, they never really "flopped," did
they?), and almost everyone has an e-mail address and access to the Internet.
Churches publish worship folders, newsletters, and brochures, keep their
membership lists and financial records in databases, roam the Internet for
ideas, information, and discussion, and use the computer daily to do all kinds
of other things. My cheerleading and advice on the ABCs of the computer are no
longer needed.
There are still many evolving issues relating to churches and computers. We
don't know yet what Internet communication is doing to our sense of
community — whether it is expanding our world or making us more isolated in it. The
impact of computers on society and the world raises moral and ethical questions
as we learn that unscrupulous people and evildoers use this technology to warp
truth and cloud minds. More advanced computer technologies such as Bluetooth,
Vista, GPS devices, streaming video, and Artificial
Intelligence raise new questions and possibilities.
These questions go beyond the scope of this modest column. So, with thanks to
Lutheran Partners editors, who have encouraged me and made my copy better; and
with thanks to those who read these lines, sent questions and made comments, I
log off this particular phase of my life. I have become much more of a techie
than I ever imagined I would. I suspect the same is true of anybody sitting at a
computer keyboard today.
Charles M. Austin serves as interim pastor at the Lutheran Church of the Savior,
Paramus, New Jersey. His e-mail address is
caustin4@optonline.net.
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