In a connected world, digital discipleship includes practising disconnection. Perhaps it’s not time to throw your phone in the river just yet, but do consider switching it off.

We live in a deeply connected world. There are some signs that geopolitically that might be changing, but individually it’s as true as ever. The distraction devices in our pockets keep us connected to each other, people with our specific interests, what’s going on in the world, things somewhere we should be anxious about that will never affect us personally, and an unending swirl of banality.

It’s now patently obvious that, at best, the digital revolution has been ambivalent for us as people. Every purported blessing, some of which are real, is met by an equal and opposite curse. It is ever thus. We all know that smartphones are terrible for kids and yet because everyone else does we end up trapped in giving them to ours as well. We all know that they are notably mixed blessings for ourselves as well, but we haven’t managed to build a world hospitable enough that we could chose to give them up.

We can rage against the madness of it all—and honestly there’s a place for that—but it doesn’t appear that the page is turning in the next decade at least. With several of these developments the genie can’t be put back in the bottle even if we thought that was the best idea for all of us, we just find ourselves and the way we think notably changed by a succession of huge structural changes to society through technological revolutions.

This has happened before. We might think of the end of feudalism in the enclosing of common land to farm sheep for wool or, much more obviously, the industrial revolution with its numerous shifts in everyday life that changed who we think we are and how we operate as people.

We live in a time of great change.

What we have to do as a result is figure out how to live in the world we find ourselves in. What does digital discipleship even look like? Should churches use digital tools to help congregations or does this dehumanise us? Should we bring our phones to church or not? Should we even own them? What do healthy limits and rhythms look like with work and play in digital spaces? How should we use social media? What should we think about videogames? A thousand more similar questions could easily arise. Before you get too excited, I’m not about to answer them, that’s the work of more than 800 words.

What I’d like to do instead is tell you about a practice that I’ve started in my own life.

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