Just after the caveman days of the cell phone, when few people owned them and they resembled small bricks, I was given a new kind of phone to beta test—a flip phone. My first jaunt away from home was to a Renaissance festival, where I couldn’t wait for a reason to pull out the phone. I felt like Captain Kirk opening his communicator to announce he was ready to beam up to the Starship Enterprise, and I was hoping that people were watching me.

Technology speeds ahead of our ability to evaluate it. As a parent I had to make decisions about cell phones long before there was great Christian wisdom available on the subject. Should children have phones? Which features should they have? What are the long-term effects? Two decades later, we are still struggling to find the best answers to those questions. Meanwhile, related apps and technologies surge into brave new worlds.

As Daniel Howe, an RP pastor, points out in his forthcoming book on the Sabbath, there is an enormous need for deep thinking on the role of technology in our lives. For example, it can be very hard to rest when you have a phone constantly grabbing your attention. RP pastor Mark Loughridge agrees, in his book review in this issue: there isn’t much of an established worldview that includes digital life and social media. The last full revision of the RP Testimony was approved more than a decade before there was a World Wide Web, much less cell phones in every pocket.

If you think things are bound to continue moving toward digital inundation, you might be mistaken. There is evidence that some segments of younger generations are sidelining their phones more often and returning to old-fashioned media like books, vinyl records, and in-person conversations.

College student Emma Lembke is the founder of the Log Off Movement. In her mid-teens she was using phone apps for 5-6 hours per day. One day she stopped to consider: “How am I allowing these apps to have so much control over me?” And she mused how she was “seeing all of my friends’ attention get pulled away from me…having their eyes looking up at me, having conversations and (then) getting pulled straight down.…Each one would spend more and more time sucked into their phones and screens rather than talking with me in person.” (CNN)

Youth and young adults might be moving toward a solution quicker than older adults, who have fully adopted social media. Ninety-four percent of adults age 55-64 are social media users (Global Web Index). Over all age ranges, an average of 2 hours, 22 minutes is spent every day on social media and messaging. But social media isn’t just about checking on your friends, because many people use it to get their news, even if that’s not a good method for gathering well-rounded, accurate information about the world.

Truly, it’s time for Reformed Christians to talk more about the disconnections that happen as we become more connected to our digital devices. We explore that topic in this issue.