Principles for the redemptive understanding, experience, and use of technology.
Part I
How we understand technology
Technology is any tool that amplifies human potential
Technology describes any device we use to extend or amplify our creative ability to organize and benefit from creation—from digital bits on a screen or the gears and levers in a machine.
Technology is good
Technology and the ability to create it are good gifts that help us fulfill God’s purpose for us as His stewards of creation.
We display God’s image through technology
The human creation and creative use of technology is a pre-fall impulse arising from God's mandate to translate the raw potential of creation to be more useful, beautiful, and humane. A redemptive approach to technology uses it to restore God’s natural order and to make beauty from chaos.
Part II
How we experience technology
Technology shapes us
We shape technology, but then it shapes us. It subtly and significantly shifts the way we think, act, and communicate individually and communally.
Technology embodies our theology
People replicate their worldview in the technology they create, whether they are fully aware of it or not. Technology extends our theology into the world.
Part III
How we use technology
We amplify our spiritual formation with technology
We use technology to create places and opportunities for personal and communal spiritual formation and sabbath rest.
We shine a light on the hidden effects of technology
Recognizing that technology shapes individuals, community, and culture, we carefully identify the secondary effects of technology and publicly reckon with any potential repercussions without guile.
Part IV
How we create technology
We liberally distribute the benefits of technology to all people
Instead of leveraging our technology to gain increasingly monolithic power, we seek to distribute the power of technology to everyone, especially the overlooked and disadvantaged.
We make technology truthful
We hold ourselves to radical transparency and precision in our claims about the technology we create. Well-meaning “white lies” — convenient obfuscations, oversimplifications, and exaggerated claims — are not hidden from God.
We esteem the vocation of technology
We call on the church to raise up a cadre of well-trained experts who lead believers to think about technology from a deeply informed theological basis, and we encourage believers gifted in technology to pursue positions where they can influence the building of the algorithms and principles that increasingly govern our world.
We make technology beautiful
We design technology to create more than to consume. Each creative use showcases and adds to the natural, transcendent beauty and good order of the world and does not deplete or muddle it.