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.

III

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.

III

We have dominion over our technology

No matter how seductive the technology, our God-given agency over it unbinds us from a creator’s original intentions or its normative cultural use.

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.

III

Above all, we love one another with technology

As technology amplifies our potential in the world, it most of all amplifies our potential to love. By creating presence at a distance and lending us tools to sharpen our presence in person, we give more of ourselves to our neighbors near and far.

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.

III

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.

We sacrifice to make technology humane

We design technology to serve the ultimate good of others but never to exploit human weaknesses even when greater wealth inevitably results from doing so. This approach requires sacrificing temporal gain for eternal gain.

Principles for the redemptive understanding, experience, and use of technology.