Already Gone
by Laurence Windham

My good friend, Scott Smith, tells the story of a freshman basketball player about to play his first game out of state. When he is told that their flight will arrive at its destination an hour earlier than their departure time, the sheltered collegian exclaims, "I ain't getting on no time machine!" As you laugh, be careful to note that this young athlete's guarded appraisal serves as an example for us all.

Technology is not something we think about these days as to how it affects our Christian walk. Gone is the skepticism of the "new." Today, the latest technology is anticipated, expected, accepted. We may be Christians but we are also consumers, and as consumers we desire and demand the faster, lighter, smaller, and more efficient. And with each quantum leap we are morphed, we are changed. And if we are not careful, conformed to this world. Any casual study of inventions will reveal that as a new technology was introduced, a new culture was born.

Consider these examples:
The automobile gave independence and seclusion to adult children to be alone together on a "date" rather than in the protective presence of their parents during courtship. The television changed the format of the living room from a comfortable place where people faced each other and communicated, to a miniature theatre facing the onmipresent glow of modernity's noisy replacement of the fireplace. Before central heat and air, the family would all congregate in the same area of the home more for the sake of staying comfortable than being together-but they were together and, therefore, were used to being together. Now each member of the family resides in their own space and the hearth and front porch are fast becoming nonfunctioning, nostalgic, architectural tokens included in floor plans so that consumers feel that they can actually "purchase" a home.

Here at the Highlands Study Center, we are concerned that the technological advance has been more detrimental than beneficial to the cause of Christ. How have we come to such a conclusion? Rather easily, this age has not produced Christians of strength and virtue. Modern Christendom thinks and acts and orders their lives after the world. They are immersed in the Normal and tend to think and act as Laodicians. This is seldom, if ever, intentional. Most evangelicals are naive passengers moving in time with the times. They have come to accept therapeutic nonsense and practical positivism from the pulpit -since they live in a manmade, man-ordered world in a sphere containing comforts, amusements, distractions, conveniences, and a disorder that passes as life for them, this sermonic pragmatism sounds sound. This is tragic. There is so much more. God is so much bigger.

What is truly amazing is to witness the testimony of those few who escape. The story is almost like a second salvation for them. "I can't believe I was so blind," is a common lament. They begin to see the matrix for what it is, they begin to understand from the scriptures what is important in life, and they begin to order their lives deliberately.

Consequently, they no longer try to keep up with the culture. They find themselves more involved with their children (and having more children). They start planting gardens and practicing family worship. They have a taste for the substantial, the superlative in all areas of life. They have tired of the race to nowhere. They don't want to contribute to the disposable and convenient any longer. They have escaped the world where Dilbert is the last prophetic voice left. But, and here is the shocker, many leave without leaving. They are like unto the immortal Kramer of Seinfeld fame. They may still hold the same job, go to the same church, live in the same neighborhood-but in their heart and mind, they are already gone. You will not find them any longer amusing themselves to death. They have moved from the comfort zone of mediocrity. They are pursuing and overtaking the important. The clock is no longer a dictator. They have specificity when traveling the Information Superhighway. When it comes to raising their children, education, piety, livelihood, and worship, they choose modes and means from ages past. They live in this age with its technological advantages but without its tyrannical agenda. They are wise to the fact that technology has not as its reason for existence, the glorification of God but, rather, the gratification of the masses. That the tools are being used to make man faster, more informed, and autonomous.

They also see the new Babel being built. Constructed out of materials from new age pragmatism, nourished by fast food, educated by infidels and catechized by the non-Church. The result is an ugly structure with no sure foundation that is destined to topple. Proofs of its demise are easily seen in the limitless tax monies required to repeatedly prop and patch this City of Man.

Those who have escaped and found sanctuary in the simple, separate and deliberate, have become masons, carpenters, and artisans involved in the building of a Kingdom that is beautiful. They will take the same technology and tools used by the pagans, (and their confused Christian brothers), and work like craftsmen, laboriously taking their time in producing an everlasting work at whatever cost to themselves, which in their estimation, is their reasonable service.

And lest anyone think that this is an obscurantist, separatist, monastic view of life, be misinformed no longer. We intend to obliterate and replace this present misrepresentation of humanity with the true, the good, and the beautiful. This is our agenda. We are prepared to spend our lives doing this; we have a taste for nothing else. We will build slow and strong for generations. And we will use any and all tools available--the internet, the garden hoe, the claw hammer, the cell phone and the Newman generator. We are here, we are here, we are here! And someday, we will be all that there is.