When I was in college several years ago, I worked for the Center for Students with Disabilities. One day, in the office, I was speaking with my supervisor, and the conversation turned to God.
Not having a Bible with me, we used her PC and I taught her a Bible study on the Gospel using
www.biblegateway.com.
She attended church with me that night and we baptized her in the name of Jesus Christ. She received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and God did a deep healing upon her heart. It was beautiful.
Also during college, I made a friend with a Japanese student, who then reached out to me because she had a friend back in Japan who was studying the Bible, but because of the nature of Japan's religious culture (or lack thereof, especially when it comes to Christianity), she didn't have many people to fellowship or study with. So I began teaching her a Bible study through email. She eventually came to the US and we had a chance to meet.
Prior to that, i.e. before college, when I had first become a Christian, I was witnessing to people on a non-religious message board. I made a friend who lived half the country away. One day, a couple of years later, he reached out to me, depressed, lonely, needing God. I evangelized him through email. The Holy Spirit descended on him as he read one of my emails, and he began attending an Apostolic church, and was immersed in the name of Jesus Christ.
The point of the story? Technology does not have to be a distraction that causes a Christian to fall into darkness. It is a tool, like any other, that can be used for the glory of God.
Should people walk away from it time to time? Yes, if their inner man is in needed of renewing, spending time with the Lord is the only thing that will satisfy. But it does not mean that the Christian faith as a whole, i.e. "Christianity", is "shrouded in darkness" simply because many people in this country (or other parts of the developed world) are lost in a malaise of techno-burnout.
The truth is Christianity is alive and well and is a light to the world, and is flourishing all over the globe. The current greatest revivals are happening in parts of the world where no technological advances exist, where no telecommunications infrastructure has been implemented. Explosive revivals all through out the poorest communities of the world, without in-door plumbing or safe drinking water, let alone smart phones, are happening as we speak.
Estimates of hundreds of millions of people in the world have been baptized in the Holy Spirit of God, to the point that Pentecostalism is giving Catholicism a run for its money in traditionally Catholic strongholds (Central and South America, especially).
Where then is the darkness? Is it not in obvious, weak generalizations and un-informed presumptions made against an entire, worldwide, world dominant faith?
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