“Oh my gosh, you’re ancient!”

That was Miller Pitt’s spontaneous outburst when he checked the version of Mozilla Firefox I was using to access the internet on the PC in my study at the church.  It was working fine, except each time I went to our own church web site some of the content did not appear.  I couldn’t figure out what was wrong, so I asked Miller to look at it.  He’s the tech guy around here and knows a whole lot more than me about that stuff.  He quickly downloaded the latest version of Mozilla and problem solved.

Interestingly enough it was working fine until about three weeks ago.  One day I checked our web site and the problem showed up.  I don’t know why it took me three weeks to have Miller look at it…procrastination for an unknown reason.

By the way…he then checked my assistant’s Mozilla and exclaimed, “Golly, yours is even more ancient!”

Technology changes fast…very fast.  We buy something today and tomorrow it’s outdated, unable to operate the newer programs.

Technology is not the only thing that changes fast…a lot of things do.  We either keep up or things pass us by.

Churches that have been around for a while often struggle with this fast changing world.  We tend to change slowly, so we get behind.  If we’re not intentional about trying to stay current, we get farther and farther behind.  Then one day we wake up, only to discover that we’re ancient…and not working as well as we once did.

Procrastination as a church diminishes our effectiveness during the period we’ve been procrastinating…and catching up is not easy or quick.  But catch up we must!

While the gospel of Jesus Christ is eternal and God’s word will never fade away, we cannot say the same thing about everything we do at church.  Otherwise we really will become ancient…and that would be a tragedy.

Pastor Steve Hogg