By: Stephen McAlpine
Dumb Phones
Okay, so it’s not the blog post you think it is going to be.
But we all know that dumb phones are a thing again. Those phones that, some twenty odd years ago, seemed pretty smart cos we could text with them, (the flip-top Motorola being a particularly sweet little number), but apart from making phone calls, that is all they did.
Look at all those in the picture above. If you’re my age or even ten to fifteen years younger, you remember these things well.
And dumb phones are back. Faced with a plethora of social media distractions and apps there is a whole contingent of people reverting to dumb phones. Can we just strip this thing back down to something manageable, relatable and not so shredding of our time, attention and sanity?
There are heaps of sites selling them, their are newspaper articles rating the best of them, and their are long form essays in quality journals explaining their rise in popularity (though that probably doesn’t need too much thought!).
The craze was big in 2024, though who knows if we’re so addicted to our smart phones that we can’t resist the urge over the long haul to just revert. And obviously when so much of life is now channelled through the smart phone (banking, maps, car screens etc) it makes it harder.
But writing in The New York Times last year, columnist Kashmir Hill, said that she noted the difference it made to her life having switched for a full month.
Despite these challenges, I survived, even thrived during the month. It was a relief to unplug my brain from the internet on a regular basis and for hours at a time. I read four books. I did a very cool magic jigsaw puzzle. I went on long runs with my husband, during which we talked, rather than retreating into separate audio universes with AirPods. I felt that I had more time, and more control over what to do with it. After about two weeks, I noticed I’d lost my “thumb twitch” — a physical urge to check my phone in the morning, at red lights, waiting for an elevator or at any other moment when my mind had a brief opportunity to wander.
All very cute, and all very optional. And there’s plenty more in the article which talks about the realities of making the switch and how hard that is in a social and technological context which pushes you towards the smart phone and, let’s face it, pushes you towards distraction.
Dumb Church
Which brings me to dumb church. I was speaking just today to a minister in Sydney who said that he had noted a return to the “plain wrap” or “vanilla” church he was leading, by a bunch of young lads who had gone off to explore the more sexy versions of church.
Their return was hastened by their desire to dial down the constant distraction of having to always be “on”. The superlatives, the constant media updates, the sense of “this is the latest…” and the constant need to be “excellent” (whatever that means).
These young blokes had tired of it. They wanted to do dumb church again. Church without all of the apps, so to speak. The apps that are always calling them to something more, or something radical or whatever it is. Dumb church – just plain old church with those apps removed, just seemed more sustainable.
And here’s the thing about those so called apps. They distract from the main game. The main game of the Word being at the centre of the community, sending people out to love and serve in the myriad ways they can – and have to – on any given week.
The main game of a meal together when we can, and just spending time with God’s people and seeking ways to make Him meaningful in our external lives and relationships.
Supposed smart church just seems so often to be for the sake of ministry heavy hitters who need to change it up all the time. And those things can be distracting. Those things can give us the equivalent of the smart phone eye-twitch.
I even heard of a church deliberating reverting to hymnals, quelle horreur!
But of course this shift is not primarily about the need to remove technologies from our churches. It’s not about becoming Amish, certainly not theologically, and not becoming Luddites, with an impervious and often ungrounded ideology about tech.
It’s about asking the hard question of the busyness of church and the constant distraction that modern church can – if it is not self-critical enough – apes from the culture. And what those things are doing to our core relationships.
In his excellent book, Made in Our Image: God, Artificial Intelligence and You, Stephen Driscoll observes that the Amish did not simply abandon certain technologies willy-nilly. On the contrary, they had an a priori list of values that they held to. And all technologies were placed under the grid of those values and assessed.
So why is there no TV in the Amish community? Not because they are Luddites. But because their conviction was that as a technology it would hinder, and indeed destroy, their foundational commitment to fostering deep relationships with each other. They assumed the advent of TV would lead to less communal time between and within families in their community.
Have they been proven right about the influence of the blue screen in each of our households? Whatever you think of the good or ill of TV, the answer has to be yes. TV has change the depth and width of our communal life over the past sixty years. It’s not the only thing that has, but it is an integral one.
The same is true obviously of our churches. Not only what technologies might wither our lives as God’s people, but what supposedly good things that have been ramped up beyond our ability to sustain, are in danger of shredding our communities?
Getting Rid of Apps
Perhaps the horse has bolted on whether we all need literal apps for our churches to function well. I would say the “app-less” days are probably over. But modern communication techniques is not what this is really about.
At some level we need to delete some of the equivalent of the smart phone distractions. we need to get rid of the many things on the screen menu.
Churches that decide to go “dumb” might find that they become places of refuge for people who are over-taxed by the pace of life, the demands of the culture, and the constant churn of upgrade, shiny new stuff, and a corporate church experience that is always “on” and rarely gives time for rest.
Smart phone church is just as easy to hide in our modern evangelical reformed tradition as it has been in the bigger, more pentecostal settings. We just use different language to hide it.
And I am convinced that we can often hide a frantic app-laden disposition among our theological and missional convictions. Frantic church goers who have to almost be enticed to sign up to another thing, along with burnt out church ministers who are constantly worrying that things are in decline, are a sign that we may be addicted to our smart churches.
Dumb church might be the solution. And of course there will be plenty of visionaries and missionally minded leaders who will point out the pitfalls, or at least the perceived pitfalls, (mission-drift, loss of evangelistic zeal, an ungodly laziness, disobedience to the Great Commission etc). And I get all that and I’ve read all the books.
Fair enough. But the last two decades of my tribe doing smart church, it hasn’t necessarily delivered. And dumb church might be what an exhausted community needs for a while. Smart phones have not made us more reflective, but more distracted. Smart phones have not thickened our relationships, but thinned them out. Smart phones have not formed us deep in knowledgeable craft, but have delivered us a smorgasbord of competing interests, none of which we explore too deeply.
Dumb church is not about being less connected, or less zealous, it’s about longer focus on a couple of things and assuming that if we sow and water, then God will give the increase.
Sometimes that will look busier than other times. But what it won’t look like is as frantic and distracted as the world. It won’t look like it’s always chasing the next best thing. Or the next app that will solve the problem that the last one promised to solve, but didn’t.
There’s more to the story of course, and these are just my initial musings. But after some of the conversations I’ve been having with people who have dialled down some of their smart phone thinking, and replaced it with dumb phone thinking, this idea doesn’t sound so stupid.
Article supplied with thanks to Stephen McAlpine
About the Author: Stephen has been reading, writing and reflecting ever since he can remember. He is the lead pastor of Providence Church Midland, and in his writing dabbles in a number of fields, notably theology and culture. Stephen and his family live in Perth’s eastern suburbs, where his wife Jill runs a clinical psychology practice.
Feature image: Photo by Rayson Tan on Unsplash