How Amish Evaluate Technology

A post on the resonate.ca blog directed me to this 1999 article in Wired. It's a very interesting piece on how Amish communities evaluate what technologies will be allowed, for what purposes, and which will not. The bishops consider how extended use of the technology will tend to shape the people who use it, and also ask the question "Does it bring us together, or draw us apart?" — a particularly important question for a people that values community highly.

The author found much guidance in his interaction with the Amish on the use of technology to apply in his own thinking — something he had most definitely not expected. His article ends thusly:

I never expected the Amish to provide precise philosophical yardsticks that could guide the use of technological power. What drew me in was their long conversation with their tools. We technology-enmeshed "English" don't have much of this sort of discussion. And yet we'll need many such conversations, because a modern heterogeneous society is going to have different values, different trade-offs, and different discourses. It's time we start talking about the most important influence on our lives today.

I came away from my journey with a question to contribute to these conversations: If we decided that community came first, how would we use our tools differently?

While he was thinking primarily of technology in terms of "things", I suspect we could also apply some of the same observations to our use of technology in terms of "methods". Might we in the church not be much better advised to have the sort of "long conversation" with our methodological tools that the Amish have, than to simply adopt whatever method seems to have "worked" in some other context? How would our decisions around music style, liturgy, program times and methods, staffing, small groups, goals and vision statements, etc. differ if we thought about what sort of people we would tend to become from long term use of these approaches? I wonder.