The Speed of Godliness vs. The Speed of Technology

Technology is speeding things up and people feel like everything in their lives should speed up. Spiritual formation takes time. Here’s a quote from an interview with Dr. James Houston in the Denver Seminary Magazine, on spiritual formation and integrity. Responding to a question about speeding up the process of spiritual formation, Dr. Houston says:

“Well, I think the vocabulary is wrong, because it’s all part of living in a technological society. And so processes, procedures, programs are all, in a sense, technical devices or a technical mindset for fixing things. So we want to fix things quickly.

But the very nature of integrity is that we have a speed that is appropriate to what we are doing. The speed of gaining information is very fast, but the speed of godliness is very slow. Or the speed of making a friend is very slow in comparison with other forms. So we lose integrity when we use the wrong mindset or the wrong speed at which we’re operating. My problem is that I can think faster than I can speak, I speak faster than I can act, I’ve got more acts than I’ve got character for… so maintaining integrity is acting appropriately.”

These are notes from my friend Peggy Reynoso that we took at one of our Renovare Conferences. Thanks Peggy!

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