We have spent a long time asking what technology can do for us.
We have spent far less time asking what technology is doing to us.
That, in essence, was the heart of my recent conversation with Jay Kim on Created in the Image of God. Jay is the lead pastor of Westgate Church in the heart of Silicon Valley, and that detail matters. He is not reflecting on technology from a safe distance. He is living, pastoring, and thinking in the very ecosystem that has shaped much of the modern world’s assumptions about speed, scale, convenience, efficiency, and connection.
And what he offered was not a screed against machines, nor another tired “phones are bad” rant. It was something more careful, and therefore more unsettling.
Technology, Jay suggested, should do things for us. It should serve human flourishing. It should amplify what is good, true, beautiful, useful, and humane.
But if we are not careful, technology stops being a tool and becomes a power that forms us.
And if it forms us badly, it does not just inconvenience us. It deforms us.
That is a distinction worth sitting with.
A church in Silicon Valley sees the future early
One of the privileges of talking to someone like Jay is that he sees certain pressures before the rest of us fully name them.
His congregation is made up in large part of people who either work directly in technology or are closely adjacent to it. Apple Park is minutes away. Google, Meta, and other giants are nearby. This means many of the questions that drift into the rest of society eventually arrive in Silicon Valley first and often in concentrated form.
What does all of that mean at street level?
It means that people are not merely using technology. They are immersed in a world where technology is assumed to be the answer to nearly everything. It is the cultural air they breathe. It shapes work, communication, expectation, pace, identity, and aspiration. It affects not only what people do, but how they imagine a good life.
That is why Jay’s question is so important.
Not: Is technology useful?
Of course it is.
Not even: Can technology help us?
Obviously it can.
The deeper question is: What sort of people is it making us into?
From tool to tyrant
Jay put it with admirable precision: we have to distinguish between what technology does for us and the way technology forms us.
That sounds simple, but it cuts straight to the bone.
A hammer can drive a nail for you. That is a tool. A car can get you from one city to another. That is a tool. A telescope can reveal galaxies otherwise hidden from sight. That is a tool.
But smartphones, social platforms, algorithmic feeds, constant notifications, ambient connectivity, and now AI systems do not merely perform isolated tasks. They create habits. They reward certain patterns of attention. They train reflexes. They alter our expectations of speed, availability, validation, and stimulation.
They shape our nervous systems.
They shape our relationships.
They shape our sense of time.
They shape our capacity for silence.
They shape our understanding of what counts as meaningful.
In other words, they do not merely help us act. They help decide what kind of actors we become.
That is where tool becomes tyrant.
And if that sounds dramatic, Jay was clear that the evidence is no longer speculative. The data around social media, anxiety, loneliness, depression, and teen suicide rates is sobering enough that we should stop pretending this is all just cultural hand-wringing by older people who do not like change.
Something real is happening.
The air we breathe may be toxic
One of Jay’s most vivid metaphors in our conversation was this: the digital age is now the cultural atmosphere.
We are all breathing it in.
And once you see it that way, the obvious follow-up question is: what toxins are in the air?
That is not anti-technology paranoia. It is simple moral and spiritual responsibility.
We test water.
We test food.
We monitor air quality.
We inspect products for lead, asbestos, carcinogens, and contaminants.
Why would we not do the same, morally speaking, for the technologies that mediate consciousness, relationships, childhood, and public life?
Jay’s concern is not merely that digital tools distract us. It is that they may be training us into forms of life that are less human than the ones we were made for.
Less patient.
Less attentive.
Less embodied.
Less capable of presence.
Less capable of deep thought.
Less able to receive limits.
Less able to love.
That is not a small problem.
If human beings are created in the image of God, then anything that persistently malforms our loves, our minds, our relationships, and our capacity for presence is not just a lifestyle issue. It is a theological issue.
The bridge generation—or the bent generation?
During our conversation, I mentioned something I had just heard at my daughter’s graduation.
One student speaker described his cohort as the bridge generation—the generation that would help carry society forward, the generation adaptable enough to navigate the changes handed to them.
It was a hopeful framing. And in one sense, perhaps it is true.
But listening to Jay, I found myself thinking about the darker side of that optimism.
Bridge to what?
COVID accelerated something in young people that many parents and teachers could feel even if they did not yet have words for it. Technology no longer functioned simply as a supplement. It became the environment itself. School, friendship, identity, entertainment, affirmation, and boredom all got rerouted through screens at a formative age.
That changes people.
Jay did not overstate this. But he did not understate it either. And neither should we.
A generation can be adaptable and still be damaged. It can become highly functional within a system that is quietly hollowing out its emotional, spiritual, and relational life.
To be “good at digital life” is not the same as being well-formed.
The smartphone as cigarette
Perhaps the most arresting line in the whole interview was Jay’s comparison between handing a child a smartphone and handing them a pack of cigarettes.
That is not because a phone and a cigarette are identical. They are not.
It is because cultures often normalize harmful things long before they develop the moral imagination to see them clearly.
Jay referenced those old Camel cigarette ads that suggested doctors preferred a particular brand, as if the thing harming you might actually be helping you. We look back on those ads now with disbelief. How could people not see it?
But perhaps future generations will ask the same of us.
How could parents, schools, churches, and entire societies place endlessly stimulating, addictive, identity-shaping devices into the hands of children and call it normal? How could they do that while evidence mounted that these tools were correlating with anxiety, despair, social fragmentation, and compulsive dependence?
I added my own comic-book analogy in the conversation. When I was a kid, Thor lost his power if he was separated from his hammer for too long. Watching some young people today, one gets the impression that if the phone leaves their hand for sixty minutes, they revert to mortal panic.
That may be funny. It is also not far from the truth.
Churches are not immune
One of the most important parts of this conversation was Jay’s warning that churches are often too reckless in the way they adopt technology.
Not because all technology in church is bad. It isn’t.
But because churches are particularly vulnerable to baptizing whatever seems to promise greater reach, scale, efficiency, growth, or impact. If a tool can increase audience, expand platform, streamline communication, or extend influence, the temptation is to grab it and justify the decision after the fact.
Jay’s point was that we need slower, more serious conversations than that.
If the church adopts technologies that train people to expect spectacle, convenience, frictionless belonging, passive consumption, and disembodied participation, then the church may be undermining the very sort of formation it claims to care about.
This is not just about worship livestreams or sermon clips. It is about ecclesiology. What is the church for? What kind of people is it trying to form? And can those ends really be served by any means so long as “reach” increases?
Jay is right to be cautious.
A larger church is not automatically a healthier church. A more scalable church is not automatically a more faithful church. If digital culture tends to make the large larger and the small weaker, we should at least ask what kinds of community are being rewarded and what kinds are quietly dying.
What gives hope
And yet Jay was not despairing.
One of the most hopeful parts of the interview was his observation that people are approaching AI with more caution than they approached social media fifteen years ago. When social media arrived at scale, society largely welcomed it with naive enthusiasm. We were told it would create a global village, deepen connection, democratize voice, and bring people together.
Instead, it often fractured us.
Because that lesson has now been learned, perhaps painfully, people seem more alert as AI rises. There is more apprehension. More questioning. More willingness to ask whether speed itself might be a problem.
That gives Jay hope, and I share some of it.
He also shared practical examples. His wife’s public high school is moving toward phone-locking pouches in classrooms. His own family is taking a hard line: no social media for their kids until adulthood, and even his daughter’s first phone is a flip phone.
I suspect some readers will find that extreme.
But what struck me was not the extremity. It was the sanity.
When a culture becomes disordered enough, sanity starts to look radical.
Peace at a human pace
All of this points naturally to Jay’s upcoming book, The Pace of Peace.
The title alone gets at something deeper than digital hygiene. The issue is not merely how to manage devices. It is how to recover a pace of life that is actually human.
Jay described this not just as life-changing, but life-saving.
That language matters. We often speak of peace as an inward feeling or a therapeutic state. But Jay’s vision is more robust. Peace has a pace. It belongs to a kingdom that does not move at the speed of cultural panic, corporate ambition, or algorithmic demand.
And perhaps that is where this conversation lands.
Technology is not evil because it is powerful. It becomes dangerous when power escapes moral limits. When convenience outruns wisdom. When speed outruns presence. When formation happens without consent. When tools quietly become masters.
The challenge before us is not to smash every device or retreat into fantasy. It is to discern what kind of humanity we are willing to protect.
If we do not ask what technology is doing to our souls, someone else will answer that question for us—likely with a product update.
You are created in the image of God.
Not in the image of the machine.
Not in the image of the market.
Not in the image of the feed.
The question is whether we still remember the difference.
Sneak Peek: What’s Coming Up on Created in the Image of God
Next on Created in the Image of God:
- Sunday, July 19 at 7:00 a.m. US Central time: I interview Jen Pollock Michel—author, speaker, and writing mentor—on desire, time, and the ordinary practices of faith, and how scripture reshapes the way we see everyday life.
- Tuesday, July 21 at 8:00 p.m. Central time: I interview Brian Adamson, kingdom business coach and entrepreneur, on how faith and business can work together, helping leaders build with purpose instead of striving.
From longing and limitation to leadership and impact, we’ll keep exploring what it means to live faithfully in the real world.
As always:
You are created in the image of God, and God loves His creation.
