More on Technology and the Church

Sometimes I feel like the church always lags behind a fews years in technology. I visualize it almost as a large, ancient, lumbering organization trying to adapt to a fast-paced society. For instance, my calling, home teaching supervisor, should be mostly automated by requiring ward members to go on-line once a month and fill out a form communicating their home-teaching results. Instead, I have to manually call everyone in my group, record their results, and then pass them off to my quorum leader who has to tally the results and compile the final report. Perhaps because of my computer science background, I occasionally spot what I see as inefficiencies in the church bureaucratic process that could be easily smoothed over by some type of computer-based solution.

Whenever I read about how the church is technology, however, I am almost always awed, not by what they are doing, but by the attitude they have toward technologoy as they attempt to best utilize it. The church continues to see technology as a gift from God to help further the work and this belief pervades all of their decisions on technology useage in the church, from mormon.org to the church's internal record-keep systems to the new Family Search API. They are cautious because the very nature of the work requires them to be. So far, the results have been very positive and beneficial to the church as well as the world.