by Chris McKenna
You guard the doors of your church, vet your volunteers, and lock your nurseries at night. You preach protection, model discipleship, and shepherd families through their hardest seasons. Yet across your congregation, children are being handed a portal to the entire unfiltered internet, often without a word of guidance from the church.
The pulpit has always been called to speak into the cultural forces shaping the next generation. Right now, few forces are more powerful—or more quietly destructive—than smartphones and social media in the hands of children. What follows is an excerpt that I believe every pastor and church leader needs to sit with.
5 Habits of the Tech-Ready Family
Chapter 7, page 161
Does the Christian church bear a duty to cry out when parents place glowing iPhones into the hands of their children or nod “yes” to Snapchat’s lure? Too often, what I’ve heard is silence—an aching, thunderous silence from pulpits and platforms. Meanwhile, a quiet corrosion creeps into the souls of God’s children, seeded by the early glow of screens and the endless scroll of social media.
If you’re a churchgoer, maybe you have seen an image of Jesus in the kids’ wing of a church where he’s in a meadow with his arms around a group of children. It depicts a scene from Matthew 18:2–5 (NIV):
He called a little child to him and placed the child among them. And he said: “Truly I tell you, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven. Therefore, whoever takes the lowly position of this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me.”
Beautiful, right? But what I’ve never seen in that kids’ wing is a second picture right next to the first one, depicting a bloated, drowned body at the bottom of an ocean with a millstone tied around its neck. That would be from the next verses in the “little children” passage (Matthew 18:6–9 NIV), which say:
If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea. Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to stumble! Such things must come, but woe to the person through whom they come! If your hand or your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life maimed or crippled than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire. And if your eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to enter life with one eye than to have two eyes and be thrown into the fire of hell.
Graphic stuff! I think this illustration was meant to make us shudder. Jesus is making sure that we’re listening. Do not harm my children. He makes a strong case for ripping away things from our lives that cause us to stumble in our walk with God. When it comes to our children, should we do any less to protect them?
Saint Paul gives us the positive side of the coin:
Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things. (Philippians 4:8 NIV)
Does our tech give those things to our kids? Honestly, maybe so. Our kids use smartphones and social media for connection, entertainment, and exploration. And with those positives come experiences I’ve shared in the preceding pages, including sharp increases in anxiety, suicidal ideation, self-harm,