In his monumental and enduring letter to the church in Rome, the Apostle Paul issues two perennial reminders to disciples of any and every generation: “Do not be conformed to this present age, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may test and approve what is the will of God” (Rom 12:2, NET).
The first and foundational reminder comes at the end of the verse, in the “so that” clause, where the apostle orients us to the core of our reason for being: to discern and embrace what God wants for our lives. Though Paul doesn’t use the term “vocation” in Romans 12:2, he nevertheless underscores the concept: Those who consider themselves to be disciples of Jesus have a responsibility to attune and faithfully respond to the “Voice” that has called them into being and summoned them to join in his mission for the world.[1] So, Paul here reminds us that our primary responsibility is to hear and respond faithfully to what God has revealed us to be and called us to do—to be the kind of humans we were made to be. This is God’s will.
The second reminder is equally important: Disciples of every generation are faced with the challenge of discerning and living out their vocation in a context in which they are being directed away from what God wants for their lives. That is, Paul stresses that if would-be disciples do nothing—if they are not intentional about discerning and embracing their vocation, if they just “go with the flow”—then they already are being conformed (note the passive grammatical construction), being shaped by and to a pattern of life that does not align with their reason for being.
It is important to reflect briefly on the word “age,” which in other English translations of Romans is often rendered as “world.” It derives from the Greek word aeon. For Paul, an aeon is a segment of time that is characterized by a set of (a) patterns or habits of life that are built on (b) unreflective values and (c) unquestioned assumptions about what it means to be human that together make up a “vision of the good life.” These unquestioned assumptions about what it means to be human are absorbed or metabolized (more often than not unconsciously) through the uncritical consumption of some sort of implicit narrative that teaches us who we are, where we are, what has gone wrong, and how that problem is to be resolved.[2] The unsettling point that Paul makes in Romans 12:2 is that our “default position” in whatever age we live is that of being conformed by and to a pattern of life that does not reflect our true vocation.
When we bring these two perennial reminders together, we see more clearly that if we are going to properly discern and embrace what God wants for us, that is, if we are going to be faithful to our vocation—if we are going to be the humans that God has made us to be—then we must also pay attention to the ways in which our age is actively shaping our habits and assumptions about the good life and what it means to be human. In other words, we are compelled to contemplate not only What is the will of God? but also What are we being conformed to? This, I suggest, is one of the most urgent tasks and challenges of pastoral leadership and care today—helping our congregations become more attuned to what our technological age is doing to us.
The Context of Our Technological Age
To do so, it is important to locate our technological age within the context of a larger trajectory that stretches all the way back to the Enlightenment. To make a long story short, we now live in a “me-centered” world.[3] By “me-centered,” I am not so much lamenting that our technological age is overly selfish or narcissistic—at least not more than any other era! Instead, I choose the term because it succinctly expresses the stark contrast between what we now assume about what it means to be human compared to what commonly was assumed at all other times and places. Ron Highfield’s work in God, Freedom, and Human Dignity has underscored this stark reorientation by helpfully tracing the way in which the Western world moved away from self-understanding and morality that was grounded in external things like nature, divine order, or even group identity, and has now shifted to “inwardness” as the norm for establishing identity, purpose, calling, dignity, and flourishing.[4]
He shows that in past ages, it was assumed that freedom, dignity, and flourishing could only be attained by bringing oneself into harmony with the natural order of things—something extrinsic to the self. Or, to borrow Paul’s language, our notion of flourishing once required us to conform to God’s will and world. But with the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, there developed a new set of assumptions that flipped what it means to be human on its head: Freedom, dignity, and human flourishing are attained by conforming the world to our desires, wants, and longings. Enabled by scientific inquiry, human reason, and technological innovation, suddenly we gained the understanding and the power we needed to manipulate creation and subdue it for our own purposes. And over the decades and centuries, as we have grown in our scientific knowledge and technological capabilities, it has become increasingly more plausible to assume that there is no human nature to which we ought to conform, no design or purpose inherent in the natural world, no limits to being embodied, and no created order that governs morality, justice, and the good. Instead, we now live in an age in which we take for granted—with little to no awareness or reflection—that dignity and fulfillment are rooted inward in our psychology: our feelings, preferences, thoughts, opinions, and wishes. What is important to see here is that in this way of conceiving of the human person, technology becomes a kind of high priest or mediator that enables us to achieve our dignity, freedom, and happiness. And even worse, we begin to expect God to function like our technology—to give us the capacity to control and conform the world to our inner longings and desires. And when God doesn’t perform in this way, we are disappointed.
As a professor and dean, increasingly I’ve seen the harsh impact that the technological age unknowingly has had on the current generation emerging as the first natives of the technological age. As they begin their university years, they seem to bear a burden unlike any other generation before them. From the day they step onto a college campus, they embark on a quest to find their place in the world—to clarify who they are, why they are here, and what they are going to do with their lives. That’s not new. But what is new is that they come already having been conditioned to assume that they must manufacture their identity and purpose for themselves, that identity and purpose are not given, conferred, revealed, or discovered—not something that is received from outside of ourselves. Instead, identity and purpose are achieved once we find the capabilities to bend the world to our wants.
This burden makes the quest for identity and purpose nearly impossible for most of these digital natives, because they have also been formed (often unknowingly) to assume there is no coherence in our world—no one true story that orients us to our truest selves. Instead, they have learned that our intellectual, academic, professional, social, and spiritual lives are disconnected and even worse, unrelated, and that at times these compartments compete against each other. And in lots of ways, they have learned that we as a society—those who have gone before them on this quest—really don’t know who we are, what we are doing, or why we are doing what we are doing. And so increasingly, for many of these digital natives, life is like trying to put together Humpty Dumpty, or even worse, a piece of Ikea furniture with one or two missing parts!
This is one of the reasons we all often feel so exhausted. When we unintentionally participate in our technological age—taking part in the patterns of life that have shaped us and formed a plausibility structure in which it seems obvious that we must manufacture our identity according to our desires in order to be our truest selves; when we uncritically absorb the assumption that our dignity and flourishing depend on the freedom to become whatever we want—then at some point we inevitably find ourselves either feeling left alone to determine the most important aspects of our lives, or worse, set in direct competition against God.
This is the context of the age we live in. This is what is happening to us if we just unintentionally “go with the flow.” And as we increasingly expect technology to mediate our dignity and to generate flourishing, as we increasingly find technology ubiquitously embedded in every aspect of our lives, our capacity to discern and embrace our vocation is profoundly hindered.
Three More Byproducts of Our Technological Age
And this is, in part, because of three other pernicious byproducts of living in this technological ecosystem.[5] First, we are distracted, more than any other generation that has gone before us.[6] And this is not an accident. It is a design feature of the devices and apps that call to us from our pockets or purses. Increasingly, we are learning the hard way that the most fundamental commodity today is attention.[7] We are confronted with the reality that our quality of life, our ability to enjoy meaningful relationships, and our capacity to attune to God’s will and ways—and to respond faithfully—is dependent on our capability to pay attention, to be undistracted, to focus on what needs attention. It is, therefore, urgent that pastors prioritize equipping, or perhaps better said, retraining their congregations to practice paying attention to what they are paying attention to, and more importantly, to be able to attune to what God is saying to them and doing in and through them.[8]
The second pernicious byproduct is that we are impatient. This, of course, is fueled by distraction. Short-form video, doom scrolling, instant access to complex information and problem-solving platforms, music and entertainment “on demand,” smartphone dependence and overuse are reshaping our cognition and generating an insatiable appetite for novelty.[9] Our devices are literally training us, by rewiring the chemistry of our brains, to be impatient. This is why we find it more difficult than ever to tolerate “deep work” or to contemplate the familiar. But if all the generations of Christians who have walked before us have taught us anything, it is that growth and maturity take time and perseverance—a long obedience in the same direction—and that God does not seem to ever be in a hurry.
Finally, we are polarized. This also is a design feature of our devices. In order to garner attention, drive engagement, and combat impatience, social media platforms program algorithms to amplify hostile content that fuels outrage and to funnel users into curated ideological echo chambers that reinforce what they already believe.[10] As a result, these algorithms are training us to define ourselves and to see others according to the available, socially constructed categories provided by the age we live in. The challenge of being a disciple of Jesus, especially in our digital age, is to recognize that this is happening to us and to “from now on no longer regard anyone from a worldly point of view but instead as one who is being reconciled to God in Christ.”[11]
So, when we “go with the flow,” when we do not seek to discern what is happening to us in our technological age, then we inevitably participate in these habits, assumptions, and values that animate our age. Unintentionally, we assume that God exists to empower us to control our world and conform it to our desires; we are trained to be distracted and impatient, unable to attend to that which matters most, that which enables to know and do God’s will; and we are pushed into ideological echo chambers that train us to dehumanize the neighbors we are called to love and serve as ambassadors of Christ.
The good news is that we have the resources to overcome this technological age as it works against us—but we need to be explicit in our employment of them. For example, when we engage in corporate worship—prayer, Scripture reading and exposition, confession, the Lord’s table, the passing of the peace, baptism, giving, and spiritual direction—we must do so while explicitly acknowledging that these practices are the fundamentals of being faithful humans, training us to pay attention to the truest story about who we are and to what God is doing in our lives, conditioning us to be patient, and to see our neighbor as one whom God is reconciling to himself through the ministry of reconciliation that has been entrusted to us. We must explicitly remind ourselves that we have been invited to participate in the “realest” reality—namely, God’s life of love in Christ and by the Spirit.[12] And since this age shapes us corporately such that we cannot individually opt out of our technological age, now is the time for creative collaboration, pastors working together to develop fresh ways to shape whole congregations to become counter-cultural communities of vocational attention, patience, and neighborly love.[13]
References
[1] The term vocation comes to us from the Latin verb vocare, which means “to call,” and the noun vox, which means “voice.” To have a vocation means to respond to the “voice” that “calls” or summons you. Thus, “calling” and “vocation” are synonymous. See, for example, Ephesians 4:1, where Paul uses the term “calling/called” to sum up our proper response to what God has done for us through Jesus and the Spirit—as Paul outlines in Ephesians 1–3.
[2] Importantly, Paul in Romans 1–11 is challenging the narrative of his age by telling the true story of the world as embodied in the life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus Christ.
[3] This “me-centered” terminology and the insights that follow are drawn from Ron Highfield’s God, Freedom, and Human Dignity: Embracing a God-Centered Identity in a Me-Centered Culture (IVP Academic, 2013). This is an excellent place to learn the “long story” of how we got to where we are today.
[4] See especially Chapter 1 of Highfield, God, Freedom, and Human Dignity.
[5] It should be noted that treating God like technology (and thus being disappointed with God), exhaustion, distraction, impatience, and polarization are not the only byproducts of the technological age, but seem to me to be the most pernicious.
[6] See Maggie Jackson Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming of the Dark Age (Prometheus Books, 2008).
[7] See Chris Hayes, The Siren’s Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource (Penguin Press, 2025).
[8] E.g., Dallas Willard, Renovation of the Heart: Putting on the Character of Christ (NavPress, 2002); Eugene Peterson, A Long Obedience in the Same Direction: Discipleship in an Instant Society (IVP Formatio, 2024); James K.A. Smith, You are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos Press, 2016); Tish Harrison Warren, Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life (IVP, 2019); or Andy Crouch, The Life We Are Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World (Convergent Books, 2022).
[9] See Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can’t Pay Attention—And How to Think Deeply Again (Crown, 2022).
[10] This polarization is not inevitable. Research has shown that algorithms can be designed to reduce polarization.
[11] See Paul’s more detailed development of this idea in 2 Corinthians 5:14–21.
[12] See Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (IVP Academic, 2022); Part Two of Highfield, God, Freedom, and Human Dignity.
[13] For an example of how the early church did this, see Alan Kreider, The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire (Baker Academic, 2016).