Copyright: © 1997 Paul F. Bosch.
This document may be freely reproduced for non-commercial purposes with credit to the author and mention of the Lift Up Your Hearts web site http://www.worship.ca/ as the source.

In retirement, says a friend, every day is Saturday. (Although I'm now officially retired and drawing my pensions, I'm nevertheless still in harness, so to speak, three days a week as Interim Pastor at St.Peter's Lutheran Church in downtown Kitchener, Ontario.)

Nevertheless, following that splendid principle put forward by my friend, the week before Ash Wednesday found us -- my wife and I -- in Trinidad, B.W.I., for Carnival. We had been invited by our hosts to join them one afternoon at a country club party. We were at poolside, "liming" with friends. In the rich vocabulary of that Caribbean island, the term "liming" refers to a kind of hanging out, and hanging loose, with friends -- a kind of laid-back, convivial socializing that, out of my own tradition, I'd have associated with Gemutlichkeit.

A monstrous wall of electronic loudspeakers had been installed on a stage nearby, and was at this moment assaulting our eardrums. The loudspeakers were set at a volume that, with every pulse of its rhythms, you felt in your solar plexus, and under the soles of your feet. It was actually painful for me to bear; these days, in my twilight years, I wear not one but two hearing aids, one in each ear, and I could do nothing but take them out and put them in my pocket. I perceived the recorded, amplified music as a monstrous personal assault.

Presently the recorded music stopped. And a live, genuine Trinidadian steel band began to play, marching through the crowd.

Now the volume -- the decibel level -- of a Trinidadian steel band, as you probably know, is not exactly that of the string section of the Toronto Symphony. The musicians make their music, as you also probably know, by hammering on the up-ended bottoms of steel oil drums, salvaged from the dump, and more-or-less precisely tuned, believe it or not, so as to provide, in many cases, several octaves of pitch.

In any case, the music was gloriously ear-shattering. I kept my hearing aids in my pocket. But I loved every minute of this music. It was live; it was acoustic; I did not perceive it as an assault, but as an invitation to high-energy revelry. It was marvelous! I was surrounded by swells of sound in a glorious secular liturgy.

Now, these things are a parable. The experience confirmed a growing conviction in me: that "high" technology, as it is called, has no place in Christian liturgy.

The church I serve in my retirement (part-time, interim) is a handsome but huge contemporary neo-gothic-style cathedral, with an expensive public address system. Its constraints require that, each Sunday, I get "miked" with a lavalier-style lapel microphone. (Lapels? On a chasuble?) It's been a constant irritant to me: I forget to turn it on; my movements are restricted; the radio box slips off my belt and clatters to the floor; I find my feet tangled in its aerial. And the diligent volunteer in the sound booth is sometimes unable to prevent the whole system from squawking or humming or screaming at the decibel level of those poolside Trinidadian loudspeakers -- or so it sometimes seems to me.

The bottom line? "High-tech" has no place in worship. (And this from someone who wears two hearing aids, and carries in his rib-cage an artificial steel-and-nylon aortic heart valve!) By "high-tech" I'm referring, in this context, to PA systems, overhead projectors, "multi-media" slide shows, electric guitars, taped or recorded music, electronic "organs" -- anything that depends on electricity for its functioning.

Any church building, for example, that needs a PA system is simply too big: build smaller. And train worship leaders to project their voices.

Yes, I suppose I'm a Luddite: someone who's suspicious of technology. (The term comes from the mythic character Ned Ludd, who, in the days when the Industrial Revolution was transforming British industry, and building its factories (those "dark, satanic mills"), organized cottage workers to sabotage the new technology, and thus protect their own hands-on craft work.)

Of course, you'll argue, even a beeswax candle represents a primitive "technology." Sure: so is an oil lamp; so is a book (a hymnbook!) But this is "low-tech", not "high-tech". Low-tech is "user-friendly" in ways that high-tech can never be. Low-tech is humane. Low-tech belongs in worship; high-tech does not.

Another parable: My wife and I are honoured to be major benefactors in providing our own parish church with a small but splendid little 19th Century tracker organ, where all the "works", with the exception of the air supply, are mechanical, not electronic. When a key on the keyboard mis-functioned at a Sunday Service recently, our pastor, himself a respected organist, repaired the thing in minutes -- between Services! -- with a rubber-band! He quoted a teacher of his: "Never trust anything you have to plug in!"