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Church at the Cross has been going through a digital declutter this spring, identifying unhealthy connections to technology and intentionally making space for God to form their spiritual character.
“It’s no shock that in our cultural moment, screen times and people’s use of social media is extremely excessive,” said JR Vassar, lead pastor of Church at the Cross.
“Some stats are saying adults spend seven hours and two minutes a day on screens. It’s higher among Gen Z and Millennials, and all that time on screens has decreased our capacity to give sustained attention to things that are significant and truly meaningful.”
Intense focus on screens has led to the breakdown of human relationships and a negative impact on mental health, particularly among teenagers, whose levels of anxiety, depression, and suicidal ideation has escalated.
“It’s not just that these are unintended consequences,” Vassar said. “These technology companies have actually built their products in such a way as to create addiction and to keep you tied to it. It’s sort of like a symbiotic relationship. We are feeding off them for entertainment and dopamine hits, and they’re getting rich off of it.”
With insights from Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation and Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism, Vassar led Church at the Cross through a 30-day digital declutter in March alongside a sermon series called “The Attention Economy: Paying Attention to What Matters.”
“We’re doing this so that we can open our lives up and make ourselves available to God and let Him shape us with His Word in the context of community while eliminating all the competing things that would seek to capture our imagination and shape our values,” Vassar said.
"We’re doing this so that we can open our lives up and make ourselves available to God and let Him shape us with His Word in the context of community while eliminating all the competing things that would seek to capture our imagination and shape our values."
The goal was not for members to use their phones less, but to redefine their relationships with technology. During the 30 days, the church was encouraged to identify which digital tools were necessary in their lives—news feeds, texting, etc.
“These things are required for your job, they’re critical for your communication with people in your family. If a tool is deemed necessary, you mark it necessary,” Vassar said.
If a tool was deemed unnecessary, the goal was to eliminate that for 30 days. “This could be social media accounts. It could be streaming services. It could be a number of things that have stolen your focus and that tend to cannibalize a lot of your time and attention,” he added.
If a technological tool was deemed necessary, the pastor led the congregation in placing some rules for use around it. For instance, they would only text when a face-to-face conversation or phone call was impossible.
Then they were to determine what meaningful activities they needed to reintroduce into their lives, such as taking walks, having face-to-face conversations with their spouses, or having board game nights with their families.
“What we want is to remember that we are embodied people, and we’re meant to have embodied interactions with people, not just screen interactions,” Vassar said.
Most importantly, Church at the Cross was called to engage or re-engage with the Lord through the Scriptures, prayer, meditation, church attendance, and community life with other believers.
To facilitate the entire emphasis, church leaders developed a digital declutter workbook. At the end of each week, people were asked to consider reflection questions including, “What are you doing now that you thought you didn’t have time for in the past?”
“Some people feel like they just don’t have time to read, but now they’re actually reading books because they’re incorporating that activity into their lives that they think would be beneficial for their own formation and emotional and mental and spiritual health,” Vassar said.
A married couple had a great marriage but had gotten into a habit of sitting down and watching TV with their laptops open, the pastor said. Now they spend time on the back porch, eating meals together and conversing in meaningful ways.
A young woman was accustomed to listening to podcasts on her commute, but during the digital declutter she tried to be quiet and attentive to the Lord on the drive. “She’s actually enjoying the sunrise, and she’s having some thoughts about her life that she thinks have been kind of drowned out by a lot of other noise,” Vassar said.
“We’re seeing families spend more time together with the TV off and just more conversation and a lot more laughter together, and we’re seeing people watching TV less and actually picking up their Bibles more,” he said.
If believers don’t intentionally choose to be formed by God, they will take their cues from the culture and be formed by the world, Vassar said. A digital declutter is an effort at blocking the algorithms that would catechize the imagination.
“We need God to move powerfully in the lives of people,” Vassar said, “to free them from things that are weightless and incapable of actually filling the deep needs of our souls.”
