The Ravens Have New Feathers

For two weeks I have been telling you old stories. Ravens feeding a prophet. A river healing a commander. Unlikely delivery systems from a God who refuses to deliver on our terms.

Now I want to bring it into the room you are sitting in.

Because the ravens are still flying. They just have new feathers.

The most disruptive delivery system of our lifetime is already at the door. New tools. New technology. Things that did not exist a few years ago that are now rewriting industries, jobs, and the way information moves through the world.

And the response I hear most often from believers is not curiosity. It is suspicion. Sometimes it is fear. Sometimes it is a flat refusal to even look.

I understand the instinct. I want to gently challenge it.

We Have Done This Before

The church has a long, embarrassing history of being late to every major shift.

We were suspicious of the printing press, the same machine that put the Bible in the hands of ordinary people.

We were late to radio. Late to television. Late to the internet. Every time, we let the world build the platform first, then showed up years later trying to use a tool we had no hand in shaping.

Every single time, the same two groups emerged. The ones who hid from the shift and got left behind. And the ones who stayed anchored in something deeper than the shift and helped build what came next.

The difference was almost never intelligence. It was almost always identity.

I do not want us to be late again. Not this time. The stakes feel higher than they have ever felt.

Discernment Is NOT Suspicion

Let me be clear about something, because I am not telling you to swallow everything the world hands you.

Discernment is essential. Not everything new is good. Not every tool is neutral in how it gets used. There is real garbage out there, and there is real danger in handing your attention and your kids to systems built by people who do not love them.

But discernment and suspicion are not the same thing.

Discernment looks closely, tests the fruit, and asks what God might be doing here. Suspicion refuses to look at all and calls that refusal holiness.

Remember the ravens. They were unclean. By the letter of the law, Elijah had every religious reason to refuse them. If he had treated suspicion as obedience, he would have starved in the name of staying pure.

God did not send him a clean bird. God sent him a faithful one.

The question was never whether the raven was respectable. The question was whether it was carrying what Elijah needed.

Ask The Better Question

When the printing press arrived, most of the church asked, is this dangerous?

The better question was, what could God do with this?

Both can be true at the same time. The internet is dangerous and God has reached millions through it. Television is a wasteland and the gospel has gone around the world on it.

So here is the better question for whatever is unsettling you right now.

Not, can this be misused? Of course it can. Everything powerful can.

But, what is God planning to deliver through this, and do I want to be in front of it or behind it?

The people of God belong out ahead of this shift. Anchored. Awake. Shaping it instead of fearing it. Not naive, and not hiding.

The Anchor Holds

I keep coming back to something my flight instructor taught me. When you hit weather you do not understand, you do not yank the controls and panic. You trust the instruments, you make small corrections, and you fly the airplane.

The airplane is the thing in front of you. The weather is everything you cannot control.

You do not master the storm. You fly the thing in front of you, anchored to two things that do not move. Who God is. And who God made you to be.

If those two are settled, the new tools cannot shake you. You can examine them. You can use the good and refuse the harmful. You can stay curious without losing your footing, because your foundation was never made of the technology. It was made of the One who has always fed His people through whatever was available.

He used ravens once.

Do not be so sure He will not use an algorithm next.

One More Thing

I named the book Ravens and Algorithms on purpose. The raven is the ancient unlikely delivery system. The algorithm is the modern one. The principle has not changed in three thousand years. Only the feathers have.

If you want to stop fearing the shift and start discerning it, this is the book I wrote for exactly this moment.

Click → RAVENS AND ALGORITHMS
 
The ravens are still flying.

Look up before you wave them off.

Onward,
Chris Behnke

P.S. — Next week is the last email in this series, and it is the one I most want you to read. I am going to tell you about the single most unlikely delivery system in human history. God sent it, an entire religious nation was waiting for it, and they killed it anyway. Because it did not match what they had already decided it should look like. Do not miss it.