REV DAVID FAREY: Church of England launches '˜God App'

It has launched an App for the Amazon Echo device which enables users to ask questions about God, Jesus and prayer.

You can ask a question like, who is God? It offers help with prayers and answers questions people might have about faith.

It’s an attempt to explore ways to connect with people who are increasingly abandoning traditional church going.

I wonder what fun some programmers might have planting ‘Easter eggs’, known software bits of fun that lie otherwise hidden.

Just try asking Siri on your iPad to explain the plot of Inception!

It is an indication though of the growing trend to disconnect people from one another.

Why bother going to church when you can just as easily activate Alexa, Echo or Siri from your bed to engage in a spiritual experience?

It’s another step in the direction of individualism, of feeding the belief in self and of reliance upon self without having to come into actual contact with other human beings.

Travelling down this particular road leads to the individual creating and moulding their own hybrid beliefs, with bits tacked on from all over and conveniently reinforcing their own preferences which probably have little to do with objective faith.

But hold hard!

Another story recently was of a couple having a private conversation when a short time later someone they knew got in touch to tell them they had received a recording of their conversation!

An explanation was that their voice activated gadget had heard or misheard the command to wake, record, and send the recording to a person they had inadvertently indicated in their conversation.

The chances of these accidental references was extreme and yet possible.

Scary isn’t it?

But just think, just as these gadgets are always listening for the words they want to hear, so for all of us God wants to hear from us and doesn’t need an electrical gizmo to do it.

Maybe the Church of England has something but let’s not allow it to replace the real contact!