The Tech-wise Family
Pastor Joseph’s Book Recomendation
I knew when I preached on technology that one sermon was never going to answer every question screens had brought into our homes. My hope was simpler than that. I hoped the message would start honest conversations with families, parents, students, and anyone who had felt the pull of a device shaping more of life than they wanted to admit. As I worked through the message, I kept returning to two ideas from Scripture: guard your heart, and do not let anything master you. In everyday language, the question became very practical for me: Was I using this screen, or was my screen using me?
That was why I pointed people to Andy Crouch’s The Tech-Wise Family. I appreciated that he refused the two easiest responses. He did not act as if every screen was dangerous, and he did not shrug as if we had no choice but to let technology set the pace of our lives. Instead, he offered households a better imagination. He described simple commitments: letting devices rest for regular periods, waking up before our phones did, putting them away before bed, making car rides conversation time, and choosing in-person presence for the moments that mattered most.
What stayed with me most was his reminder that we had been made to create more than we consumed. A screen could hand us endless entertainment, other people’s opinions, and one more distraction, but it could not replace attentiveness, skill, or real relationships.
I also liked his honesty. Building healthier habits was not easy, especially in the tired stretch before dinner when convenience felt irresistible. That was why I would never want a family to read this book and feel buried under ten new rules. I would rather see one wise step taken with peace than ten ideals carried with guilt.
In the end, I hoped the sermon and the book would do the same thing: keep the conversation going. Technology was not a separate world from discipleship; it was one of the places where we learned what shaped our hearts, our words, and our sense of truth. I wanted our church to be thoughtful and gracious there, not fearful.
The book was not the only help we printed on the back of the notes. Five other resources made that list, and each one earns its place.
Plugged In is Focus on the Family’s entertainment review site, and it is the one I reach for most. Before a movie, show, album, video game, or YouTube channel comes into your house, you can look it up and find a specific breakdown of what is actually in it: language, violence, sexual content, drugs and alcohol, spiritual themes, and the genuinely good things too. It goes well past a letter rating and tells you what you are really about to watch.
Protect Young Eyes exists for the parent who has thought, I know I should set this up, and I do not know where to start. It is Chris McKenna’s ministry, and the heart of it is step-by-step parental control guides for essentially every device and app a family owns: phones, tablets, game consoles, routers, YouTube, all of it. What I respect is that they are honest that controls alone do not work. They call them a starting line, not a finish line.
Axis is for anyone parenting a teenager. Start with The Culture Translator, their free email that arrives every Friday and explains the trends, slang, apps, and songs shaping your student’s world that week. They also publish short Parent Guides that take one topic at a time. It is the fastest way I know to stop feeling three steps behind.
Bibles.net is a free Bible reading website that sets sermons, songs, articles, and commentary right alongside the passage you are reading, so the help is attached to the text instead of scattered across ten browser tabs. It also offers guided readings that walk through the whole story of Scripture.
RightNow Media is a streaming library of more than twenty-five thousand video Bible studies, along with over two thousand shows for kids. It costs you nothing, because our church carries the subscription. You only need an account through us.
If you wanted a next step, we had free copies of The Tech-Wise Family at the coffee bar, and there was also a copy waiting in our church library. Any one of these is a fine place to begin, or continue, a wiser conversation at home.