Home Outreach Leaders Smartphone Discipleship: Three Ways to Get the Most out of Your Phone

Smartphone Discipleship: Three Ways to Get the Most out of Your Phone

Memory is like a muscle. No pain; no gain. Unless the weight is heavy enough to make you struggle, you don’t grow any muscles. If it is too heavy, it crushes you. Memory is not created by reading a verse over and over. Memory is created when you struggle to recall a verse and then recall it.

I go through a hundred or so verses each morning and then pray about what I read about. The app also keeps up with what verses need to be reviewed when. This would be almost impossible without a smart phone.

I also read from one or more plans on the YouVersion app. Great stuff.

Smartphone Small Group Connection

I had a conversation with Steve Gladen a few months back and was taken aback when he said, “Our group hasn’t met in months, [due to Covid] but we are very connected.” It got me thinking about the many ways our phones help us connect with others.

Our group is much better connected because of smart phones.

Relationships are in the minutia. The closer I am with someone, the more I connect around the gritty details of life. For strangers, I say I am fine, everything is fine. With my close friends, I talk about the details of my life.

I am in a couple of text groups that make this easy to feel connected this way. Often, we share things that don’t deserve a phone call, but the connection is nice. I see the pictures on Facebook and talk about it when we meet.

People seem to be talking a lot these days about online groups vss. in person groups. It seems to me that groups will nearly all be both going forward.

Smartphone Worship

Some of the best worship times I have experienced have been on my phone. (Sometimes I upgrade the experience to an iPad.)

I am thinking now of Chris Tomlin’s rendition of “Crown Him with Many Crowns.” I remember the day that came out listening to that on my phone and just being blown away. I listened to it over and over—probably 30 minutes or more. It was, for me, a near-perfect worship experience. I plan for us to watch the video in our group this week.