Wow. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, but I am, at the level of technological know-how that makes it possible for a church **NOT** to have a printed directory!
I'm used to churches in which significant numbers of the church leadership did not have email or use computers. My church is very definitely on the young side, with a number of homeschooling families, though certainly not in any way officially a "homeschooling church." I think everyone in leadership has email, but several in leadership do not use social media and are not what one might call computer-savvy. Many churches I know have many leaders, and sometimes a majority of those in leadership, who do not use computers at all, or only minimally.
It's not just churches. Up until four years ago, we still had some elected officials in our county government who did not have email and quite a few elected officials I know today on city councils, school boards, and other elected positions in our community are all but computer illiterate. Not just the retired people, who tend to be overrepresented in local elected positions because they have time to dedicate to community affairs, but even some of those elected officials who are in their 50s and younger. As recently as twenty years ago, the publisher of the newspaper for which I then worked was barely able to use his work computer, didn't have a computer in his home, and our newspaper staff had to print out anything important that he needed to read because he said it was hard to read the computer screen since it hurt his eyes, and he wanted everything on paper. (He's long since retired.)
FYI, nearly all of my church members are younger than me, but I go back to the days of programming with punchcards on mainframe computers using COBOL and FORTRAN. I've been a "techie" basically forever, so this is not at all the "old geezer complaining about them there newfangled computa-things and the Interwebs." It's me expressing surprise at churches that apparently can expect so many of their members will be able to access information online that they no longer need to put out a printed directory at all.
When I first became Reformed it was hard to find conservative Calvinists without white hair. I was almost always the youngest conservative guy in the room, sometimes by a decade or more, and when I was arguing that Schuller's Crystal Cathedral and Hybels' Willow Creek were terrible models for Reformed church growth, most people thought it was inconceivable that anyone my age, let alone an adult convert like me, would oppose the "church growth movement" and that someone young and from "outside" would "sound like an old stiff-head Hollander, stubborn as a mule." (The Dutchmen reading this will know I'm alluding to a specific word in Dutch that literally refers to stubbornness and euphemistically to mules, but in church circles, often carries the connotation of the American term "TR" or "Truly Reformed," but used as a term of abuse, not a positive self-identifier.)
Now that I have (some) white hair, Calvinism is full of young families who became interested in Christian education and then became Reformed. That's a wonderful change from what I saw in the 1980s when most people I knew felt the Reformed faith was dying and might not survive another generation.
God doesn't need computers, obviously, but there is a generational difference between people of my era and young people on use of computers and social media, and it's a great thing to hear of Reformed churches that can assume everybody is online rather than assuming most members aren't. It means the church is full of young people and that's a great thing to hear.
May the number of cyber-Calvinists continue to increase.
