The Lord’s Day service will be one of the last beacons of hope in our modern age, because that’s what it has always been.

In a world increasingly dominated by bits and bytes and endless streams, the Lord’s Day stands apart. It is a gathering several hours each week where we raise hands, bend knees, and pray with physical bodies. Hands play physical keys and strings. Mouths blow air through trumpets and horns. We eat and drink. We lift our voices together.

The service will more and more feel like another world. And yet it is not an escape from this world. It is this world, glorified. The liturgy is heaven-on-earth, heaven here. The divine service is not worship done “in the cloud,” but earth taken up into glory. It is an ascension into heaven, and from that heavenly place, we are sent back to live faithfully on the earth.

This summer at Theopolis, we are considering what it means to work in our modern world and in the age of AI. There will be spirited debate, discussions, and lectures. We will wrestle with what it means to labor faithfully amid rapid technological change.

At the center of that conference will be sung psalms, sung liturgy, and the reading of Scripture, an overflow of what happens every Lord’s Day. Our conversations about work and technology will be grounded in worship.

Psalm 1 speaks of men and women planted by streams of water. In an age of digital streams and noise, the Church is called to be rooted beside living waters. That rootedness is not finally in a nation, a tribe, or an ethnicity. The world-wide Bride’s life is grounded in heaven. We are one body in Christ.

From our heavenly citizenship, we can join in the laughter of God at the frantic chaos of the world. 

Biblical liturgy is the rock-solid foundation from which to build culture in the age of AI, and in every age to come.