Centuries ago only the liturgy had scripture, and the scripture they had was Latin - often poorly translated Latin, and they did a poor job of bringing any understanding of God and the Lord Jesus to the people in the pews.  Church tradition ruled and knowledge of the word of God and the Lord was extremely restricted.  These days are often referred to as the dark ages.

Then over many years we had men like Luther, Tyndale and many others who challenged the status quo and over many, many years and through much bloodshed and tears brought the word of God to the people, and along with it a better understanding of the meaning of scripture, and knowledge of the Lord. 

Inventions such as Gutenburg's printing press, made it easy to create volumes of scripture quickly and get it into the hands of the people.  This technological breakthrough is probably the most important in the history of the church.  With the invention of the printing press, knowledge was able to be documented and shared en-masse like never before.  It allowed many of the great church leaders of the time to get their knowledge and understanding out to anyone who could read - and it changed the social class of those who could read from the elite to almost anyone.  These changes revolutionized not only the church but the world. In England the increased availability (and acceptance) of the word of God was one of the key drivers behind the "right of every man" to read, and the institution of free public schools.

Since these days the church has been slowly taking all the knowledge of the smartest men in the world and building up the understanding of scripture amongst the church broadly.  This process started with the likes of Luther who challenged the traditions of the Roman Catholic church and declared that scripture alone was the authority - not the church. 

Since then the church has worked through the doctrines of salvation, the church, creation, the trinity, and more recently eschatology and have nailed down many of these doctrines reasonably thoroughly and with a degree of consistency.  Of course there are still many things that many believers don't agree on, but technology has enabled these discussions to be recorded and thought through by many people over many years, so that the basics are widely agreed on and the details are also becoming more widely accepted.

I was reading Ephesians 4 this morning and this passage jumped out at me:

And He gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ, so that we may no longer be children tossed to and fro by the waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes.

If you think about this passage in the context of the global church, technology is a key enabler to helping believers grow together.  The printing press allowed the thoughts of many pastors, teachers, evangelists and the apostles to be collated and published for many to consume and understand, and build on, growing the body of Christ as a whole.  Today too, the understanding of the word of God is being propagated by mechanisms such as podcasts, RSS and similar technologies.  However we are only at the beginning of what is possible.

The goal is to unite the church so that "we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God".  Technology, and the Internet have much more to offer through centralizing the understanding of godly pastors and teachers into a repository that allows the examination of scripture and the interrogation of thought in a collective where all the understanding of the church is stored, scrutinized and drawn upon by believers in order to build up their knowledge and understanding of Christ.

Of course this is not all.  Believers must open their hearts to one another and allow each other to have a part in each others lives for accountability and growth - this too can be done with technology, but the offline world has a lot to offer that technology cannot do as well in this role at this stage.  Perhaps in the future this will change, but in the meantime, we can concentrate on growing individually, and helping each other globally using technology to reach out with our understanding and the lessons we learn as we live for Christ.