God is Not a God of Efficiency: We Have Been Created Differently
THE SHOCK ABSORBER
The Cultural Assault of Efficiency
Joel has changed his evening routine. No screens after 9:30 PM. Instead, he reads for half an hour before bed, recently tearing through Tom Holland's "Dominion" and finding that such a simple shift has had an unexpected side effect: he's reaching for his phone less throughout the day.
"There's something about that," he reflects on the latest Shock Absorber podcast. "There's more of a yearning to just find that time to read my book rather than finding those bite-sized pieces of information we get from our phones."
It's a small personal victory in what Tim and Joel describe as an all-out cultural assault: the aggressive messaging that efficiency, productivity, and digital experiences are always better than their slower, embodied alternatives.
What if, as Tim argues in a recent sermon that sparked this conversation, God is not a God of efficiency?
We Are Incarnate Beings
Before diving into AI, productivity culture, and digital liturgies, Tim lays out his thinking:
"God has created us in an incarnate world. It's physical, it has physicality, we are physical beings,"
"Christologically, Christ's incarnation and resurrection into a resurrected body speaks highly of the importance of our embodied state," Tim argues.
Jesus didn't just temporarily inhabit a body to accomplish a spiritual mission and then shed it like a costume. He was born in flesh, lived in flesh, died in flesh, and was resurrected into a glorified but still physical body.
This stands in stark contrast to Greek philosophy and Eastern religions that view the body as something to escape. Christianity has always had what Tim calls "a very high, honoured place of the embodied physical person and personhood."
This matters enormously when we start talking about technology, because so much of our digital world is fundamentally disincarnate. It promises connection without presence, experience without embodiment, productivity without physicality.
The Books That Sparked Everything
Tim has been on a reading binge about digital culture and its effects on human formation.
Christine Rosen's "The Extinction of Experience." pulls together research across multiple disciplines to argue that we are losing embodied, incarnate experiences and translating them to digital ones and thus losing something fundamentally human in the process.
She tracks the decline of handwriting (why bother when you can type?), the movement from typing to swiping to voice commands (progressively less physical engagement), and the rise of technologies like the Apple Vision Pro that promise to replace physical reality almost entirely.
The second book is explicitly Christian, "Digital Liturgies by Samuel D. James. Building on the work of philosopher James K.A. Smith, he argues that everything we do regularly becomes a liturgy, a formative practice that shapes who we are.
"If we have these digital liturgies, these things that we do regularly and it's all disincarnate, disembodied, all through the screen," Tim says, "what is that actually doing in our formation? How is it shaping us?"
The answer, both books suggest, is that these practices are making us less human and, for Christians, less Christ-like.
Reality Privilege and Silicon Valley's Cynicism
One of the most striking concepts Tim encountered in his reading is "reality privilege," a term coined by venture capitalist Marc Andreessen.
Andreessen champions technologies that create immersive digital experiences. When critics push back that these technologies remove us from physical reality, his response is essentially: your physical reality is privileged.
"You're just assuming that people's incarnate experience is better than what we can give them digitally," says Tim, summarising Andreessen's argument. "That might be true for some people, but to assume that's true for most people is reality privilege."
In other words, if you think the real world is better than what tech can provide digitally, that's only because you're one of the lucky few with a good real-world experience. For most people, Andreessen argues, digital experiences will be superior.
It's essentially the argument of Cypher from The Matrix: the fake world is better than the real one, so why not choose the comfortable illusion?
"If our physicality is God-given, then this is the way that we ought to live.” Tim responds, “This is the best possible experience, one that is physical and incarnate and embodied. And so the things that take us away from that are dehumanising."
Jonathan Haidt has previously highlighted that Silicon Valley leaders won't let their own kids use the technologies they're selling to everyone else, sending their children to screen free schools. They know something we're supposed to ignore: these technologies aren't actually making us better. They're creating, as Joel puts it, "a new class of people" while the tech elite protect their own children from the digital onslaught.
The Trick of Efficiency
Our culture sells efficiency and productivity as obviously good things. More output in less time. More experiences in less space. More information in smaller packages.
Book summary apps like Blinkist and Shortform promise you can absorb the key ideas from dozens of books in the time it would take to read one. Why spend seven hours reading when you can get the summary in 15 minutes?
Triple-screening, watching a movie while scrolling your phone and checking your laptop, lets you consume more content simultaneously. Why do one thing when you could do three?
AI tools can write your essay, your email, your blog post faster and often better than you can. Why struggle through the hard work yourself?
The trick is these "efficient" solutions are actually inefficient at producing the thing that matters most - human formation.
"There's this trick here of what is productive," Tim explains. "Productivity is always more. Produce more, consume more. But what does it mean to actually be more human?"
Joel shares his own realisation: "I'm fulfilling this perhaps need to feel more efficient by doing less." By reading actual books instead of summaries, by putting his phone away, by going to bed earlier and waking up earlier for focused work, he's technically being less "productive" in the cultural sense, but he's actually accomplishing more and feeling better.
Before the Industrial Revolution, work followed natural rhythms. Planting season was intense labor. Then you waited while crops grew—a period of apparent non-productivity that was actually essential. Harvest was back-breaking work. Then fallow periods where the land rested.
Factories changed all that. With the right setup, a factory never needs to stop. Twenty-four-hour shifts. Every day of the week. Maximum efficiency. Maximum productivity. "Why stop at nighttime?" Tim asks. "Let's just get a new shift of people in. And why not? It's efficient. You can get a lot more done."
But humans aren't factories. We need sleep, a third of our lives spent bring "unproductive." We need rest, sabbath, fallow seasons. God designed us this way.
"I don't think God is an efficient God," Tim says, and he acknowledges how strange that sounds. "It's almost sounds blasphemous and I feel a little bit awkward."
But consider: it took approximately 1,800 years from God's promise to Abraham that his seed would bless the world until Jesus actually came. That's extraordinarily inefficient by cultural terms. God could have sent Jesus immediately. Why did He wait?
2D vs. 3D: What We Lose in Translation
Tim introduces a helpful framework from his friend Hunter Williams: the difference between 2D and 3D communication.
2D communication is email, text message, maybe even Zoom. It's flat, mediated through screens, lacking the full dimensionality of in-person presence. 3D communication is face-to-face, embodied, incarnate. You're breathing the same air, picking up micro-expressions and body language, responding to hormonal and emotional cues that happen below our conscious awareness and it extends beyond communication to skills and experiences.
Should you ask ChatGPT for a book summary, or should you read the book? One's 2D (quick, efficient, disembodied), the other's 3D (slow, embodied, formative).
Should you get AI to write your essay, or should you work through the hard slog yourself? One produces a grade efficiently. The other produces a more mature, more thoughtful human being.
"What's going to make a better human?" Tim asks. "What's going to make a better human is the incarnate experience of working through the hard thing. Reading sources, digesting it yourself, being able to mash up sources in your brain that comes up with an original thought."
What the Church Must Be
So what's the Christian response? Tim and Joel argue that the church can be a refuge, a place that actively resists these cultural pressures of productivity and efficiency.
This can mean several things practically:
Prioritizing face-to-face community over digital connection: Yes, there's a place for online church in certain circumstances (illness, distance, etc.). But it can't be the default. There's something irreplaceable about being physically present with other believers.
Embracing inefficiency: Church services that run long because people are actually talking to each other. Small groups that "waste time" eating together before getting to the Bible study. Ministries that prioritize relationship over outcomes.
Resisting the productivity mindset: Church isn't a spiritual jab to get you through the week. It's not about efficiently extracting the sermon content. It's about being formed slowly, over time, in community.
Creating space for boredom: Not every moment needs to be filled with content or activity. Silence, waiting, resting—these are spiritual disciplines that efficiency culture has trained us to view as wasted time.
Modelling a different way: When the world sees Christians who aren't obsessed with productivity, who value presence over efficiency, who choose embodied community over digital convenience, it should look strange. Attractively strange.
Tim puts it beautifully: "If God has made us to be physical incarnate beings, that God has honoured that by incarnating his own son Jesus, who is now in some way, very real way, in his resurrection body right now, there is an honouring of our embodiment. That physicality matters and we can express that as a church."
"Therefore the church can be a place of deep embodiment and deep community and deep incarnation with each other, which will actually be the most faith-formative thing that we can do and the most humanly formative thing that we can do, particularly when we have a culture that is oppressing this digital world amongst us and pushing us towards endless efficiency and productivity all through a mediated screen."
The Metric Problem
Here's why this can be so hard: we're using the wrong metrics.
If church is about efficiently extracting spiritual content, then yes, a podcast is better. You can listen at 1.5x speed while doing other things.
If discipleship is about consuming as much theological information as possible, then yes, book summaries and AI chatbots are better. You can learn more, faster.
If Christian formation is measured by output, how much you do, how many people you reach, how quickly you grow, then efficiency and productivity make perfect sense.
What if formation happens slowly, through repeated embodied practices over time? What if depth matters more than breadth? What if presence is more valuable than productivity?
"That hour and a half was not a very efficient way of getting a spiritual jab of good preaching," Tim says of a typical churchgoer.
But if you change the metric, if church is about being formed into the image of Christ through embodied community with other believers, then suddenly that "inefficient" hour and a half becomes essential. The small talk isn't wasted time. The long prayers aren't a drag. The meal afterwards isn't optional.
The Remote Amazon Tribe
Tim shares a story about a remote Amazon tribe that was given smartphones. It didn't take long for them all to be wasting time on TikTok and addicted to pornography.
It's a stark illustration. The promise of technology is democratisation, anyone with a smartphone can access Harvard courses, world-class literature, the accumulated knowledge of human civilisation.
And yet, what do we actually use it for? What do our natural, fallen instincts gravitate toward?
"Both are possible," Tim notes. "And which ones do ourselves naturally gravitate to? It's the undisciplined, it's the things that are immediate gratification rather than things that actually work harder to do."
This is why the church's role is so crucial. We need communities that form us toward what's actually good for us, not just what our immediate impulses crave. Communities that value depth, presence, and incarnation even when culture is screaming the opposite.
The Takeaway: Find Boredom
Tim's takeaway is simple:
Find a moment of boredom. Find some way to be incarnate in the real physical world without distraction.
Practical examples:
Sit on the train without looking at your phone
Stand in line at the coffee shop without pulling out your device
Wait in the doctor's office without scrolling
Take the elevator without checking your phone
Spend an evening without screens
These moments feel wasteful to our productivity-trained brains. They feel inefficient. But that's exactly the point.
"The slowing down with an incarnate community is a key part of making us more human and a key part of making us more like Christ," Tim concludes.
Listen to the full conversation on the Shock Absorber podcast. For more on theology, strategy, and practice in ministry, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts or email joel@shockabsorber.com.
Discussed on this episode:
Anchorman
Step Brothers
The Mummy I
The Mummy Returns
Alien
Young Frankenstein
The Bourne Identity
The Fast and the Furious
The Godfather
The Social Network
A Few Good Men
Die Hard
Lethal Weapon
Tunnel 29, by Helena Merriman
The Escape Artist, by Jonathan Freedland
Cloverfield
The Extinction of Experience, by Christine Rosen:
Digital Liturgies, by Samuel D. James
Marc Andreesen
The Jungle Village Hooked on Phones
Soul Revival Church is an Anglican church in the Sutherland Shire and Ryde.