The Chipping of the Church

Computer chips are now so cheap, they're everywhere: car brakes, basketballs, canned goods. But chips without connectivity are worthless. This is the message of Paul: The Christ-body needs to be "chipped" and connected. When that happens, the world can never be the same!

Guess what! You've been "chipped."

You already have a computer chip in your car and your stereo and your rice cooker and your phone [hold up a cell phone]. It's in there: a small, silent sliver of silicon - a tiny chip of embedded thought. Someday you'll have one in your soup can, light switch, shirt hem, drill press and even your basketball. There are 10 trillion objects manufactured in the world each year, and the day will come when each one of them will carry a silicon chip.

Soon we will all have car keys with chips on them. Some of us already do. [Hold up such a key, which looks like most car keys but has a chip on each side. To get a duplicate of this key, one needs to go to the dealer or manufacturer to get the chip programmed. Ask for people in the congregation who have such a key to pull it out and hold it up.]

The whole world is becoming chipped, at an astounding rate. Some of these are dumb chips, like the chip in your car's brakes. This is no notebook computer chip,...