Picture this scenario: One Sunday morning, you spot a guest in your church lobby looking around the room oddly. He’s wearing a pair of Meta’s Ray-Ban smart glasses, a new piece of tech capable of recording video or capturing a photo with a simple voice command. Your church may have a policy prohibiting unauthorized photography and videography during church events. So a member of your leadership asks the guest to remove his glasses because of their potential ability to film children or people using the restroom. The guest says these are prescription glasses, and he doesn’t have another pair with him. As a staff member or volunteer at the church, what would you do? This scenario isn’t hypothetical. A friend of mine had to navigate it at his church several weeks ago, and the situation may soon become more common. Next Frontier of Wearable Tech Ten years ago, Apple released the Apple Watch. What was once considered niche and experimental eventually became nearly as common as smartphones; a decade later, the smartwatch market is booming, with a myriad of options from dozens of competitors. Smart glasses are on a similar trajectory. In contrast to bulky VR headsets like the Apple Vision Pro, smart glasses are an affordable improvement on the glasses people already wear. Reading a text message or taking a photo using glasses is much more appealing than the awkwardness (and danger) of wearing a computer on your face in public. Currently, Meta’s smart glasses dominate this new market. They’re available on Amazon and in big-box tech stores, and they can be purchased with or without a prescription in numerous colors. While Meta created these glasses for general consumers, they’re finding unexpected success among disability advocacy groups. Sarah E. Needleman’s recent piece in The Wall Street Journal described how the glasses are a game-changer for visually impaired consumers, with an executive director of the National Federation of the Blind saying, “It’s giving significant accessibility benefits at a price point people can afford.” Unfortunately, the key features of these glasses that are enhancing lives in one demographic can be exploited by others with harmful intent. ‘Hey Meta, Take a Video’ Like with other AI-enabled devices, an individual wearing a pair of Meta’s Ray-Bans can say “Hey Meta” and give numerous voice commands, including calling someone, taking a photo, and recording video. You can even ask the glasses to give an AI-generated description of what you’re seeing. This feature is proving most valuable to visually impaired wearers. The key features of these glasses that are enhancing lives in one demographic can be exploited by others with harmful intent. When you take a photo or record a video, an LED light embedded in the glasses’ frames turns on. In some ways, this feature makes recording with the glasses more obvious than holding up your phone in front of you to record. But a quick Google search for “how to turn off Meta Ray-Ban light” reveals dozens of results for how to disable that light, with solutions ranging from using electrical tape or black epoxy to cover the light to advanced modifications such as precision drilling into the light to disable it. This is a clear signal that wearers find the light annoying and want to be able to turn it off. Thankfully, Meta’s smart glasses seem resistant to tampering and modification. If the light is blocked or disabled, the glasses won’t record, and no clear-cut way to get around this has emerged. Yet given the strong demand from consumers to turn this feature off, it’s only a matter of time before a competitor enters the emerging market with a pair of smart glasses that can discreetly capture photos and videos without an indicator light. It’s only a matter of time before an individual uses a pair of smart glasses to prey on children or other people’s privacy in church. How Can Churches Keep Their People Safe? To keep attendees safe on Sundays, we must first acknowledge a scary truth: An individual with harmful intent only needs to succeed once to create a lifetime of suffering. Thankfully, churches can take these three steps to greatly reduce the risk of a predator using smart glasses to harm people who come to church. 1. Include specific language about smart glasses in your church’s photography policy and standard operating procedures (SOP) for security. Photos and videos taken by smart glasses should be subject to the same policies governing scope, consent, privacy, and publication as photos and videos captured by other devices. If your church doesn’t have a photography policy or security SOP, it’s urgent you create such policies right away. What should your church’s policy for smart glasses be? I recommend that churches prohibit the use of smart glasses in areas of the church building that serve minors, such as the nursery, the children’s ministry area, and the restrooms that families frequent most. Some churches will want to limit the use of smart glasses at church to individuals with visual impairments; others will be more tolerant of their use in common areas. Whatever your church decides, pastors and church leaders must consider now and adopt policies early for how they want to handle smart glasses in church before the technology becomes more widespread. 2. Educate volunteer teams about your church’s policies. Your volunteers should be able to accurately explain these policies and specific instructions about smart glasses to anyone who asks about them, and especially to any individual confronted for using smart glasses in violation of your policy. 3. Proactively ensure that visually impaired people are welcomed and served by your church. We ought to rejoice that smart glasses are proving life-enhancing for the blind, but allowing these aids shouldn’t be the only way we serve people with visual impairments. We ought to rejoice that smart glasses are proving life-enhancing for the blind, but allowing these aids shouldn’t be the only way we serve people with visual impairments. Churches can provide printed materials in large print (or even braille) or provide a digital stream of the service that can be zoomed in on a phone or tablet for those who request it. An individual might be assigned a volunteer assistant to accompany and aid him while he’s at church, if he’s comfortable with this. He may still need, or want, to use smart glasses, but offering a variety of accommodations will mean that using smart glasses doesn’t have to be the first or only option. Don’t wait until an incident occurs in your church to decide how you’ll handle smart glasses. Be proactive in keeping your church hospitable and safe.

Should one “network” at church? Perhaps you’ve been approached at church by someone selling anything from candles to makeup. Or maybe you’ve wondered if church would be a great place to find a career mentor or potential customers. Let’s unpack this. In its most basic form, networking is building relationships with others with a particular goal in mind. In work culture, the goals can be to find opportunities or to advance organizational interests. While these aren’t inherently bad goals, they’re centered around enhancing, building, or sharing your work. Relationship building within the church has a different set of goals in mind: loving God and loving others by serving, encouraging, and promoting each other’s spiritual growth. What’s appropriate behavior for relationship building at work, then, may not be appropriate at church. On the other hand, we do bring our whole selves to church, and sometimes we can love each other by helping with job connections. So is it OK to bring my work into my relationships with other church members? Is it acceptable, or is it crossing a boundary? Before we can answer this question, let’s name a few truths about what it means to be an image-bearer of God that must frame this conversation. Image-Bearers First, every member of your church body was made in God’s image and is called to bear his image in all he or she does. Genesis 2 depicts Adam and Eve as colaborers in the garden. They were commissioned to develop the earth under into a working, livable society. They were called to build and cultivate a thriving place to live, filled with all the systems, processes, and physical and immaterial frameworks that enable a growing population to flourish. They were called to bring order into the world God made. All image-bearers of God have this same call and capacity to reflect God’s goodness in the world by the way they work in it (Col. 3:23). Second, every member of your church body was created for community. We’re intended to be in close relationship with one another. Third, there’s no sacred and secular divide. Our work isn’t separate from our faith. God intended our work and faith to go hand-in-hand as a way to use the gifts we’ve been given for kingdom purposes. We can go into a secular workplace and honor the Lord in it, and we can honor the Lord in how we handle our work with people in our church. Warning: Networking Gone Wrong Sometimes we’re tempted to use work as a way to build our own kingdom instead of working to build God’s kingdom. Consider how and why we might build relationships with others. Sometimes we’re tempted to use work as a way to build our own kingdom instead of working to build God’s kingdom. We have a clear example in Scripture of what it looks like to bring a community of people together for prideful and selfish motives. Genesis 11:4 tells us, “Then they said, ‘Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth.’” The goal of their relationship building and collaboration was their glory, not the Lord’s. They used their relational strength to actively work against God’s commands. God has made humans to need each other. He has ordained for us to be in community with one another, build each other up, engage relationally, and create beauty together. But this collaboration is intended to have a singular purpose: God’s glory and the advance of his kingdom. If we strive to build relationships for our own sake, we miss the mark, just as the people of Babel did. Here are some questions to consider when evaluating your motives in networking within the church body: Do I want to genuinely get to know this person? There’s a curiosity that comes with wanting to know and understand others. Do you want to get to know her, her interests, and her giftings, or are you seeking to know her for your own gain? Am I more concerned with the benefits this relationship would bring me? Are you intentionally trying to position yourself to know her for your benefit or advancement? Is your primary concern your own gain? Am I forthright in communicating my intentions when wanting to meet with this person? If your goal is to discuss something business-related, are you clear about that when scheduling time with someone? There’s no worse feeling than believing you’ve been invited to coffee for genuine connection, only to discover you’ve been invited to a pitch without your knowledge. Are you communicating honestly? Networking Redeemed Worldly networking brings people together for the sake of building one’s kingdom, while redemptive networking connects others for the sake of building God’s kingdom. In a world where relationship is currency, let the church be the model of what it looks like to leverage relationships for the good of others and the good of the community. Redemptive networking requires a perspective motivated by honoring the Lord and being others-focused. To pursue godly motivations when networking within the church, ask yourself questions like these: How can I serve this person? How can I promote the good he’s doing? How can I encourage him? How can I help him do the good work that God has prepared in advance for him to do (Eph. 2:10)? How can I honor the Lord in the work he’s called each of us to do and connect others to it? How can I pray for him? Networking with Greater Purpose I’ve been a beneficiary of others-oriented and God-focused networking. When I was 19, I began attending and working at a church as an intern. During that time, I was invited to a woman’s home for countless meals and conversations. We built a relationship where she attended my recitals in college, checked in with me during stressful seasons, and helped me navigate big life decisions. She genuinely sought to know and understand me as a person and encouraged me in all the ways she saw the Lord had gifted me. Redemptive networking requires a perspective motivated by honoring the Lord and being others-focused. Once I graduated and we both moved away, we stayed in contact. In 2019, she called me to tell me about a nonprofit the Lord had put on her heart to start that she thought I might be interested in. That conversation birthed a partnership with Women & Work that’s invaluable to me today. Not only did she know me well enough to know I’d be interested in partnering with her, but we also had enough relational capital and trust built up that I knew she wasn’t motivated by self-promotion but by a genuine desire to connect my gifts to the work she was doing. This is a small example of a relationship born out of church membership and genuine connection that later gave way to networking opportunities. The book of Acts describes the birth of the church, which involved all aspects of life being melded together in community. If our primary concern is love for God and love for others, and we share all things in common in Christ, then we’re freed up to love, connect, and serve one another. Before you network at church, examine your heart and motives. The church can be the place where believers model networking with a greater purpose: God’s glory and God’s kingdom.

'I do think deep down they know'

On Tuesday morning, MSNBC anchor Ana Cabrera and contributor Paola Ramos covered the Los Angeles anti-ICE riots by insisting the riots are justifiable because of “American empathy.” The toxic word choice from Cabrera and Ramos only covers up the left-wing agenda of not arresting illegals who do not belong in the United States rather than supporting US citizens.   When Cabrera asked Ramos to describe the intentions behind the riots, she portrayed the White House as the instigator, claiming it “has been clear that they want this big display in LA” and “wants this fight.” What is crystal clear to the White House is the protection for the country, citizens, and federal property, not a show.     Ramos followed by going on rant accusing President Trump of “dehumanizing” people:   But I think the other story to me is that what we are seeing, not just in LA but across the country, is perhaps one of Trumpism’s biggest threats, and that is that there is a growing number of Americans that are slowly starting to humanize that Donald Trump has spent years dehumanizing…Knowing that is the way these images show, the way that Trump is really, really, really stretching his powers and using immigrants as a way to really slide this country into some type of authoritarianism that is making people feel uncomfortable.   Did Ramos mean riots full of explosions, fires, and disorder are a way to “humanize”? This is not the only time misleading words were used to cover up the agenda being pushed in the segment. Cabrera pointed out that what Ramos described was “American empathy.”  It is not compassionate to allow illegal immigrants to live in a country that is not theirs and have the same opportunities without doing the right process to become a US citizen. It is not civilized to have riots over unauthorized entries and violations by people who are not US citizens.   Cabrera then played a clip of Los Angeles Mayor Bass expressed in a recent press conference where she declared, “I can't emphasize enough the level of fear and terror that is in Angelenos right now, not knowing if tomorrow or tonight it might be where they live. It might be their workplace. Should you send your kids to school? Should you go to work?…Stop the raids. Period.”  Where is the encouragement to stop the riots in her own city?    Cabrera used Bass’s comments to lead into a question for Ramos regarding if the illegal immigrants alarm was being “overshadowed” by the riots. Ramos responded stating:   And so I think we can't underestimate, you know, Americans in compassion and empathy. It comes out, I think that was the question that I had. Now, will this country that voted for Donald Trump twice and that voted for mass deportations, will we feel that empathy again? And the answer is yes. No. It comes out, and it comes out perhaps at the darkest times. But the empathy is there. And once you feel it, I think it's hard to look away.   Yes, Paola, it is hard to look away at the TV about the riots in Los Angeles, but the riots prove anything but “empathy” and “compassion.” Let this segment play a significant role on how toxic word choice can be misleading and lead viewers astray from the facts.  Click here for the transcript:  MSNBC’s Ana Cabrera Reports 6/10/25 10:09 a.m. Eastern ANA CABRERA: Paola, the White House has been clear that they want this big display in LA. The White House wants this fight, we are told, but I know you feel it could actually be a tipping point in the other direction. Explain.  PAOLA RAMOS: Yeah. Look, I think there's two stories here. Now, one is the images that we're seeing, which is a show of force. But I think the other story to me is that what we are seeing, not just in LA but across the country, is perhaps one of Trumpism's biggest threats, and that is that there is a growing number of Americans that are slowly starting to humanize the very humans that Donald Trump has spent years dehumanizing. And so I think we've seen these sort of collective moral breaking points in the past. When in 2012, Americans were able to humanize Dreamers, in 2018, people, mothers in the Midwest felt something when they saw families being separated at the border. And now we're reaching that moment where Americans, after seeing all of these ICE raids and the images and the viral videos, they're starting to see all of these people that are being detained, not as criminals, as Donald Trump wants us to see, but as parents, as mothers, as their neighbors. And that is inspiring something. I think the question is, will this sort of moral, collective breaking point stay, or will people sort of let go of that moral outrage at some point? I think the difference now, Ana, is that through immigrants, a lot of ordinary Americans, perhaps even independents, are starting to see the bigger threat. Knowing that is the way what these images show, the way that Trump is really, really, really stretching his powers and using immigrants as a way to really slide this country into some type of authoritarianism that is making people feel uncomfortable. So I do think that perhaps this breaking point may be here to stay. CABRERA: On your point about, sort of, this American empathy and, you know, Americans identifying with connecting with people who are being detained that are their neighbors or a friend. I want to highlight what Mayor Bass said yesterday about the root cause of all this when it comes to these immigration raids MAYOR KAREN BASS: I can't emphasize enough the level of fear and terror that is in Angelenos right now, not knowing if tomorrow or tonight it might be where they live. It might be their workplace. Should you send your kids to school? Should you go to work? (Transition) Last Thursday, there was nothing happening in this town that called for the raids that took place on Friday. (Transition) I would say stop the raids. Stop the raids. Period. I would say give the power back to our governor. CABRERA: Paola, do you think the human aspect of this, the fear has been overshadowed now by this image of chaos in the streets? RAMOS: No, I don't think so. I think that Trump is counting on Americans to be cruel, not to not feel anything. I think what you're starting to see is the complete opposite and in small ways. Now why? Because now we're talking about third, fourth, fifth generation Latinos that are seeing their own parents, sort of, being deported and being detained. No, we're talking about Americans that for the last 30 years and have spent living their lives next to undocumented immigrants that are no longer just immigrants, but are their neighbors. And so I think we can't underestimate, you know, Americans in compassion and empathy. It comes out I think that was the question that I had. Now, will this country that voted for Donald Trump twice and that voted for mass deportations, will we feel that empathy again? And the answer is yes. No. It comes out and it comes out perhaps at the darkest times. But the empathy is there. And once you feel it, I think it's hard to look away.

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