Authority is an appropriately mighty word, descended from the Latin auctoritas. Originally referring to the degree of prestige enjoyed by a citizen of ancient Rome, it had nothing directly to do with civic power, but symbolised the less tangible sway exercised by certain heroic figures. During the Middle Ages the papacy invoked it in order to legitimate its own temporal power.

Its provenance is yet richer, being linked not only to the word author, or bringer into being, but also to augeo, denoting increase. Perhaps the word and its associations have never been more fully deployed than in the alternative naming of the King James Bible as The Authorised Version in 1611.

What price authority now, in an age of such fragmented yet powerful, secular, commercially driven influences? Well, I have some perhaps encouraging news. When faced with a major or difficult decision, more people turn to prayer than to social media such as Facebook and Twitter. How do I know this? What is my...authority? To help with researching this topic, I commissioned the polling company ComRes.

Even until as recently as the 1970s and 1980s, there were rural parts of Britain where the local vicar was the go to person for advice on big and small life decisions. In my own childhood, my dad was that vicar. He was a real voice of authority in our local community. This was not unusual at that time.

Does such authority – however you construe that term – still reside in such places? This question was the spur to my inquiries into people's preferred sources of help and advice. To this end, ComRes surveyed 2,000 people.

More than three-quarters (77 per cent) of respondents said they would turn to friends and family when facing a tough decision. More women than men (81 per cent to 72 per cent) expressed this view, while more men than women said they would look to an expert. I must confess I was surprised by this, having assumed that a Google search would easily top the list.

But then again, more than half (51 per cent) of respondents did indeed say they would use online search engines for such purposes. About one in five (23 per cent) respondents said they would speak to an expert when confronting a serious dilemma.

Interestingly, 29 per cent of male respondents selected the option of speaking to an expert, compared with 17 per cent of females, who preferred friends and family.

Just six per cent would use prayer. But what surprised me most of all was that even fewer, four per cent, would use social media such as Facebook or Twitter. Therefore, when it came to a face-off between God, and Facebook, the older competitor triumphed – at least when it come to making difficult decisions.

However, a mere two per cent of respondents said they would turn to a priest or another religious resource, such as the Bible or other Holy Book.

I confess I was surprised by how few people would opt for prayer, or the Bible, or a religious source such as a priest as their first or second choice. Nor was I expecting to see such a large number turn first to friends and family, who come out way ahead of search engines.

Stephen Bullivant, drector of the Benedict XVI Centre for Religion and Society at St. Mary's Twickenham, told me how interesting it is that Facebook, Twitter and other social media come so low down the list. Although the number who would turn first or second to prayer is low, it is still higher than the number who would go for Facebook. It seems to me these findings represent both an opportunity and a challenge for the churches. The opportunity lies in the clear pre-eminence of friends and family as sources of wisdom, even in today's online world, when hard choices loom; the challenge is for the local vicar to become seen as one of those friends to whom we turn.

Bullivant observes that there is a good deal of research already pointing to how religious London is; the proportion choosing prayer in the capital is eight per cent, compared to just one per cent in the North East. 'Given the amount of time people spend on social media,' he says, 'and the amount of attention it gets, the fact that people are more likely to ask God for help in making difficult decisions than Facebook is really interesting.'

What can we conclude, from an admittedly modest sample, about where authority resides, or is thought to reside, today? Perhaps we are being told to expect a future in which it may be invested less in hierarchical structures such as the Church and more, as Niall Fergusson points out, in flat social networks.

For what it is worth, my own small piece of research suggests quite forcibly strongly that people prefer these social networks to be actual rather than virtual. That at least is a point of hope for a church attempting to do God's work through the human agencies of priests and laity.

And yet there can be no doubting the extent to which technology is providing religious communities with the means of complementing their own core values.

Few observers have described this process with greater clarity or prescience than Heidi Campbell, associate professor of communications at Texas A and M University, and author of the influential 2010 study, When Religion Meets New Media. In this she noted that the propensity of religious community to accept and appropriate a given technology tends to involve the extent to which media can be viewed as a conduit; that is, a neutral instrument which can be co-opted for good or for bad, depending upon who is using it and to what ends.

'New media,' she writes, 'can thus be framed as a God-given tool to be used to further a divine agenda on earth. The technology is seen as a utilitarian means of meeting these communal goals.' She cites the case of Tim Bulkeley, a lecturer at Carey Baptist College in New Zealand, in whose career the embrace of technology for missionary activities had figured prominently. In the 1980s he had worked in Zaire with the Baptist Missionary Society. His tasks included that of producing religious resources for the region's pastors, who only came infrequently to the capital, where the college was situated. Although the Congolese church did produce pamphlets written specifically for the local dialects, the distribution and take-up of these looked extremely limited. Often the pastors could afford no more than a couple of copies. If they used the option of taking several away and then settling up on the following year's visit, the soaring rate of inflation would make it impossible for them to pay.

Bulkeley had an idea. With his computer and dot matrix printer, he produced stencils that could then be used to make copies of these tracts. Most schools in the Congo, even in rural areas, had mimeograph-like machines capable of reproducing pamphlets. If pastors wanted a particular pamphlet for use in their rural churches, they were offered a packet of stencils so that they could reproduce as many copies as they needed. This may have lacked the outreach of the Gutenberg and Luther combination, but the principles were the same. Even though Professor Campbell is describing an initiative that took place in our own millennium, technology's advance has accelerated so much that the account already bears the scent of history.

The landscape appears to be shifting faster than it once did. In a collection of essays called Megatech; Technology in 2050, 20 experts from the worlds of science, academe, industry tell us how it's going to be, or might be about to be.

Leo Mirani, news editor of The Economist, writes: 'The visual clutter of the twenty-first century will be replaced by pristine environments in which what we see depends only on what we need to know, and nothing more. We will also be able to decide what level of reality we want. Most of it? Or as little as possible? We could spend days wandering around fourteenth century versions of our cities if we so desired, and still be fully functioning creatures of the twenty-first. Just as no two smartphones are the same once you turn them on – each user has a different set of apps, shortcuts and contacts – so will the world appear different to each one of us.'

If this sounds far-fetched, Mirani tells us, we should bear in mind that many newspapers no longer publish print editions, that no London buses take cash any more.

Towards the end of Megatech, the science writer Oliver Morton argues that computers play a role comparable to that of steam engines for the Victorians. They are the technology that stands for all technologies. 'Through their own apparent autonomy, they instantiate ideas about the autonomy and agency of all such artifice. When they say "No", or say "Yes", or "make" decisions, they always do so in ways that are determined by the programs that have been written by human hands, for human purposes, with human flaws.' But, Morton crucially adds, they do so in ways that make it hard not to imagine the agency as residing in the device itself. If he is correct, then we must consider ourselves on the verge of outsourcing control, responsibility, auctoritas itself, to a contraption of our own devising. Rather as an atheist might accuse us of doing in the matter of God.

The US religion writer and publisher Phyllis Tickle has described the current upheavals confronting Christianity in her book The Great Emergence. She makes the much-needed, indeed vital link between the way the new printing presses enabled propagation not just of the Word, but also that other key inspiration and motivation to faith and worship – music.

Take Hillsong. How noteworthy that Justin Bieber, the biggest pop star of the millennial generation has moved away from secular performance into a more private form of self-expression in that very genre. Surely the secular expectation of the modern world would be that the popular music would absorb and overtake a phenomenon such as Hillsong, yet in a way the opposite has happened. The phrase 'Belieber' has acquired a whole new meaning.

What would Luther have made of it all? What if he were to be transported to this place and this time through a technology which would have flummoxed him even more than it would flummox us? What if we engineered his return and he found himself standing here, before us, because he could do no other? Would he have found himself in peril of his life for vilifying the behaviour of the established church, or would he have been offered a column in The Guardian?

One thing, I think, we could predict. He would be astounded by the miracles – the man-made and therefore God-made miracles – through which we speak to one another, work together, sing, play, bank, share our texts and just about everything else. He would have downloaded his Bible before you could say Gutenberg and pinged it off to everyone in his boundless address book. He would have loved such a tool of dissemination, and rued the fact of its coming so late. He would have been less impressed, though probably unsurprised, by our misguided use of such a gift.

Diarmaid MacCulloch, one of our leading authorities on the Reformation, writes: 'In the sixteenth century Europeans burned one another for denying that bread could become God, or fully God and fully human, while some hanged others for not believing in government by bishops. In the past, they did indeed do things differently.' Yet today we have seen organisations such as Islamic State harness social media to promote their cause and inflict cruelties on other human beings that well past atrocities brought about by excess zeal.

Our path is not an easy one, but then nor was Luther's. Nor is that of anyone who wishes to live by authority but who questions and challenges the worldly incarnation of that thing. I am reminded of Jesus' words in Matthew 7: 'Enter ye in at the strait gate, for wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat. Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.'

O Lord, show us the way.

This column is an edited version of The Ebor Lecture delivered in York last month. Ruth Gledhill is multi-media editor of The Tablet and editorial adviser to Christian Today.

Follow her on Twitter @ruthiegledhill.