When Christians attack each other online, the gospel moves backwards.
There’s not a single atheist on the sidelines of Christianity who says, “You know, I don’t love this guy Jesus, but his followers sure do hate each other online. Maybe I should get to know him.”
I’ve never met someone with a testimony that said, “The bitter, public backbiting of Christians online is what led me to a growing relationship with Christ.”
I think part of the problem is that we only want “sanctified online conversations.” We don’t leave room for people to wrestle out and discover and grow. We want each post to be written as if the person is already completely sanctified and their thoughts on any particular topic are final. But if we won’t let each other be open and honest online about our doubts and struggles what makes people watching think we’ll let them be open and honest in our churches?
I’ve bumped into this for years as a Christian with a blog. It’s made me want to start a Christian bloggers justice league.
We probably wouldn’t have a secret hangout, but if we did, these would be some of the things we’d agree to:
1. Debate online, fight offline.
Instead of writing a blog post about how much I want to fight your idea, I’m going to send you an email. Or a direct message. Or a small note tied to a pigeon. I don’t think we have to agree about everything, but when you tweet about somebody without trying to contact them privately, you’re not trying to solve the problem. You’re trying to showcase the problem.
2. Don’t use each other for traffic.
If you’re a pastor, blogger, random human, I won’t use your downfall as a means to increase traffic on my blog. If I want to do a blog review of your book, awesome. Even if I disagree with it. But if you fail at something or make some sort of mistake, I’m not going to create a blog post celebrating that just so I can get more traffic.
3. Share best practices.
Sometimes I feel like Christians online are all on these individual islands. You know things I don’t know. I know things you don’t know. Let’s share and amplify the gospel with creativity.
I think about things like this mostly because I’ve done such a poor job with them in the past. I’ve been the person who attacks or writes dumb posts geared at traffic not change.
But the gospel moves backwards when we Christians act like that.
And that’s the wrong direction.
Question:
What point might you add to this list?
