Friday, April 09, 2010
It's More Than Just The Web
Two bloggers I read a lot, Matt Anderson and Greg Gilbert, linked, as did a lot of other people, to this post by Carl Trueman:
This is the madness I fear. The church has come to be viewed as offering commodity, so we stoop to promotional tactics in all media to differentiate our product from the next guys.
There is nothing, I repeat nothing, commodious, about what the church should have to offer the world. Why do we think there is?
Because we have reduced it to such. We have taken the Creator of the Universe, The Savior of Mankind, He who was incarnated, crucified, and resurrected, and turned Him into something that must be sold like laundry detergent.
If the church wants to grow, it has to stop looking at how to reach the world in the world's "language" and figure out how to be the people God intended us to be. Instead of looking at how to reach the next person we should be on our knees looking for the Lord we have yet to truly find.
It's not madness, it's idolatry.
Let’s stop there a minute. This is madness. Is this where we have come to, with our Christian use of the web? Men who make careers in part out of bashing the complacency and arrogance of those with whose theology they disagree, yet who applaud themselves on blogs and twitters they have built solely for their own deification? Young men who are so humbled by flattering references that they just have to spread the word of their contribution all over the web like some dodgy rash they picked up in the tropics? And established writers who are so insecure that they feel the need to direct others to places where they are puffed and pushed as the next big thing? I repeat: this is madness, stark staring, conceited, smug, self-glorifying madness of the most pike-staffingly obvious and shameful variety.Of course, all of blogging talked about this, but my thoughts ran to the church in general. Everything from advertising to conferences where Christian "leaders" spend all their time patting each other on the back and saying how good they are. Facebook pages geared almost entirely to generate "buzz" for one congregation or the other.
This is the madness I fear. The church has come to be viewed as offering commodity, so we stoop to promotional tactics in all media to differentiate our product from the next guys.
There is nothing, I repeat nothing, commodious, about what the church should have to offer the world. Why do we think there is?
Because we have reduced it to such. We have taken the Creator of the Universe, The Savior of Mankind, He who was incarnated, crucified, and resurrected, and turned Him into something that must be sold like laundry detergent.
If the church wants to grow, it has to stop looking at how to reach the world in the world's "language" and figure out how to be the people God intended us to be. Instead of looking at how to reach the next person we should be on our knees looking for the Lord we have yet to truly find.
It's not madness, it's idolatry.
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