I love Jesus, but I can't stand Christians...
Conversations with God 3.0
Daniel 9
by Eric Stillman
September 24th, 2006

Five years ago, if I asked you what a blog was, you’d probably say something like, “isn’t that a really fat frog?” or “isn’t that a sound your stomach makes when you’ve eaten too much ice cream?” or something like that.  Nowadays, however, it seems like everyone has a blog – in case you don’t know, blog is short for weblog, which is an online diary or journal that allows people to read your thoughts and post their comments on the things that you write.  From high school kids who use it as a place to share their thoughts and feelings to university professors who use it as to gain a wider audience to their opinions and viewpoints, to journalists who use it to offer their readers a way to hear more of their thoughts, there are seemingly millions of on-line journals on the internet.  If you step back as an observer and examine the blog culture, one thing that you notice is that there are more opinions out there than you ever wished to know about, that you can learn what millions of random people think about millions of random things, more than you might ever wish to know.  Someone will post their opinion on President Bush’s latest speech, or the Monday night football game, or the latest Justin Timberlake release, and then random people from all over the world can post their own comments and opinions and arguments in response.  In some ways, this is a fascinating innovation, as it has allowed for great conversation between a diverse group of people, as well as the opportunity to hear the wisdom of a lot of people.  I have benefited from reading discussions by many prominent Christian thinkers.  On the other hand, blogs can be a very scary thing to participate in, because once you put something out there in cyberspace, you can’t take it back, and you open yourself up to all sorts of criticism and unwanted feedback.  It has become very clear that in the blog culture, everyone’s a critic, everyone has their opinion, and everyone is an authority in their own mind. 

Christian websites and blogs are in many ways no different.  Perhaps you have yet to be exposed to the on-line world of Christian thinking, but believe me, there’s plenty of it out there, and everyone has their opinion on church and Christianity, the way things are and the way things should be.  One book that I picked up two years ago was called Making Sense of Church by a former pastor named Spencer Burke.  Making Sense of Church is a fascinating book that is a compilation of a lot of posts and ideas found on the website theooze.com, organized around topics that reveal some of the shifts in theology and methodology found in churches today.  Chapters include intriguing titles such as “Tour Guide to Traveler – a conversation about leadership,” “Adversary to Ally – a conversation about faith,” “hero to human – a conversation about spiritual growth.”  As fascinating as this book was, the prevailing mindset was essentially “churches are so backwards and far from what Jesus intended,” and it was very difficult not to get sucked into that frame of mind and somehow think that the critics alone have it all figured out while those who are actually leading churches and doing ministries have it all backwards.  As much as I love reading websites and blogs like theooze.com, it again seems clear that in today’s blog culture, everyone’s a critic, everyone has their own opinion, and everyone is an authority in their own mind.

I know that I’ve fallen into this many times.  For example, for four years I brought my youth groups to an event called Acquire the Fire, led by a man named Ron Luce.  Perhaps you’ve seen him on a Christian television station or heard him in person.  His passion for Christ and to see teens become Christians and go on missions is incredibly inspiring, but like many speakers, he’s all too easy to make fun of as well.  I still receive e-mails from ATF, including ones about their current campaign, called Battle Cry.  He loves using battle and warfare images to communicate the battle teens are facing in the world today and the need for the church to rise up and come alongside young people.  Great stuff, but part of his campaign is this statistic that he got from somewhere that explains that only 4% of the current teenage population in America will grow up to be evangelical Christians.  Ron Luce follows this with apocalyptic visions of what this sort of world will be, with the reality that Christianity as we know it could be on the brink of dying out if we do not join the battle.

So naturally, being the authority in my own mind and the perfect critic and judge, my response is often to mock him and make fun of the whole Battle Cry thing and his alarm that only 4% of teens will be Bible-believing Christians.  As Ron pours his heart and soul into winning the world for Christ and saving teens from what he perceives as the immorality of this world, I sit back in my critic’s chair and laugh and judge.  More and more in today’s culture, everyone’s a critic, everyone has their own opinion, and everyone is an authority in their own mind, and sadly, that attitude infiltrates the church, and I know my own heart, all the time.