Aaron Armstrong

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Links I like (7/18)

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Links I like

In case y’all need the reminder, Links I Like is a round-up of the interesting, thought-provoking, and/or goofy things I find online.

Why Didn’t the Planned Parenthood Videos Change the Abortion Debate?

Joe Carter:

Two years ago yesterday, a group that almost no one had ever heard of before released an undercover video. The video produced by the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) showed a national-level executive of Planned Parenthood admitting that the abortion provider sells intact fetal body parts.

Over the next few weeks CMP released other videos. The pro-life movement was electrified. Many defenders of life thought to themselves, This changes everything.

Only, it didn’t.

Gospel + Safety + Time = a church where anyone can grow

I love this. I’m thankful that I know of a number of churches who are trying to live out these values.

Facebook is not my church

Erin Davis:

The First Church of Facebook can only temporarily spackle the holes in our hearts and lives, never fix or heal them. We need Jesus for that, and Christ’s Plan A for our sanctification and the world’s redemption is the local church. Not the cyber church. Not the podcast church. Not the blogosphere church. Not even the Facebook church. Here are three reasons why.

Every Book of the Bible in One Word

Garrett Kell:

The Bible is one book made up of 66 books. Each book has a major theme that emphasizes an aspect of God’s character or a way he is working to carry out his perfect plan. What follows is an attempt to capture these themes. These themes are certainly reductionistic and required me to make a few tough choices, but I hope you’ll be helped by considering them.

The Bible is Better Than Google

Margaret Bronson:

I have three kids: that means three different opportunities for random diseases and injuries and weirdness to pop up. When there are spots on my 3-year-old’s arms, when my 1-year-old’s hair smells like it’s burning, or when my five-month-old is eating twice the amount his formula says he should, I always turn to Google. I plug in my keywords and get 345,289,293 results, and after reading four or five answers, I wonder why I ever bothered. What does Buzzfeed know about spots on my kid’s arms? How do I know who wrote this journal on a baby’s intake? And this chat room about burnt-smelling hair is terrifying. How can I believe anything I read!?! Even if I read something that is true, I’m skeptical because I found it on the internet! It’s far better to talk to my pediatrician or my mom. In the same way that we should go to right and authoritative sources about our kids’ health, we should do the same in our spiritual lives.

3 Things the Gospel Says When You’re Overwhelmed

Michael Kelley:

To feel overwhelmed by the pressures of work. To feel overwhelmed by what’s happening in your family or in your relationships. To have so many people, so many responsibilities, so many troubles, so much stuff pressing in around you that you feel trapped, intertwined with all these arms and legs of circumstance. Feeling overwhelmed like that can leave you breathless, struggling for the oxygen of life.

More often than not when I feel like that, there is going to be some tiny little thing that sends me over the edge. I’m trying to juggle everything else that’s happening around me, and then one of my kids will do something, or say something, or spill something, and I’ll fly off the handle. It’s not because what they’ve done is particularly heinous in some way; it’s because it was the final straw that sent all the other plates spinning in life crashing down, and that kid just happened to be the easy target that gets the brunt of all the frustration.

Yes, you really should mark up your books

A favorite from the archives:

Some of you got chills as you read that headline, I know. You hate the idea of writing in books. You want to keep them pristine. You try never to crack the spine, I bet. (I say this as someone who used to try to avoid this, so I’m not making fun.) I get it. I really do. But you know what? You might not like it, it’s true:

You really should mark up your books.

Why? Because reading is not a passive activity. Your mind should be fully engaged, even when you’re reading silly fluff. (This is especially important for all us writer types.)

Links I like

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Kindle deals for Christian readers

Several volumes from Crossway’s Theologians on the Christian Life series are on sale for $3.99 each:

Want to get a sense of the series? Get Theologians on the Christian Life: On the Church for free. Also on sale:

And finally, four volumes in the Christ-Centered Exposition Commentary series are $2.99 each:

What kids around the world eat for breakfast

This is pretty interesting.

Making The Church A Safe Place For Mental Illness

Stephen Altrogge:

In some churches, there’s this weird taboo surrounding mental illness. Nobody ever talks about it or acknowledges that it’s real. If a guy is sunk into depression, we say he’s, “Going through a rough patch,” or, “Having a tough time,” or we don’t say anything at all. If someone has cancer, we pray that God will heal her. If someone has back surgery, we make meals for him. But when it comes to mental illness, we don’t know what to say or do. Everyone knows something is wrong but nobody actually talks about it.

Don’t fall prey to the Facebook hoax

Remember friends, the only one who looks silly is you. And all the people who copy and paste what you post.

5 Reasons to Pray for Other Churches

Eric Bancroft:

Most evangelical churches that are faithful to preach the gospel are eager to do God’s work. While they represent this in a variety of ways, it usually includes baseline expectations of evangelism and discipleship. They organize their meetings, hire their staff, train their volunteers, structure their programs, and build their buildings with these intentions in mind. If they have been at it for any length of time and God has blessed their labor, they have seen fruit. Lives have been impacted. Homes have been changed. Relationships have been deepened.

parsons-old kind of heretic

“Saying you’re a new kind of Christian with a new kind of Christianity is basically saying you’re an old kind of heretic.”
—Burk Parsons—

The Social Church by Justin Wise

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The Social Church by Justin Wise

The first time I heard Justin Wise speak on social media I was impressed.

It was the first session—actually the pre-conference workshop—at a conference for Christian creatives in Canada. Wise was speaking on how churches need to embrace their websites as their new front-door. And as he laid everything out, with tons of practical examples, I had two reactions:

  1. People really need to listen to this guy
  2. This is going to be really hard for some folks to swallow

Many of the people occupying the leadership roles in churches, non-profits, and for-profit entities are digital immigrants. They remember a time without Wi-Fi, Netflix, and Facebook. Many of them use social media, but struggle to understand how to do it. Others don’t bother with it at all, seeing it as a distraction, a fad, or a time-suck that gets in the way of getting real work/ministry done.

But, Wise argues, digital communication is not a good thing for a church to engage in—it’s necessary if they’re actually serious about reaching people with the gospel. And that’s really the heart behind his book, The Social Church: A Theology of Digital Communication, where Wise unpacks the “why” of social media, with a bit of how sprinkled in along the way.

Mission and ministry in social media

If you could boil the why down to one thing, it’s really this: Churches need to be engaging social media—blogs, Facebook, Twitter, whatever the next thing is that’s going to take the world by storm—not because it’s hip and trendy, but because it’s about mission and ministry. Where people are, Christians must be as well. But the difference, and maybe the most challenging aspect of it, is that mission and ministry in social media requires two-way communication.

“For many, many years, churches communicated in the same fashion you and I drive down a one-way street: traffic only moved one way,” Wise explains. “Churches broadcasted a message and never anticipated a moment where the congregation would start speaking back.”

But social media has changed this dynamic.…For the church, and virtually every other sector of society, the shift to social permanently turned the tables in the public’s favor. Social media gave people a voice, and they’re not going to give it up easily. (30)

This is the challenge many of us have when engaging social media. Because the expectation is two-way communication, you actually have to engage people. You have to talk to them when they talk back and share content that’s not all about you. And this is also where so many organizations—including some of the world’s biggest brands—fall on their faces. So if you’ve just realized that you’re doing the digital equivalent of shouting into an empty room, take heart: you’re not alone and you can change this.

But in order to do it, you have to know the values of a social media culture, what it likes and dislikes. What it thinks, how it feels… This is, essentially, the “nasty” business of contextualization, becoming all things to all people so that some might be saved. And even as we seek to understand—or humbly admit we can’t make the leap ourselves and bring in people to help us—we find more opportunities to push back.

Challenging a mediated world

Even as “online” and “offline” become increasingly blurred, we’re going to find ourselves having to confront the tendency to hide in the digital realm with more force. Humans were not meant to hide behind screens and smartphones (and yes, I understand the irony of me even saying this in a digital medium). Real relationships can form and be nurtured online, but the best kinds of relationships form in the real life.

I suppose the inherent danger of online communities is when there is a mistaken belief they can serve as a one-for-one replacement for in-person communities. They can’t (and shouldn’t). Offline trumps online.

Having said that, online community is definitely preferable to no community whatsoever. Lives have been changed, saved, and redeemed all because gospel-centered online communities exist. (155)

You can see the tension here, can’t you? I think Wise is certainly correct that “digital community is better than no community” to some degree, but the fact that this also points us to a legitimate issue in our context: that even as we develop a sound theology of digital communication, we must develop a robust eccesiology to compliment it. This is the difficulty many of us have with idea of online services—while streaming the service can certainly beneficial, how do we challenge people to engage in reality?

Years ago, I was part of an active hobby-focused online community. People would talk about the primary subject (comics), but would also delve into all kinds of other topics, including sharing deeply personal details about their lives (not in a TMI kind of way. Usually). Folks would meet at conventions for drinks. Users who lived in the same cities would get together every once in a while for a meal if the suggestion was tabled… But in the end, when someone stopped visiting the site, it was like they never existed. In an instant, those relationships were severed. The connections weren’t really all that deep.

This is the challenge we face when we deal with the implications of online ministry. How do we build real connections that aren’t easy to sever? This is something Wise doesn’t thoroughly address in the book because, honestly, I don’t know if he or anyone else is equipped to put forward an answer. But make no mistake: if we’re serious about being gospel-minded, gospel-centered people who want to engage the digital realm for mission and ministry, this elephant in the room must be named and addressed.

The beginning of a much deeper conversation

The Social Church is not the last word on social media and the church, nor should it be. Instead, it’s best to see this book as the continuation (or possibly the beginning) of of a conversation we’re not quite ready for: a much deeper discussion on how to do ministry in a simultaneously bigger and smaller world. But whether or not we’re truly ready, it’s a conversation we need to have.

Title: The Social Church: A Theology of Digital Communication
Author: Justin Wise
Publisher: Moody Publishers (2014)

Buy it at: Amazon

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