A friend of mine sent me a video yesterday that, at first, made me smile and then made me wince because I realized what kind of impact that it would have on my spiritually lost friends and family. The church can’t afford to be mockers at the expense of the next generation.
There are plenty of opportunities for believers to begin gospel conversations in the arena of social media. But at the same time, we might permanently lose the very people we intend to reach with the gospel. There’s really no place for mockery in the church even while we feel angry because of the current state of our culture. We aren’t the first generation to face the decay of society and to weep at the way our society is going. But every great movement of God happens because of connection, prayer and compassion. God never moves amidst our pride, and mockery.
In order to find connections, we must stop politicizing every issue and realize that there are people who are dying for truth. They are hoping for a deep level of compassion and empathy while we lean on our own moral platitudes and strike back with memes, links and parody videos. There is a deep and lasting desperation that we are called to address. There’s no way to overflow with love and mockery. These elements flow out of two separate spigots.
Our clever “gotcha moments” never send anyone to heaven. So today I mourn the state of the Church
and regret deeply that many have lost our compassion. We have turned to anger as a cathartic practice to make ourselves appear more righteous. We appear as social media warriors on paper horses throwing political grenades across the wall, looking to gain amens, likes and shares from our brothers and sisters who share the same axes that we grind. The dopamine is released in the pomposity of our supposedly regenerated minds while the rest of the world that we are called to reach, turns away from the Church because of our pharisaical posturing and ungodly hubris. There’s just no getting around the fact that we must do better as the Body of Christ.
This work by Matt Tullos is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International