While many churches have been engaging with social media and establishing an online presence, others among us have felt less enthusiastic for Facebook and Twitter. Such platforms have felt either intrusive or superficial and the concept of virtual church a contradiction in terms.
But all such thoughts are now pre-Covid. Since the virus, even the most technophobe among us have been mastering virtual backgrounds in Zoom and exchanging comments on Facebook Live. For better or worse, the church has fully embraced the Internet age. At Moorlands College we have shifted all our teaching online and my local church now has two Internet Sunday services along with a daily prayer meeting and weekly homegroups. Things will change again as the lockdown unwinds, but ministry will never be pre-Covid again.
I want to make a plea that we maintain our commitment to healthy apologetics in the material that we place online. One of the dangers we have is that we capitulate to the obsession with image that social media encourages. Of course, we do want to present ourselves well. We want ‘likes’. We need to pay attention to audio quality and camera angles. Please let us stop showing our nasal hair by badly-placed camera phones – the Lord is not glorified by it. We also need to be wise stewards of time and resources. Perhaps our online sermons need to be a little shorter and more accessible given the way we can now reach many more people who may have never attended a church.
However, the obsession with image can lead us to misread the effectiveness of our online ministries. It is well known that the number of ‘views’ for a Facebook video only counts those who watched for at least three seconds. Using such view counts as a guide for how many people are engaging with our church services is like counting attendance at our physical church by including passing cars. The world of Instagram and Twitter lend themselves to short, positive one-liners. Therefore, well-known Scripture verses often circulate that way. These can be encouraging to see on our feed, but let’s also be realistic about how limited such communication really is.
Peter tells us the essential principle of apologetics: giving ‘the reason for the hope that you have’ (1 Peter 3:15). While it is good that we tell the world God is good and Jesus saves, these headlines only inform people what we believe – they don’t explain why we believe it. For that, we need to give reasons. Let us pepper our online communication with good evidence.
We may reference historical evidence, personal testimony or logical implications. We should evaluate our anecdotes, quotes and retweets to assess their accuracy. The climate of fake news does us no favours if Christians casually retweet misleading information. That is one reason why I often use this column to identify fake evidence used in apologetics. A short-term positive headline can become a toxic embarrassment in the long term.
Now that we have such a great opportunity to flood social media with biblical content from our churches it is a good time to reflect on the reliability of our sources, the coherence of our claims and the appeal of our message. We should not just be a loud presence on the Internet, we need to be a persuasive presence too.
