A good post at Come to the Waters about Christianity and blogging. It was inspired by a quote from Pastor Rob Bell in this month’s issue of Relevant:
“When the followers of Jesus can think of nothing better to do with their time than to pick apart and shred to pieces the work of other followers of Jesus who are trying to do something about the world, that’s tragic . . . When a Christian can find nothing better to do with their time in the face of this much pain and heartbreak, you start realizing some Christians need to be saved. . . You have to be totally disconnected from the pain of the world to think that blogging is somehow a redemptive use of your time. I guess I have some strong feelings about that.”
So I’m going to ask the same question others are already asking: How can blogging become a redemptive use of our time?
Whether you have a blog or not, I’d love to hear back from some of you on this one….
Comments
This entry was posted 2 years, 2 months ago on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 10:57 am and is filed under a beautiful broken body, best way to be human, blogging on blogging on blogging.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Well… he’s just kind of scoffing at it (from the quotes you gave) without giving a rationale, other than assuming all blogs are doing the same thing and that it is, in a sense (this is just the sense I’m getting), just an uncool, ‘babyish’ thing to do. And it’s true it can seem juvenile. The temptation is to indulge yourself in seeing your words online, in creating a kind of echo-world in which the only one who enjoys and takes in your comments is you.
However, who is to say a blog is more or less ‘important’ than a book? Sad as it is, many people’s attention spans are better suited to the bite-sized thoughts blogs are designed to dispense, as opposed to a book, and I think their lives/reading habits reflect that. Also, who are you reaching? Being in a book seems to presuppose a certain ‘importance’ or affirmation; often, though, new books end up mouldering and forgotten on the shelf. If you can reach a listening audience where you are, why not? Is it his business, really, to accuse a broad blanket of ‘erring’ bloggers, rather than posting his own comments to their blogs suggesting his thoughts? Oh, that’s right, he doesn’t BELIEVE in them.
I’m not as bitter as I sound :D; it’s just getting me going. Hollow critique is, of course, hollow critique, and it can appear anywhere - scientific publications, etc. Blogging is just that much easier, spawning ideas that aren’t polished or well-thought-out. But really, how long do those kind of blogs last? (If a tree falls and no one hears it…?) I think he’s far off the mark if he’s deriding any forum in which people - especially Christians - can share ideas.
Blogging can be redemptive by sharing information about events happening around the world so others will hear about them. Blogging can be redemptive by providing a place where people can actively discuss from miles away (much like email), provided everyone has an open mind and doesn’t go into flaming each other.
I really think the latter is part of the issue Rob Bell brings up. Blogging isn’t redemptive when all you do is attack someone else’s perspective, which we all know happens on many different blogs, and can be wholely unproductive.
Renae- To adequately discuss all that your comment is covering would demand a whole separate post, but here’s my initial thought in response: First, to say blogging is pragmatically better for communicating might be true, but that then begs the question whether we should indulge the poor attention span of our generation by giving into the demand for bite size bits of info. Second, I used to really believe in using technology as a means of “outreach,” but now I think most Christian outreach has to happen in community for it to be in any way Christian. Put another way, I think the how is just as much a part of the Christian message as the what. You can communicate correct theological information to people over the internet, but does that mean you’re communicating Christian truth in a Christian manner? I’m not sure.
For example, Covenant Seminary will not post any of their systematic theology courses online for this very reason- they feel like theology has to happen in community and what you’d get by attempting to do it in a vacuum on a blog or facebook or whatever is probably more harmful than helpful.
Heath- I read one commenter at a blog who put it this way: “This is why I can’t stand blogging…great for the info…pathetic for the pious rhetoric…”
The difficulty is that the easy fix is to disable commenting, but that in turn also disables one of the best potential uses of a blog: conversation and dialog.
OK, here’s my thoughts, in no particular order.
1) Be really picky about the comments you let through. Moderate them. And keep in mind that it is your blog; any comments, whatever the side, that engage in character attacks, slander, etc should simply not be allowed through the filter. One of the major problems I think many bloggers have is that they somehow view the comment threads on their blogs on their domains as somehow not their responsibility. We have yet to deal with this problem here, but suffice to say I don’t think either I or you (Jake) will let people who say things like “A pox on those damn [insert category here]” through. At least I hope not.
2. As to the medium, I agree that seeing blogging as comparable to books is an oversimplification. There are three major differences. First, books are necessarily written by people who have some measure of acceptance on what they’re writing about. Its not perfect, but every 16-year-old living at home can’t get published, which is a bit of a content improvement. Second, they tend to be written over long periods of study and reflection, which means the sort of half-thought-out stuff which I know I sometimes post here isn’t as much of an issue. And thirdly, you have some editorial oversight.
HOWEVER, this does not mean that I think blogging is a bad thing. Instead, I think we need to view it as a “conversation”…
3. Blogging is essentially a form of public discourse. At least, the sort of blogging which I think both of us tend toward is. Sure, some of it is just spreading information, and some blogs are good for this. However, I think blogging is probably most similar to a public discussion between strangers and aquaintances, an internet-spanning forum on given issues, if you will. This means that, as Christians, we are bound by all of the constraints of public discourse. We must be gracious. We must speak clearly. We must seek to treat everyone, especially those we disagree with, in a manner consistent with the gospel. If this is our approach, then I think there’s nothing wrong with blogging. But it needs to shed its guise of anonymity and instead force us to view ourselves as people talking to other people, just as we should in a public, human conversation.