What use is Twitter and Facebook when it comes to pastoral ministry? Should we even try? Is it really smart for pastors to lob verbal grenades into cyber space where any number of people in any number of conditions and situations may do anything they like with them? Is it really all that helpful? I want to defend the practice and encourage those who feel inclined to give it a try.
Why?
First of all, I would defend the art of pastoral tweet bombing by pointing to the perfect pastor: Jesus Christ. He’s the Head Pastor of the Church, the Chief Shepherd, and we take our cues from Him. Jesus invented Twitter. Jesus was the first pastor to employ Twitter in His pastoral ministry.
He may not have had a smart phone or even a dumb phone, but Jesus was the master of throwing out short truths that were calculated to poke, prod, and offend.
Here are a few samples from Matthew’s Twitter Feed:
“Follow Me, and let the dead bury their dead.” (Mt. 8:22)
“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. But go and learn what this means: I desire mercy and not sacrifice.’ For I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance.” (Mt. 9:12-13)
“Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth. I did not come to bring peace but a sword.” (Mt. 10:34)
“I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” (Mt. 10:35)
“Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees.” (Mt. 16:6)
“If you want to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give it to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven, and come follow Me.” (Mt. 19:21)
The point is that Jesus frequently said things in short, pointy ways that not only could be misunderstood, but which frequently were and were meant to be. Jesus didn’t apologize and promise to only write essays, books, and give long sermons that explained everything more carefully. Jesus kept right on saying things that were startling, confusing, and could be easily misunderstood. In fact, Jesus ultimately was condemned for statements that were twisted and taken out of context.
If Jesus had only said things that were more helpful to everyone, He probably could have avoided the cross. Oh good, would someone please let Him know? Actually, there were lawyers and pharisees lining up to give Him the memo.
The fact that some people will read Matthew’s quotes above and think that they are reasonable, unobjectionable statements only goes to show that the modern Church has asked a neutered Jesus into their hearts. And now they’re frequently wagging a grandmotherly finger whenever anyone says anything that’s actually slightly Christ-like.
The point isn’t just to say anything that might get a rise out of someone. The point is to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may. The point is to tell the truth without being bothered with exceptional cases and devilish nuances. The point, dare I say it again, is to tell the truth.
Furthermore, the gospel itself, while it is big and expansive and glorious, is also reducible to Twitter form, and the apostles do not shy away from this.
“I declare to you the gospel which I preached to you, which also you received and in which you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast that word which I preached to you – unless you believed in vain. For I delivered to you first of all that which I also received that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures…” (1 Cor. 15:1-4)
“This is a faithful saying and worthy of all acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am chief.” (1 Tim. 1:15)
“For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit.” (1 Pet. 3:18)
And there are others of course.
But the fact of the matter is that Twitter is inescapable. This is the idea of sound bites. We live in a sound bite culture, and there are plenty of reasons to lament that. Our sound bite culture is full of superficiality, hypocrisy, and consequently it is full of morons and easily duped masses.
But even apart from our modern, slack-jawed idiocy, the sound bite has always existed. This is because part of the glory of finitude is the inability to say everything all the time. We always abbreviate, summarize, and abridge. And this does not automatically damn the speech of the human race. In fact, God is the original leader in this venture. When God spoke light into existence, He did not give a lecture on the topic – though He surely could have. He could have exhaustively spoken the entirety of all that light is and means. But instead, He abbreviated. He called Light by a short, potent utterance that commanded it into existence. The whole concept of naming is the same. God brought animals to Adam, and authorized him to name them. And whatever Adam called the little, squatty rodent, that was its name – despite the fact that Adam had only existed for about five minutes and could not have had a very thorough taxonomy figured out on hedgehogs. But God was pleased. He wants His image bearers to name the world like He does, with short descriptions and names. He is not worried if Adam hasn’t said everything else he can possibly say about the creature, even though a modern biologist might be able to run circles around him. It is actually incredibly God-like to speak big truths in 140 characters or less.
But the world wasn’t a week old yet, and Satan, the Father of Lies, showed up with a lexicon, hoping to tease out some of the nuances of the Word of God. This isn’t a case for anti-intellectualism; it’s actually the opposite. It’s perilously easy for pastors and theologians to get distracted by gnats in the text, while their people are getting trampled by camels in the pews. This leaves the faithful to fend for themselves, digging a few crumbs and scraps out of the theological pile of hot, stinky stuff that frequently passes for a sermon. And of course there are others on the opposite end of the spectrum who actually think the crumbs are the feast. They probably also think that Twitter is all-sufficient for every pastoral need, and they will have their reward.
But ultimately, it is not a pastor’s job (or any Christian’s for that matter) to make sure everyone understands. Sometimes, God sends pastors and prophets to preach in such a way as to make sure the people don’t understand, to tell parables, and perform prophetic charades until the people are deaf, dumb, and blind (Is. 6:9-10, Mk. 4:11-12). It is not necessarily a failure for the truth to be told in a way that stirs up discussion, demands clarification, and confuses people. Jesus did it all the time. And Jesus did it so that some people would be confused, turned off, and reject Him, and others would be drawn to Him, to ask questions, to find out more, to figure out what He meant (Mk. 4:33-34).
Pastors should not think that creating questions and confusion is failure. Even when words might have been chosen more carefully, we should always think of those situations as opportunities. If you need to correct what you said, then correct it. But when people demand answers, the answer is always Jesus. And when people clamor for more, you’re in a win-win situation. There is no down side to getting to talk about Christ.
David Cassidy says
You wrote, “Pastors should not think that creating questions and confusion is failure.”
You are exceedingly mistaken.
You’re not Jesus. You’re not an apostle. You’re not a prophet. You’re a Pastor. C’mon man. The Pastoral care of the congregation is not the same thing as standing on a hillside and hurling down flames like Elijah. Use Twitter or Blogs or whatever – fine. Be prophetic. But purposely cause confusion in the church? Good luck with that one. Once. Maybe. Too make a point about confusion perhaps. More than that – you won’t be helping the flock at all, but you will have some very jumpy sheep on your hands. Not that what I think about this matters in the slightest. Oh, and make sure you employ sweeping generalizations that accuse people of telling God to F-off too! Yep, that’s going to help your folks handle the apologetic load. Its headline grabbing – if that’s what you like.
Tom Brainerd says
Another good post, Toby.
I’ve determined that I don’t have to put another original-to-me thought in cyberspace. I can post quotes from the old commentators, helping Calvin and Manton et al enter the cyberspace, kicking and screaming. There’s enough short, pithy stuff there to last me a lifetime.
Brad Littlejohn says
Toby,
Thanks for these thoughts. There are definitely some good points here, but I hope you won’t mind if I prod you further on a couple.
The heart of your argument appears to be, “Well, Jesus did it.” To this, at least two objections come to mind.
First, a crucial difference between the ministry of Jesus, or indeed any preaching ministry, and Twitter, is that *Jesus could see who he was talking to.* This is important on a number of levels. Jesus may have, as you say, thrown out short, enigmatic, provocative statements at times, statements that would bewilder and challenge as much as or more than they would illumine. But at least he could assess his audience before he did so; he could decide that these particular people needed to hear this particular “tweet-bomb” at this particular time. Indeed, although Jesus certainly did often preach to very large crowds, in which cases he could not necessarily know (humanly, at any rate) just who all was going to hear his statement and how they might take them, it is perhaps significant that the examples you give above were all addressed to particular individuals (1, 2, and 6) or to the group of disciples (3-5). In any case, even when addressing a large crowd, Jesus could have some idea of whom he was addressing.
On Twitter, however, one lobs a statement out into the Cloud with no idea who all might stumble across it. To be sure, one may have a good general idea who one’s regular followers are, but if the statement is a provocative one, many more readers, some coming from standpoints not remotely imagined by the Tweeter, may read it, and who knows what time and place they will come upon it? One may aim a challenging and bewildering one-liner at a small group in order to get them thinking about it, but its effect on the wider masses may be much different, and less constructive. You have not, at any rate, convinced me thus far that it was Jesus’s common practice to simply to throw out such statements into a random mass of hearers and hope for the best.
Related to this objection—my parents always insisted to me that 90% of what you say is body language and tone of voice, and when I first took up email, I realized how dangerous it could be to do without these. A communication uttered personally, by visible and audible speech, simply does not function the same way as a communication that appears in our web browser. The medium makes the message. No doubt, when Jesus wanted to say something provocative, he thought a great deal about how to deliver it, but the Tweeter has no such luxury. The words are out there, and can be taken in whatever tone the reader imputes to them, without any of the nuances the Tweeter might have supplied by tone, etc., should he actually have been speaking it.
Indeed, I’m still thinking about this, but it seems like a medium like Twitter can distort its message in more ways than just this. For me personally, at least, a spoken utterance carries a certain authority, an arresting quality, that words on a screen (particularly a smartphone screen) do not. If someone says something challenging to me in the pulpit, or face-to-face, then even if I’m naturally disposed to disagree, it will usually make me stop and think, force me to rethink any objections I might be inclined to fire back. Whereas, if I see that same statement as a bundle of pixels during my morning Facebook trawl, it has no feeling of authority for me. Even statements that I might, on reflection, agree with, given by people whom I generally respect as authoritative, I am inclined to balk at or dismiss, and I have to really work at it to take them seriously. Perhaps this is a problem unique to me, but I expect not. How, really, could we expect a tweet to carry the same authority as a vocal utterance?
Second (yes, I’m afraid all that was just under the heading of the first objection), we are not Jesus, as the commenter above rather insistently objected. Now, I don’t think that means we can never try to imitate him in such things. But surely you will grant that the reason Jesus is so well known for such enigmatic, challenging utterances and parables, is because they are so darn difficult to do well. It takes not only great rhetorical skill but extraordinary prudence and pastoral awareness to know when where and how to provoke and challenge in this way. Jesus, as the Son of God and the Messiah, did all sorts of things that carry, wrapped all over them, the warning label, “Don’t try this at home!” So while I happily admit that it may be possible for us to imitate Jesus’s manner of teaching, it is not necessarily *prudent* to attempt it, unless we are quite sure of what we are doing.
And indeed, let’s stop and ask how many pastors actually would feel safe genuinely imitating it, if they didn’t have the luxury of hiding behind the barrier of Twitter. How many of your more inflammatory Tweet-bombs would you have felt comfortable declaiming from a street corner, or walking into a Bible study, lobbing out there, and then walking out? I would expect that most pastors who are willing to make provocative, challenging statements, would do so within the context of a sermon, where a larger context of teaching can clarify it. We shy away from such one-liners in ordinary ministry, I think, because I think we instinctively realize how difficult they can be to do effectively, but somehow we feel safer if we’re just typing them into a computer.
I would extend this line of objection to some of your later remarks in this post:
“It is actually incredibly God-like to speak big truths in 140 characters or less.” Well, yes, I see what you’re saying, and I agree. The very best writers, like Lewis and Chesterton, are those capable of packing a year’s worth of sermons into a sentence. But this is quite a skill to master, and not one that the average pastor or Tweeter can display on a regular basis. I mean, I love a pithy aphorism, a brilliant one-liner, as much as anyone, and I admire the wit that produces them; but I am depressed at how rare they have become in our sound-bite culture.
And, if I may, a second prong to the “We’re not Jesus” objection, more closely following that voiced by David above. Jesus, we are told, sometimes taught in parables as a sign of judgment, “that hearing they may not understand, and that seeing they may not perceive.” From that standpoint, you argue, a mode of communication like Twitter, that might confuse and upset as much as illuminate, would in fact be a weapon of choice for Jesus. Jesus didn’t always want to illumine and build up, sometimes he wanted to turn off and drive away, and so he spoke in a way that would be misunderstood by most. Assuming for the moment that this is an accurate way of describing Jesus’s ministry (and I think it might be a tad oversimplistic), I guess I’m just not sure how much of that carries over to the calling of the ordinary pastor. Jesus came at the time of judgment, at the end of the age. He was the prophet of the Day of the Lord, with the winnowing fork in his hand. He came to separate the wheat from the chaff, to declare and enact judgment on unfaithful Israel. His coming was the crux of history, a unique moment of judgment in which the Old Covenant came to an end. Clearly, we live at a different moment in salvation history. Although judgment is still ongoing, we are not to be forever replaying this decisive day of judgment. Rather, we are to be telling the *good news* that Jesus has died and risen again, with the desire that all will hear and be saved. To say that the pastor will often be misunderstood, that his words of truth will often be a stumbling block—that makes sense to me. But I’m not sure it makes sense to me to say that the pastor’s goal should ever be to drive people away, to send them into judgment. I don’t accept that the the business of the pastor is to intentionally turn people off to the Gospel without then seeking to draw them back in. If you mean as a temporary thing—disorient people so that you can reorient them—sure, that makes sense. But precisely the problem with things like Twitter is that that opportunity for reorientation is often unavailable, since you don’t even know who it is that you might’ve disoriented.