The soul-poison of the little word ‘should’

I choose my social media feeds with care.  If you’ve ever tried to find me on Facebook you’ll have discovered I only have as friends those whom I actually know in real life.  That, or I’m working on an interest of mine and I follow the contributors to a group.

On Twitter/X. (or ‘Twix’, as I’m now calling it) absolutely anyone can follow me, but I follow remarkably few. Those I do, I have chosen because they inspire me, encourage me, even challenge me.  It’s a personal and continual ‘cheering up and cheering on’ approach.

Why, then, does it leave me so often feeling guilty?  And I don’t mean, that I spend hours scrolling when I should be doing something productive.  And I don’t mean doomscrolling. I deliberately avoid angry evangelical echo-chambers (if you wonder, yes I do call myself en evangelical, in the British tradition of John Stott).

This is a stream which I’ve selected to encourage me – and yet it crushes.

Why the guilt? Is it just me? 

A large part of it must lie in the form of the medium, and what the algorithm rewards.

If you’ve done any digging, you’ll know that the rewards go the extreme, the controversial, the opinionated.  Those whose edge is serrated.  Blog posts of the kind I write don’t tend to get traction or notoriety – and I really don’t want that kind of attention.  It’s unlikely that one of my book reviews for pastors will go viral – and I’m very happy about that.  

Flip that, and you can see how I filter stuff out.  I don’t want to be yelled at for my views on Genesis, or Revelation, or baptism, or Gaza.  And so I don’t see it in my benefit to publicly differentiate myself from other pastors or churches.  

Does that make me a milksop? I hope not.  My denomination is currently tearing itself apart on the  issue of same-sex marriage, and I’m trying to lead a church through that issue, while contributing at a number of levels.  It’s just that I don’t do it here, online.

So, why, then, this guilt?

Well in part, because even though lots of us don’t want to feed the algorithm, drafting a headline which will attract readers to a post is still something we need to do.

And so, it begins. ‘Why you should be preaching through Deuteronomy’ is a headline that might be crafted to make me want to preach Dt, but it actually makes me feel guilty for not having done so.  Despite the fact that I could riposte, ‘Why you should preaching on (whatever I last preached on)’.  ‘Five reasons a pastor should always/never do…’. ‘Are you neglecting your kids ministry/childless couples ministry/single parents ministry/We tried for a girl and got a boy ministry?’  See how it goes? 

The soul-poison lies in that little word ‘should’  

We can go further.  No one actually believes that famous Pastor Fred (fictional) actually spends hours each day crafting thoughtful tweets.  We all know there’s an intern or two ransacking the sermons, articles, books for pithy quotes. No one believes that he preaches as well as the carefully curated clips. No-one believes the perfect marriage/perfect ministry/perfect wardrobe/perfect teeth Instagram feed.  Do we?

Because my carefully curated feed is telling me that I should be preaching on Deuteronomy, with humour and relevance, looking cool, with pithy out-takes, life-changing power and contemporary relevance every single Sunday.  

I’ve constructed a Frankenstein’s monster of what ministry looks like, and it lives inside my head.

But that’s a teeny bit too easy.  Because that makes the problem my stupidity.  That is, I agree, a large part of it.  But not all.

As I scroll though my feed, I do wonder if there’s a tendency in contemporary evangelicalism to default to making people – Christians – feel guilty. 

I think – I hope- we should be able to spot this.  For instance, Tim Keller (who while dead, yet tweeteth) taught us to read both brothers in the Prodigal Son as needing grace. Bavinck, one of his heroes, definitely taught us about the dangers of a unipolar worldview. We should have been taught to unseat both liberalism and legalism.

But, our cultural context appears overwhelmingly to be on one side of that polarisation. The self-titled ‘liberal’ side.(I say ‘appears’, because I hope you’ve spotted that liberalism can be every bit as legalistic – we can come back to that another time). And therefore, to encourage Christians not to be embedded in our liberal, progressive cultural mood, we adopt the opposite position.

Which if we are not careful, we think is  a default, but hardly noticed, legalism.  A tone of voice which has negativity and criticism built into it, because that’s just how we have learnt to differentiate ourselves within and from our cultural moment.  

Which has the difficult corollary that we will sound increasingly implausible with each sermon and post.

A self-imposed implausibility.

Let’s pause – I’m not saying that sin shouldn’t  be called out as sin, unrighteousness as unrighteousness, and guilt named as guilt.  It is our duty to do that as gospel ministers, as we lead people to the healing power of the cross.

I’m suggesting we don’t get people to the cross, and leave them there.  

Instead, it gets more traction (ie, the algorithm likes us) to keep naming and shaming some sin even though it’s been forgiven, while we don’t name and shame other sin because it’s less of a headline.  

And we certainly don’t reassure with grace. ‘Pastor, you worked well on your last sermon – your church thanks God for you.’ ‘Pastor, you’re juggling ministry and home life, and getting it right.’ ‘Pastor, Jesus is shepherding your flock, and you are his choice as under-shepherd.’ Nah.

‘Why you should, should, should (and you’re a failure because you haven’t.  Because I have)’

If what I’m describing sounds plausible, can I suggest that we pause and and think, before we communicate.

Of course we are counter-cultural.  That is one (though only one) of our stances towards culture. But it should trouble us if we feel increasingly counter-cultural, as if there were a moment in the recent past where there was a cloudless Christian hegemony we have now lost.  Our history is much more complex – and compromised – than that. Larger church attendance went hand-in-hand with much nominalism.  More traditional approaches to personal lifestyle went hand-in-had with covert and overt racism.  

But a default negative tone of voice towards the present will be treated as a default positive voice towards the past, with all its ugliness.  And that’s not good.  

Nor, by the way, is adopting the language of ‘progress’, which treats everything in the past as hypocrisy and humbug. That is a cultural trope at the moment, which we also need to avoid. We Christians need to be much better cultural exegetes.  We can cheerfully embrace progress where it is progress, without accepting that Victorian Christian values meant stuffing children up chimneys.

That sounds a long way from where I started with Twix.

But it’s not.  If I’m even a little bit right, we’re developing a Christian tone of voice which is marked by guilt-making rather than grace, and mistakes the language of grace for an enemy, because that enemy may have adopted it as camouflage.

Let’s try to do better, friends.

And I hope I haven’t made you feel guilty.