Which is precisely what our world chases. “Viral,” even through the intense negative publicity given to viruses over the past couple of years, is still a positive thing. Each of us now holds in our hands the only tool we need to potentially launch us to stardom. The future really is quite a fascinating time to be alive.
Most of the time all the social media marketing, self-branding, and non-stop promotion of literally everything doesn’t bother me a whole lot. I don’t lose sleep over it.
Until it hits the church.
And it has. We’ve bought it hook-line-and-sinker. And for good reason. Leveraging new tech and marketing possibilities has been a boon to many churches, and, to be fair, quite possibly to the Gospel itself. I must say at this point, like Paul, that I suppose even if people are preaching Christ for selfish reasons by narcissistic means, well, at least they’re preaching Christ.
At least in our current culture everyone assumes that everyone else is promoting something. You can be free to promote your thing because I’m certainly promoting mine.
But then there’s Jesus himself. The Jesus we actually read in the Gospels. The Jesus who heals a cripple of thirty-eight years and then disappears into the crowd without so much as giving his name. (Only to have that guy run off and give Jesus away the first chance he gets.) To my twenty-first century sensibilities, that’s ridiculous. It makes no sense. What a missed opportunity. What a bass-ackwards move. He does this time and time again in the Gospels. And it’s shocking every time.
Jesus, it seems, has no interest in going viral. No interest in building hype. No interest in riding the wave of popularity. Perhaps because he knows how fickle the market is, or how quickly one’s promoters can become prosecutors—as the rest of his story certainly bears out.
What if churches took Jesus’ non-hyped approach? What if pastors preferred anonymity over celebrity? What if healers kept their cameras turned off? What if your average Christian didn’t fancy himself to be some sort of influencer because he has a blog?
Asking for a friend.
