Pretension Busters: Blogging

www.despair.com -- "Increasing success by lowering expectations"

(so much like the Old Adam and the Old Eve)

Arrogance cannot be avoided or true hope be present

unless the judgment of condemnation is feared in every work

--Martin Luther

(Heidelberg Disputation, Thesis 11)

“Where there are many dreams, there are many vanities, and words without number. Therefore, fear God!”

Ecclesiastes 5:7

As a blogger I certainly know about "the few" of the above caption. The struggle for "audience" often consumes bloggers--especially as they try to move into some sort of "pay" model. In most of those models "pay" is driven by the number of "hits"--visitors--the blogger's site obtains on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. Various tactics are used by bloggers to drive up the "hit" numbers: 1) Networking--you join an increasing circle of friends who "scratch each other's back" by visiting each other's sites, as the number of friends increases so do the number of hits; 2) Branding--carefully choosing a theme and/or key words and/or specific topics that rate high on "search engine" priorities, this drives up hits which in turn earns higher ratings on the search engines; 3) Appeal--crafting the content of the message so that it "appeals" to people's sentimentality, their vanity, their popularity, etc.; 4) Marketing--simply using any means possible to "get the word out" so that there is "recognition" of the blog and therefore it draws attention and "hits."

As a preacher, I know as well about "the few." The struggle for "audience" often consumes preachers--especially since audience size is used as a measure of the preacher's success and determines the preacher's "pay." Preachers use every tactic mentioned above and then some to increase the size of their audience. The most insidious and destructive of those tactics for preachers is that of "Appeal"--crafting the content of the message so that it "appeals" to people's "itching ears:" For there will be a time when people will not tolerate sound teaching. Instead, following their own desires, they will accumulate teachers for themselves, because they have an insatiable curiosity to hear new things. (2 Timothy 4:3)

The above caption is a parody of Winston Churchill's statement in his famous speech of 1940 wherein he pointed to the heroic defense of Britain by the Royal Air Force against the Nazi war machine by saying: "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few," The pilots and their crews of the RAF had a single-minded pursuit of purpose: to be the living shield between their homes and homeland and the enemy come to destroy them. Their single-minded devotion to that duty emptied them of concerns for personal success, profit, or safety. Time and again they took to the sky knowing that, live or die, they were all that stood between all they loved and its destruction.

While there are some similarities between bloggers and preachers--especially as they engage in strategies of audience maximization, there is one defining difference that really precludes a preacher's participation in said strategies. While it may be true for bloggers to use many words to say so little, for a preacher (unless they've surrendered to audience maximization) there is but one word to deliver but that one word says so much. That one word is a person, Jesus Christ, the Word of God. An all-encompassing word who said of himself: "And I, when I am lifted up, will draw all things to myself." (John 12:32) The preacher's single-minded pursuit of purpose: the proclamation "of Jesus Christ and him crucified" (1 Corinthians 2:2) empties such a proclaimer of concerns for personal success, profit, or safety. This preacher stands to be a voice delivering a living Word which is "lifted up" between all they love and the triumvirate of powers (the devil, the world, and the sinful self) seeking to destroy them.

The preacher delivers in such a way so as to declare this into reality: "Never in the history of the world have so many owed so much to just one."

"Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross."

Philippians 2:5-8