Is Facebook Subtly Changing Your View of Relationships?

Perhaps you have read the book: The Church of facebook®: How the Hyperconnected Are Redefining Community.

In case you have been asleep, at the time of publication (2009), there were about 5 million new users of Facebook each day. I just checked Google a few second ago and that number has skyrocketed to about 50 million per day. If Facebook were a nation, it would now have the fourth largest population in the world with 70 million active users. Like it or not, Facebook is at least a reflection if not a significant influencer of how we view and act in relationships—including relationships in the church (as the author suggests).

Author Jesse Rice states, “…a Facebook friendship ‘really isn’t too demanding of a relationship.’ Our Facebook connections typically require little thought or action on our part. We don’t have to work hard at them, or offer much of ourselves in return. We don’t have to “take responsibility” for anyone. We get to enjoy glimpses into our friends’ lives—old and new—without all that messy ‘getting to know you’ business. And perhaps most importantly to us, we get to reveal and withhold whatever we feel like. We are in control. We do not answer to anything other than our own temporal wishes.”

There is no getting around the fact that relationships are messy, trying, time-consuming-pains in the rump at times. This is because we all have sinful hearts that are in need of Gospel transformation. Yet, the practical means through which the Holy Spirit transforms us is none other than…relationships (the messy kind, not the Facebook kind)! (The actual means is always the Gospel.)

The hardest part for me is not so much the “messy” part. (There are far too many people who accept me despite my many shortcomings, sin, and idiosyncrasies for me to become weary with others!) No, my challenge is time. But if we don’t spend time, we aren’t really getting to know people on a heart level, and we’re probably not really helping them either.

I have begun the practice of spending focused, scheduled time with one of my six children each day of the week. It works out fairly well. Each day at 5pm, I will take one child out for coffee, play a game, or go for a drive…just to talk.

To be honest, it has been challenging at times to keep this up. I may get hot on a project and not want to stop at 5pm. But I have very quickly seen that these times give me access to the heart that before were hit-or-miss. To a child, each has said how much they enjoy these times together. Certainly, challenges arise all the time that require flexibility on my part to address, but that’s relationships!

We would do well to consider well the value of the relationships we are in, beginning those within our own homes: our spouses and our children. How we prize these relationships will be seen in the time we spend developing them. It is a wonderful privilege to be part of God’s work in the life of another individual. But that comes at a cost. No amount of technology can every change that.

Maybe there’s a child, family member, or friend who spends a lot of time pining away on Facebook, but who really needs a real friend?

Have We Lost the Message of the Cross? Research on 500 sermons says so

David Nicholas' book, Whatever Happened to The Gospel? begins with the results of an evaluation of 500 sermons preached in evangelical churches.

He states, "94% of pastors are presenting an incomplete picture of God's work on our behalf through Jesus. Instead, they are presenting a garbled and sketchy 'gospel' which is no gospel at all."

According to Nicholas, preachers are failing to completely present the bad news and the good news which together form a complete Gospel message. The fruit of this neglect is clearly seen in the breakdowns and disconnections in relationships that have become prevalent in the Church and in the home.

His book is refreshing in its call to return to preaching a complete Gospel which seems rather hard to believe as the Gospel was the sum-total of the Apostle Paul's message and passion. I believe Nicholas' call which is most exclusively focused on the evangelistic role of the Gospel to the greater neglect of the Gospel's role in discipleship actually misses a crucial and vital opportunity if there is to be the turn-around that Nicholas seeks through his book.

Paul was not passionate about the Gospel merely because it was the proclamation of our justification. Paul understood the Gospel to be the source of the entirety of our "salvation" which includes justification, sanctification, and glorification (See Romans 1:16) which makes a full Gospel. It includes the bad news and the good news always kept together.

Consider that the reason that many pulpits don't preach a full Gospel is that the Church has forgotten how to apply it to life (sanctification) through God's ordained means for doing so: covenantal relationships. The Gospel is not mere "fire insurance" (which is how it is viewed by most Christians). The Gospel is also the way we grow.

Tragically, the Gospel has become one-dimensional, not the all-encompassing rubric through which God's Holy Spirit transforms us into the image of Christ. Everyone (men, women, children, youth--and most especially--elders and Heads of household as they are the ones whom God has called to oversee the transformation process in those under their care) must understand how to apply the Gospel to the whole of the Christian life; from start (justification) to the process of transformation (sanctification) to the final perfection of that transformation when we get to heaven (glorification).

Everyday, not just Sunday morning, is to include an intentional recounting to ourselves of the bad news and good news of the Gospel! Ephesians 4:15-16 tells us to speak the truth to one another in love. The truth is the Gospel.

Do fathers (and single mothers) see that their primary responsibility is to help those in their home to apply the Gospel each and every day? Are they being equipped to do so? Or is the Gospel something that only the pastor does on Sunday morning, or what a few people with the gift of evangelism do on Wednesday night? For sure it is both of those, but it is far more as I have stated.

If everyone saw the Gospel as what they needed for all of life, everyday, I don't think there would be the problem that there is in churches where a complete Gospel is reduced to a mere piece.

Do Twinkies Make You Fat? The Institute’s Position on Church Programs

If I were to eat a box of Twinkies each week, would you be surprised if I gained 20 pounds by the end of the year? I would think not.

What would you think if someone shot and killed a teller in the midst of robbing a bank and then pleaded before the judge that the gun shot the teller, not him? Most people would rightly consider such a claim as lunacy.

Twinkies don’t make people fat. Guns don’t kill people. In both cases, the Twinkies and the gun are merely passive tools in the hands of a heart that is seeking to use those tools for its own selfish ends, rather than the glory of God.

And, so, with that introduction we take a look at church programs.

It seems that much of the debate these days about the dire problems of the church and home centers on church programs. In the eyes of some, the very real problems of youth rebellion, parents divorcing, singles feeling like second-class citizens in the church, etc., etc. are laid at the feet of these programs—or lack of these programs.

The history of how the church came to accept many of the programs that have become ubiquitous in our churches today really doesn’t matter because the programs are really not the issue. Making the programs the issue is a tragic distraction from the real matter that continues to miss our attention.

The heart of the matter is the matter of the heart. Our hearts as church leaders, as parents, as children, as brothers and sisters in the Lord are desperately in need of transformation. Jesus tells us that heart transformation is not an outside-in pursuit, but an inside-out pursuit that is the ongoing work of the application of the Gospel in our hearts every day.

A church’s leaders can add/change/delete programs all they want, but if the heart is not the focus and the Gospel not the means it makes little difference.

At the Institute, we support each church’s examination of church programs to see how they are helping/hindering the work of the Gospel message through relationships. Let’s face it, none of the programs are called-for in Scripture but that does not make them wrong anymore than [under the same logic] that hymnals are declared wrong because they are not mentioned in Scripture.

Can programs be abused? Certainly. And I think that it is fair to assume that they are abused more than anyone is willing to admit. People abuse (by omission) their covenantal obligations to other members of the local church but we do not dismiss that as an obligation they still bare as a member of the body of Christ.

In my 20 years of working with churches I can say that I have seen churches where real, gospel-centered heart-level transformation is taking place and programs are a real help. I have also seen churches where these programs are carrying too much responsibility and being misused—and the people who run them are suffering because of it. In the ladder case, often there is no intentional focus on heart-level transformation by the Gospel through relationships visible in the church’s ministry.

I have also seen churches that have made programs the issue. Concluding that the programs were “not biblical” they got rid of them in very short order which caused great damage to the households who were not equipped to handle such a dramatic shift. In the cases where I’ve seen this happen, heart-level transformation by the Gospel was nowhere to be seen.

In coaching church leaders the Institute does not make programmatic changes the focus. However, some churches, under the leadership of the Holy Spirit, may conclude that they need to add/change/delete some or all of those programs at some point. We believe that this represents an area of freedom. When heart-level transformation by the Gospel through relationships is the focus, many of the questions regarding programs take care of themselves.

There is much more that I would like to say on this topic but I believe that this offers a good sense of where the Institute stands.

"Why Isn't it Obvious?" The Gospel is Missing in Many Efforts to Reform the Church

What do you think about this comment excerpted from an email I received yesterday:

"...I have been on a journey for a couple of years mainly focused on how we can be disciples of Jesus who actually do what he says to do. People who have been transformed by the Gospel. How does that happen? Why isn't it obvious in those around us?..."

Transformation of the human heart into the image of Jesus Christ is the focus of God's redemptive plan. Scripture is clear in places like Romans 1:16-17 that this transformation is a work of the Gospel. Yet, when I present this simple message --to Christians--, many are surprised as if this were some brand new discovery (which, in many cases, it is!)

The problems faced in churches and homes today (children leaving The Faith, divorce, broken relationships, no real growth, etc.) are fundamentally problems of the heart the transformation of which is the work of the Gospel message which encompasses our justification, sanctification, and glorification.

As my friend pointed out, the fact that this is not "obvious" is a tragedy. But the greater tragedy is that many attempts to reform the church or the home bypass the heart or seek its transformation through a means that is sure to fail.

People are simply trying to "do the right thing" (reading the Bible individually and as households, attend --or not attend-- church programs, choosing the "right" educational approach, dressing a certain way, reading certain books, etc.) with an implicit expectation that doing the right things will lead to a transformed life. But it doesn't happen that way (see Gal. 3:1-3, Col. 2:20-23.) It is believing, or placing our faith in the Gospel message every day that transforms our hearts which LEADS us to do the right things in a way that TRULY glorifies God.

Well-intentioned though they may be, ANY reform efforts that do not flow from the Gospel and that do not seek to apply, or make the Gospel more clear are false Gospels because people (perhaps without understanding it this way) are really placing their faith in the reforms and their performance in living those reforms --rather than the Gospel--to transform their own hearts and the hearts of those they love.

We agree that biblically-focused reform is needed to restore faithfulness in the home and in the church. This much is obvious. But tragically what isn't obvious is God's ordained means for that reform: the Gospel which is the essence of the Bible's focus to begin with! Any truly biblical reform must necessarily be Gospel-centered. Why isn't this obvious?