When I Was Naked, You Pixelated Me.

You can't clothe the least of these my brothers, online.

You can organize the clothing of the less than via online. But when your church, pew, pulpit, and congregant are all online because you bit the VR church bullet, then you find yourself in a strange place. One that wants to be Christian, and looks and sounds Christian, but can't act Christian in the ways Christ prescribed. Because they do church in a way Christ contradicted. How do you clothe the fan-serviced avatar who shows up at your metaverse church? The one whose pixilated breasts and ass cheeks move at every nudge of the mouse to capture the attention of every man in attendance. I'm not making the accusation and prudish judgement that a person needs to adorn themselves in perfect modesty to find a church to attend, even in person.

But the naked woman who shows up on your actual church's doorstep can be clothed. How do you clothe the digital one? Can you. Do you have the requisite digital control over your digital worship services? Or if given enough space to do such, is the rendering literally done to Ceasar? Who demands that sexuality belongs online in all spaces.

You thought Rule 34 was a joke and a meme. But it's not. It's the law and prophets of those who actually worship online. When you don't control the pixels that your digital space is represented through, then who ever does gets to decide what can and can't be done in your space. And more importantly, what you wear down the church aisles.

McLuhan said that any new technological adoption amputates the sense it enhances. That there is no way to really go back to a world without electric light, as a moral good, once you’ve had a surgeon do a 24 hour procedure inside the skull of an infant. To remove the light would be to doom the child. But in saving the child you remove the stars from the heavens. So far as we can see in the city with electric lights.

The same thing goes for clothes. You don’t get a world where nudity isn’t a problem after you weave the first fig leaves together. What motivated you to do such weavings was a cascading sin that would effect everything we do as humans, And this first of all man’s technologies led the way for a every tech to do the same kind of thing to us. Keep us from God. Which is why God sacrificed animals for Adam and Eve’s sin to clothe them. He was atoning for their sin and replacing the sinfulness of their tech with something that pointed to a future savior. One that would bring us back to him.

There might have once been a world where clothing wasn’t made to clothe the naked. Because it would have been in the presence of perfect humans and a perfect God. One where you needn’t worry about the nakedness we all have as one of our basest fears. A world where clothing was only ever an act of obedience to our loving God and a tool for our dominion mandate of the world. And not a veil to hide behind, one for us before the wedding or God before the temple sanctuary. There might even have been a world, if we had not sinned, where the same naked people who only need clothes for the work the clothes do, show up in art and pictures and videos and wind up on an interconnected network of machines that store the pictures for us. To share and view in godly ethical observance with no traces of sin that we all brought to the paragraph, when I just described what pornography is without sin.

What does a world without porn look like? We will never know. But there was a brief time between the 6th day and 2nd human where we could have found out. Since and until a future then, any digitally rendered version of a human will be what pornography is online, by any and every metric we use to define pornography. Aside from the nudity.

For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Matthew 25:35-40 KJV

My harshest criticism of the online church, despite its reach and connection, is that it cannot do the least amount of church work by the means it claims affinity to a church that could. Namely one that isn’t online and is actually feeding, clothing, and visiting the people around them in the name of Jesus.

A Deacon Of The Internet, Part 1

I want to make a suggestion to the church in general about the installation of a new position in churches locally. This position doesn’t yet exit, so far as I can tell, but needs to for a handful of reasons I'm about to explain. This position, however, is filled by people with other titles right now. And we’ll deal with that too. Don’t you worry.

That position is a Deacon of the Internet.

Now I can hear the church IT guy choking on his second-fourth coffee already. Don’t worry, I’m not here to add another role to your plate. But I'm also drawing a distinct line between the guys who make sure the livestream is always working on Sundays, and the guys who knows the live stream isn't church. Which means this may or may not apply to you.

Over the last few years one of those guys (The IT crowd) got a whole lot more sway in church logistics, and the other didn’t because his role had never really been defined for the benefit of the church. A subtle power shift happened during the pandemic where the guys who were serving the church by providing It IT and Tech services, got lofted into essential higher leadership, by being the essential service they are to the online church. And we haven’t quite reckoned with that yet. I know this because most church IT guys are not required to fill the qualifications of the role they fill. Sure they have certifications in a host of IT specialties that would seems as Greek to the layman who just needs Wi-Fi. And they likely have staff behavioural contracts that will be offered as good enough. But have we ensured that they are fit to lead in their roles biblically, apart from there ability to lead technically. Because like it or not they wield leadership power now.

And in those days, when the number of the disciples was multiplied, there arose a murmuring of the Grecians against the Hebrews, because their widows were neglected in the daily ministration. Then the twelve called the multitude of the disciples unto them, and said, It is not reason that we should leave the word of God, and serve tables. Wherefore, brethren, look ye out among you seven men of honest report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom, whom we may appoint over this business. But we will give ourselves continually to prayer, and to the ministry of the word. And the saying pleased the whole multitude: and they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost, and Philip, and Prochorus, and Nicanor, and Timon, and Parmenas, and Nicolas a proselyte of Antioch: Whom they set before the apostles: and when they had prayed, they laid their hands on them.

Acts 6:1-6 KJV

You can’t look at a person who can single handily shut down a church’s entire online ministry, church communications, and functional administrative work, and say that a person, who wields that kind of power, doesn’t lead. It’s obvious that they lead. But also obvious, to the biblical, how they lead. They lead through serving. They provide the service of a specific kind of knowledge and the ability to exercise that knowledge as a service. To most of us, we don’t know how the internet works but are fully prepared to accept when we’re presented with things the internet can look like it does. It looks like we are a single window pane away from the church service being livestreamed. Which is why online church exists. It the same, to the layman, as the window pane that separated the babies from the church service. More so than anyone wants to admit , actually. But a IT guy knows just how performative and false that illusion is. Not that he mentioned it at all since 2020. Again power showed up on his lap. You think he was gonna be the first person to say to the global senior pastor “You guys know this video streaming idea isn’t a magic, COVID proof portal to the congregation’s living room, right? Like it’s basically email but faster?”

Where this rubber hits to road is the same place it hit it for the apostles. Because they most certainly could have served tables filled with hungry widows. But through discernment and wisdom, they knew that they had bigger fish to fry but also that the smaller fish still needed frying. They commissioned the deacons to get more kingdom work done, but also tied that force multiplier that was service based to unique qualifications.

Likewise must the deacons be grave, not doubletongued, not given to much wine, not greedy of filthy lucre; Holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience. And let these also first be proved; then let them use the office of a deacon, being found blameless. Even so must their wives be grave, not slanderers, sober, faithful in all things. Let the deacons be the husbands of one wife, ruling their children and their own houses well. For they that have used the office of a deacon well purchase to themselves a good degree, and great boldness in the faith which is in Christ Jesus.

1 Timothy 3:8-13 KJV

A deacon of the internet would look different than the average church IT guy. Mostly because, across the board, the deacons would be guys. Not that there’s a whole lot of girls in the church IT crowd. They would be guys. With beards even. Accompanied by wives with hopefully less beards. They would have well behaved children and well ordered houses, and a lack of chemical dependencies. If any of that last section made you bristle a bit, remember, I’m just reading the Bible out loud here. You're the one who choked on your coffee back in paragraph three. The Bible says bitter sweet nothing about IT infrastructure personnel, but does talk about people who serve. And you’re serving the church in your role, right? Did you get hired because you could do the job, or because you were a godly person who could do the job. Would you step down if that godliness became an area of compromise in your life? Because the qualifications of that godliness are a married female spouse, children who behave, no chemical dependencies and a testing period. Good news is, you don’t have to. You just have to be an IT guy. for now.

There's a reason A deacon of the internet would need those ducks in a row. It’s a test. It’s blatantly a test. They need to be able to pass a testing. Which is going to be the trickiest part of this endeavour. Because most of us are luddites comparatively. So, how are we going to test a deacon of the internet about their ability to serve over the church’s need for ministering on the internet. Can’t exactly turn him off and on again, can we? But we did have a great test of the what the internet and the church do to one another, in recent memory in point of fact. That test was what happened and was allowed to happen during the pandemic. There was a real chance for people who facilitate the service of internet connectedness at their church, to tell their pastors they can’t do online church, because the internet is a thing not a place. And the gathering of people that makes up the church needs a place to actually gather. otherwise it’s just correspondence. Email but faster. That there was no such thing as gathering online. And that people who mince words for a living, biblically even, should know that you can’t just decide how they work. Like when we started saying “gathering online”. You can’t gather online. It’s the opposite of getting together. It’s connected apartness.

The current caste of IT professionals in the church had a chance to do biblical ministry when it counted, and chose not to, in lieu of what a pastor who knows nothing about how the internet actually works, made them believe about the internet. They were told, during an emergency meeting, that they were gonna facilitate the pastor telling their entire congregation, that they would be gathering online. And instead of serving that table of leaders, they acquired a taste for power. They could have held what the internet could do hostage so orthodoxy could be maintained. Instead they compromised into online church, online communion, online baptisms, and anything else that kept them that power. How many previously recorded live streams authorized entirely separate family groups and COVID cohorts, to do an online Eucharist. A meal meant to be partaken together, with your church, to show the unity of a indivisible body. Split into a live streamed version and a re-broadcasted live streamed version an hour and half later. Alongside a thousand different and separate homes and breads and juice boxes?

If we did have deacons of the internet they all failed their testing. And need to either be removed or brought to confession. And no one in the church wants to do that because it will likely drag the pastors into the fray again. And unlike the health ministers of the time, they don’t have legislated amnesty for actions done in good faith. What’s worse is that the IT guys likely know they’re currently punching above their pay grade. But conferences like FILO have convinced them they are as essential, if not more, than the enabling pastors that got them there in the first place. It’s a particular kind of deaf blind and dumb to say you are the first in and last out of the big complicated church tech monster, only to find out the janitors beat you there and wait for you to leave to clean up your greenrooms. The reason I know this is I worked a big church tech enabled monster and was in charge of the janitors. And the security system. I know who was first in and last out. It wasn’t Tech or IT. Though it was occasionally the senior pastor, who needs to be held to account for changing how church is done and what “gathering” is defined as to said church.

If and when that happens, the church’s online presence will begin to look different, and God willing, it will look better. It will be more Christ like, more biblical, and more different than TED talks, the Daily Stoic, and pop rock concerts at your nearest NHL arena.

Of the faithful few and repentant (hopefully) many, that answer that particular deacons call, a steep list of responsibilities and duties, as important as staving widows, will be made of and to them.

Of which you will read in part two of this blogpost.

My Personal Beefs With Theological Education

Pastors will hear guys like Vaynerchuk and Jobs tell you to not go to college and instead do “XYZ”. They’ll even back it up with success to prove it. And somewhere between the gusto and the grace those same pastors will exclude the modern seminary as if its bullshit doesn’t stink all the same. As if to beg the question of the value of guys like Vaynerchuk and Jobs dropping out from their secular college, if we hold our Christian colleges in a similar high place.

Why does this matter? Well. Why is the baseline requirement for Pastoral positions an M.Div. Because I’ve seen accurate Greek scholars and experts in New Testament history get M.Div.’s and rainbow stole wearing gender study majors have them as well. Which is a problem because both with lean hard on that flimsy paper to exhort the other to repentance. Though to be fair, I think the one might have a stronger position to do so from.

But that’s only the icing on the theological education crap cake.

Centuries ago, a religious and theological education would get you the technological equivalent of a free Logos subscription, sans search function. And while I’d be remised to not say it’s much better to know your Bible than to know how to search in your Bible. The equivalency is still there. Modern theological education likes to boast of technological prowess but never actually does anything with the name of Gutenberg, after they’ve stolen it for their clout. We could make seminary free for the church. Or as free as ad revenue would let us. But are we? No. It’s way to institutionally valuable to have alma maters that perpetually ask for funding from its alumni, then to move education online through the decades old practice of online video and the half century old technology of electronic mail. But no. The liberal elites all have dorm rooms and cafeterias and quads to study on, So we must too.

Eventually we need to sit down, methodically, and look at the world we mimic as if that mimicry had consequences and begin asking some very hard comparison questions. Ones like “We all know why we don’t hire liberal arts students from the secular schools. So, why are we so cool with hiring them from the Christian schools? They’re still liberal arts students.” I’m sure the seminaries stop where the transferable credits end. Right? I mean if one school with 120 credit hours produces blockheads with degrees and no common sense or biblical obedience, then we must, by necessity, know that our program that is modeled after them, in almost every fashion, will give us different results and stalwart alumni in the faith afterward.

Guy’s like Musk can say things like “We don’t hire college grads.” But there is a transferable and comparable amount of demonstrated skill in his fields. You can do the work of a programmer on your own demonstrably. You don’t need an institution to say your code works, Your code will show if it works or not. We don’t have that in ministry. We can have fruit from good ministers and things that can be fruit flavoured from ministers who work at big enough churches. Who cares if you have 400 kids in your youth group. Are their 40000 youth within driving distance to your church? That’s not success, that’s demographic percentages. And those demographics are not affected by how many MDiv’s are on staff at the mega church. Even though the Mega church’s hiring standards would suggest so.

But eventually these hums and haws land us in the age of the internet and the dual natured problem of online credentials and online reach shows up. It’s all well and good if a guy at a mega church with an Mdiv. has a popular blog where he flexes his theological muscle a bit. But when the drywaller with a penchant for reformed thought, puts out twice as much content, and garners twice as much a following. What do we do with his lack of a MDiv. ? We can’t just let him do that and hold that kind of persuasion and content generation, as equally valid as writing papers, and doing research on campus, through the internet to sources off campus, can we? The problem with Christians, especially credentialed ones, being online and participating in online discourse, is that this is functionally what is done offline in their houses of credentialing. Or is the theology the drywaller has to contextualize to the painters on his heels somehow made invalid because the right kind of people having followed his twitter account?

Back in 2020 we shut every church down as if it were universal good, moving every bit of our Christian practice onto online platforms with some of the worst theology to date. Theology, I might add, pertains to none of the practices that are currently being done in Christian higher education. There is not mandate, in scripture, to gather weekly for gospels 101 and contemporary worship screen management 302 classes. Yet during the same pandemic that closed the doors to the churches, the colleges asked that students return to their dorms and attend online classes from there.

Why?

Because the institutions needed to stay afloat in the midst of a flood of online engagement that the pandemic brought. And unlike the churches, they need to provide a return on the students tuition. The credentials.

Ask yourself. Are credentials as important as important than online church services? Well they must be. We closed the door of the church and invented new ways to do the Eucharist over Zoom, but heaven forbid our senior pastor not have an actual diploma on the wall of his office. Would a jpeg work so long as he could share it to the entire email prayer chain. Or would he have to commit to helping the Boomers convert it to a PDF.

Here’s my theory.

At the back end of 100 theology books read, 100 sermons/papers written, and 100 hours of bible reading at a grade 12 level. You’ll have everything but the Greek and Hebrew that a modern BA in Theology could muster out of you. Sans, dorm life, cafeteria food and annoying classmates telling girls in the student lounge that God wants them to get a ring by spring. And that Greek and Hebrew can be learned, for free, on YouTube.

Say not ye, There are yet four months, and then cometh harvest? behold, I say unto you, Lift up your eyes, and look on the fields; for they are white already to harvest. And he that reapeth receiveth wages, and gathereth fruit unto life eternal: that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together.

John 4:35-38 KJV