Dinx The Puppet And Other Shrouds

Can authoritative teachers be anonymous and can you exercise a spiritual gift through a medium?

This is uniquely important these days because of all the people claiming to be biblical scholars or pastors or doing any kind of ministry online, the best one, hands down, as in I highly recommend this account to almost everyone/anyone…

Is a puppet.

Dinx the puppet to be exact.

A well crafted, VBS style Muppet puppet who does a better job teaching about the Bible and answering questions about the Bible, than just abut everything else. He does it without a beard to prove he’s reformed and without a former onlyfans account to prove he's non denominational. But if we’re being real honest. He’s not doing it, is he?

Most of my problems with online ministry stem from the actual mechanics and physics of what the internet is. I have a problem with online church, not because you couldn’t get exactly what you feel, see and interreact with at a mega church. But precisely because you can get that. The fourth wall is nothing more than a curtain of wires. And the camera does more than add pounds to the church’s presence online. So when someone does such a great job of teaching, I naturally pay attention. And when they do it through a disarming media like puppeteering. I pay closer attention.

Make no mistake. Dinx is not only a good Bible teacher. He (Or rather the He Beneath the bottom of your screen) is a talented puppeteer. Everything from his characters voice, to his actions, to his ability to convey empathy and approachableness through a puppet, with no emotive controls, is impressive. He is a master of technique. Which is what all technologies are in one way or another. The worship pastor who knows certain songs inspire the dopamine rush, that can be mistaken for the Holy Spirit, if played correctly, and in a dimly lit colourfully stage room, does the same kind of thing.

Where I'm conflicted and explorative is if what Dinx does, or rather his worker does, through the puppet and character, authoritative. Dinx expertly never crosses this line. Not that I can tell. As a puppet. He can ask or respond to how another creator is likely wrong, or that they should not be posting what they are. But something that doesn't happen, but also can’t happen, is a call to repentance from the same place he gets his voice.

Dinx couldn’t ever call you repent of sins you commit online. Even if he made a video about them. What is Dinx going to do about you once you respond. If you continue in sin, you simply give him more content opportunities. But if you do repent, how does that baptism eventually work? What the puppet illustrates is the tragic failing of all online ministries. From Mike Winger, to the Lord's Giant to Nala Ray and everything in between. The lack of unity a body of Christ needs to do the work Christ has for it. Separated by the camera and screen for the sake of no one but the individual consuming the content.

Dinx’s exegesis and hermeneutic are always on point. Does that mean his obvious gift of teaching is bearing fruit, though? Because he can not, by several different metrics, be united to the body of Christ. The first of which being that no object, however animated can be a believer. Which is where those gifts are to bear that fruit. I know people are using the media he produces to grow in their faith. But I have a hard time putting that together with what it would look like for the puppet to end up in heaven? We will surely meet the hand that makes that puppet talk. And the voice we hear off camera. But the puppet along with all other bits of the world will be consumed in a fire and laid waste, for a new heaven and new earth to take it’s place.

The permanence of the internet seems insurmountable at times. One nude photo of you ends up online and the embarrassment lasts forever, it seems. But it is a farse. Nothing on this world lasts forever. And every mountain of content we make, for good or ill, will end up gone in the end.

I think it’s vitally important to recognize this kind of thing. Because as robotics and A.I get better it will no longer be a hand of a likely timid but effective believer up the puppets back side. It will no longer be great teaching with honest intent coming through it either. These techniques, that work to convince you that the felt and stiches are the person beneath the puppet, will work when there is no longer a person beneath that puppet. And also when there is no longer gospel coming out of that puppets mouth.

The proxy-ing of faith and the gifting of the Holy Spirit is a long term dangerous game to play. I hope it works out for Dinx. I know he’s being used powerfully. And can’t help but wonder what it would look like for him to be used fully. But if this becomes something that can’t grow further. Where is it going. What fruit is there to be born out of a puppet that can’t baptize a person. Can’t marry a pair of someone's. Can’t cast out a divisive brother in church discipline.

Or maybe what’s worse. What happens when a puppet can do these things?

Teaching, apart from the raw presentation of information, is something that happens in the church, through the believer, and from the Holy Spirit in unison. And right now, we have, arguably, the best presentation of the information our faith has online, happening through a puppet. That’s awesome. But that is also not teaching. And maybe it’s not claiming to be such. Is it being viewed as such though? Right now I don’t think so. But the second it is. We essentially cede the idea that the Holy Spirit can bare fruit with an object. And more importantly that we can have objects do what our persons are meant to do. 

We would call that idolatry if we had the courage to pick a theological fight with a cute puppet with a quarter million followers on TikTok.

Keep up the good work, Dinx.

So You've Baptized An Influencer. Now What?

Influencer might be the wrong word here. But it’s the best catch all for the kind of person we’re talking about. You see there is a type of person who uses social media like a well oiled machine to represent brands and services for payment. We’d call them walking billboards or living TV commercials if that wasn’t so wordy. So influencer will have to do. Otherwise we have to use a word that makes everyone blush, and this is a Christian publication after all.

The issue that arises when you baptize an online personality, is that who they are online is a different kind of beast then the soul that gets into the water with you, pastor. It’s a whole other thing that looks just like a person. And if you don’t know that, or recognize that, then your time spent with porn did it’s trick.

“How does that have anything do with this?” You’ll ask.

We’ll get there, precious, just stick with me for a few paragraphs.

In the news, semi recently, we’ve had two majori-ish Christians that shouldn’t have the sway they do, either start to sway too much, or loose their sway all together. One is Nala Ray, The other, Lily Phillips. One turned an adult actress career into, of all things a porn addiction recovery ministry. And the other now wants us to believe you can be baptized and leave your willingness to do porn as ambiguous as the waters are clear.

The church at large seems to be ready and willing to put just about anyone in the tank for Jesus these days. So long as they confess in a short enough clip for a media team to capture. Because at it’s heart church social media and OnlyFans have the same strategy. The Church won't admit that and certainly wouldn't post its media on Onlyfans, but it is the same strategy and would work just the same. Worship pastors and the Church Comm’s types are just a bit to timid to send the gospel where it’s not preached, is all. And what we end up with is either porn stars acting like Christians. Or Christians not knowing that they are still acting like porn stars. Because the pastors who are immersing these sinners into the faith did not grasp what happened when they immersed themselves, in the sins of these two porn stars previously.

Even if they didn’t use porn of their prospective new congregants prior, the odds and statistics put the chance of either pastor having a porn free testimony, at south of 32%, depending on who you ask. Try Barna, their usually pretty good. But from your own experience in the ministry, pastors, how many of your colleagues post 1999 don’t have porn use in their faith’s history? These pastors doing the baptism, more than likely, wrestled with the sins associated with the sinners about to be dunked. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but is something that needs to get properly addressed. Because it likely was just filed as “bulk lust” and forgotten about.

And that’s only an issue if those same pastors are fine with these two ladies making porn with no nudity or other sexually suggestive themes. Because that’s what most of social media is. It can be a place where content is made to convey information at scale for free. But it trends towards base instincts and desires. You can test this for yourself, if you really want to. Make an A.I. avatar that looks like and attractive woman and post 100 bible verses, over one week, to any given social media site you’d like. Then do it with a real picture of a man, to see the difference. For maximum effect, make sure he’s older and slightly balding. Pay careful and close attention to the difference in responses and attention you receive from the bot accounts that will surely start following you. And if you’re on twitter, (still not calling it X.) make sure you see where those bot accounts are located, too.

The difference between the two sets of bible verses, as content, will tell you all you really need to know about how the internet works. And tells you everything you need to know when a former porn star seeks to get baptized, on the basis of saying the sinners prayer in a video for later posting. Both of these women turned their literal pivotal moment in faith, into the same kind of thing they would do to their sexuality prior. They became Christians in word and deed, separately, because those no longer needed to line up with reality anymore.

“Ye see then how that by works a man is justified, and not by faith only. Likewise also was not Rahab the harlot justified by works, when she had received the messengers, and had sent them out another way? For as the body without the spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also.” James 2:24-26 KJV

What happens to a words when they become online content. Or any kind of content for that matter? Do they stay what the speaker of those words meant? Or do they become a kind of work unto themselves? The medium is the message, right? And content does it’s job/work. It’s one thing to say you will always sing for the church on Sunday. And another to simply record every song in the hymnal and send your worship team the MP3 file. Are you singing in church. Your voice is being played over the worship team’s loudspeakers, just the same as the worship team that’s also on the loudspeakers. And the baptism that is done for the cameras shares those same cameras with the strip tease. I believe that Nala doesn’t know or understand this. but I'm almost positive Lily does.

The problematic part is neither pastor of either, allegedly, former porn star seems to know this. Either is happy to have a sinner say the magic words and get dunked in their tank, as opposed to the one at the Baptist church down the street, or the Reformed church across the city. Who are we kidding. You never see this kind of stuff at reformed churches. We'll have to look into why that is later.

And I do mean magic words because I know how this spell works. You can say stuff that has no effect on your own inhibitions and behavior, but does persuade those around you. Strippers do this all the time. Which is why most guys who use strippers think that she thinks they’re in love. When all she’s doing in her mind is adding up tips and counting seconds before her shift ends. And baptism and the Christian faith is likely not something that should be made into content, the way a daily life vlog or an OnlyFans should. For the very same reasons that guys shouldn't' believe that stripper love them, just because their clothes are coming off. Remember, there was a time when OnlyFans was not exclusively an adult themed or oriented material site. It takes real wisdom to know that YouTube and TikTok will similarly, not also stay as sexually neutral as they are right now. And they aren’t exactly neutral if we’re being honest. The beast swims slow, but it swims in a consistent direction. 

In that vein, if a porn star says they are now a former porn star, prior to baptism, the works part of their faith needs to be putting that old self, to the kind of death, a personality brand doesn't usually survive. Both of these women are not being modest. Both of them are still making sure that even in alleged repentance, that they are the center of attention to every man that finds their content or name online. Both of them have thousands of tiny pornographic idols of their former selves online that they have no power to remove. Idols that every man in their new home churches can find, the second they live stream their name alongside their baptisms. The hard work of making their sin a searchable keyword and hashtag is already done. The easy part is using what would look like righteousness to an unknown church regular, as the rim of a content funnel. Anyone with google analytics can see this is true, by showing how often these women’s names were searched for, before or after their announced baptisms. You cannot be modest, even in the bulkiest, unflattering clothing, if you stand alongside the billboard of your sexual sins in propriety.

That’s because modesty can never be content, the second it becomes content, it stops being modesty. Which is only a problem when you’re content used to be immodest behaviour. And that content’s rejection is or becomes the ignition of your faith and baptism’s engine.

How did you read the word “behavior” in that last line? Did you read it as a term of enjoyment or a term of product development. Because a seasoned online influencer knows how to behave online for an online audience. It’s part of their product development. And the very best of them can do that without any costumes, clothes, co-stars, or props. A pastor needs to know this before they let an influencer get into the baptismal tank. 

And a great place to start is having them demonstrate that they understand Matthew 16:17-20. 

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.

Repentance In The Age Of OnlyFans

Over the last few weeks, a fair amount of hubbub has surfaced on Twitter (still not calling it X) about an OnlyFans model who has found Jesus.

You'll note I did not add any qualifiers to that "found". No apparently’s or evidently’s or other questioning of what might be the Holy Ghost's work in the young woman's life.

And grieve not the Holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Ephesians 4:30 KJV

I believed Ye when he did this, and I believe Nala the Ninja too. This post is not about the legitimacy of confessions. That's the easy part. Reformed guys like me all know this. We contribute nothing to our salvation save the sin that made it necessary. And all Edwardian gusto. That doesn’t mean I don’t have reservation's and a fair idea of what she should be doing now that she’s found Jesus. It means I’ll leave her spiritual formation and discipleship up to her pastor and not Twitter, (Still not calling it X).

My issue, and what this blog post will cover, are the myriad of unique problems a technologically enabled adulterer or whore brings to the communion table, not the baptistry. Because they are problems of the communion table not the baptistry.

When a man sleeps with another mans wife, instead of his wife, a particular type of scenario forms. The man is separated from his wife by sin, and also separates the other mans wife from him by sin as well. And vice versa. The way this set of separations gets fixed is Jesus dying on a cross and some very tough conversations between the parties involved and a pastor or two. The wife must forgive the husband who cheated, the husband must forgive the husband who cheated, the wife must forgive the wife that cheated and the husband must forgive the wife that cheated. An intricate and delicate web of brokenness forms between the four souls, from even a single incident of sexual impropriety.

How big does that web get when there's more than one husband committing adultery with the wife in question. When a married woman allows, even encourages, hundreds of married men to sleep with her. Or since Jesus apparently lowered the bar so much, to look at her lustfully. (Matthew 5:27) He lowered that bar but we’re the ones lowering the bar from married people to the vast swaths of singles in the church with a porn problem. What then?

In Christ's time, this meant a literal crowd gawking at a woman with less than manly intent for her body. Hence why Jesus asked for the sinless to step forward when he was present with this exact problem in John 8:1-11

What does this look like when the looking isn’t exactly direct, and the body isn’t exactly a body. And how far or closely do we stray from the Bible when we teach about what to do with porn addiction, now that we have porn actresses finding Jesus on the other end of their webcams.

For years, in response to the problem of porn, The church has instructed and taught that this is a sin the husband commits against the wife. And rightly so. He is sinning against her by looking at pictures and videos of naked people on the internet instead of being sexually fulfilled and devoted to his wife. But here’s the problem. Something we’ve been fine to avoid so long as we had a boy to whip when confronted with the friction between the online “world” and the real one. The Bible doesn't speak about any kind of visual media when it talks about lust. Instead, it talks about people. Jesus' clarification that to look upon a woman lustfully meant adultery in the heart, was talking about a real life woman. Not the image of one. And Nala the Ninja’s conversion is going to try to force that issue if everyone at her church reads their bible enough.

Because, while possible there is no practical or meaningful way Nala can be reconciled to all the girlfriends and fiancés and wives that she’s sinned against, and conversely no way all those boyfriends and fiancés and husbands could come clean either. Commentators on this verse make a fuss about the missing man adulterer in John 8:1-11. What on earth are we going to do with this cloud of witnesses. Nala has likely not actually slept with almost all of the people who used her pornographic content. But all of them, according to the church, have committed adultery with her by using said content. 

That is unless they haven’t. Because they’ve never actually seen her, just her content.

The problem with converting porn stars is that you gain a follower of Christ who can’t rightly be admitted to the communion table because of the lingering past self that remains on the internet. Because we treat the internet as a place those images and videos of the sinful woman are still sinning on her behalf as people. There's no reliable way to remove anything from the internet once posted. It’s too easy to repost and download and the type of image becomes too wide spread. If Nala is any kind of famous or well known, like she is, then even her conversion will drive searches for her past self which she has put to death to follow Jesus. Copies of her indiscriminate past will live along side her new life even as she grows in faith and closeness with the Lord. Hell, since I've typed her name in a few times now. how many of you have searched for her content. The Barna Group did the stats on this and it’s North of 50% for the pastorate, let alone the laity. Does a youth pastor staying up to date on Twitter, (still not calling it X) who peeks, make this woman an adulterer again, even with weeks of a porn free production schedule on her docket?

What we’re presented here is the concept of a created thing causing our sin for us. While small digital pictures and videos are still things. Consisting of electrons held between resistors to make up to code of the actual file of the image or video. These electrons have mass, not lots but enough to call them matter. Every time a digital camera is set upon a scene or a person wanting the product of of that camera, those electrons are organized to tell the rest of the computer what to show on the screen on demand. like tiny parts of a pervert Ikea cabinet. These are things we are talking about. Pornography is not objectifying people conceptually, they are objectifying themselves, literally. They make little versions of themselves for their audience to use and consume on their computers and we copy them on our computers, even temporarily while viewing these things online. Do the little versions of Nala still running truant across the internet have the ability to cause sin that Nala is responsible for, on her behalf, even while Nala is in a state of repentance?

A lot of churches would say yes, and I know why and I don’t blame them. Pastors are not the media savvy midwits they claim to be, on average. They know the Bible doesn’t speak on the topic of high speed internet porn and E-girls so they apply what the Bible does say about similar women and find a heuristic, broad enough to keep the wolves at bay with, if swung that is. The church has never had a problem with its understanding or teaching about lust.

But what if this isn’t just a lust problem? What if how we’ve been teaching about pornography is the right tool for a different job. A stick for the wolves that leads us to forego watering the sheep. What's happening here in principle is not men and women in throes of lust. which requires them to be in proximity to each other, biblically. It’s men in women in the motions of idolatry. Which requires that they fashion articles of worship out of physical materials.

What was it that Nala did as a pornstar?

Nala crafted idols of herself in digital likeness to give to her adoring devotee’s and her followers have dutifully sacrificed their time, money, and sensual energy, to pay tribute to their object of affection.

The sin of online pornography then, isn’t Lust, it’s Idolatry.

When that particular monster is slain, Nala can know redemption and sanctification, even with a host of digital versions of her sinful deeds colouring the past she left behind. Because they are no longer part of who she is. They are who she was. Copies of the idol of her own sexuality that was smashed when she declared Jesus as Lord. She can stop sinning like Jesus wants her to, and the lingering pornographic images that will taint the internet for decades after will be the sole problem of their idol worshiping users.

Nala will be free and free indeed the second she professes a faith in Christ, and no part of her sinful past will drag her back to an earthly death. Because she will be free. Her sins forgiven even covering the making of sexual idols still worshipped by the left handed masses of OnlyFans. She will not be held liable for those images because those using them are the ones creating them by copying the pictures and videos to proliferate their sin. They are still idol worshipers looking to plant their idols of sexual desire where ever they can. Building them out of new pixels and megabytes every time they enter her name in the search bar or look for her name in a list of her former peers.

When we come to terms with what the internet is actually doing instead of what it looks like it's doing we can start to see how the unique sins of the internet work. It is easy to look at pornography as an outcropping of lust and treat it as such. But if it’s more than that. If it’s different than that. Then what we do in regards to our personal righteousness, might be misplaced.

We are taught in the scriptures to flee and resist Lust in our lives.

Flee also youthful lusts: but follow righteousness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call on the Lord out of a pure heart. 2 Timothy 2:22 KJV

Dearly beloved, I beseech you as strangers and pilgrims, abstain from fleshly lusts, which war against the soul; 1 Peter 2:11 KJV

What are we taught in the scriptures concerning idols and what to do with them?

But thus shall ye deal with them; ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire. Deuteronomy 7:5

But ye shall destroy their altars, break their images, and cut down their groves. Exodus 34:13

Therefore say unto the house of Israel, Thus saith the Lord God; Repent, and turn yourselves from your idols; and turn away your faces from all your abominations. Ezekiel 14:6

Nala has turned from her idol making. She hopefully, as far as it’s up to her control, smashed her copies of the idols she produced and is not walking in obedience towards a relationship with Jesus. And if Her pastor did not insist on this before admitting her to their baptism tank, he’s a fool. But if he did he’s likely wiser than most guys teaching bible studies on lust, without a grasp of how the internet works in the first place. Nala is forgiven and is tasked with sinning no more.

What’s left is for the rest of the internet to do the same.

This is only going to be more and more of a internet specific problem the church faces. As the throngs of young women using sites like OnlyFans to make a living, find their life choices empty and Jesus, ready and willing to forgive them. It will be up to the church thereafter to disciple these women in sanctified living, not apart from sins they have been forgiven for, but from sins that they have left at the cross. That can only happen if the church recognizes and teaches about what the internet is and isn’t. So long as we treat it as a place, we will inevitably treat the files and media in that place as people, so long as they look like people. When those people actually show up to our church doors, we will be confronted with the reality that there is a soul seeking communion with God and his church, that we might very well refuse because we didn’t know how online pornography worked, just that we liked it enough to use. 

Today, thankfully, we celebrate the actions of Jesus fixing all of this mess. May we join Him in that restoration and share in his life that was also in close proximity to women, exactly like Nala. 

Happy Easter Everyone.

To A Chainsaw, Every Problem Looks Like A Massacre

The adage goes, guns don't kill people, people kill people. And as a pro-gun person, I used to blindly accept this statement. I knew my gun safety basics, and intermediates, and knew that it takes a person to kill another person, via negligent or nefarious actions, and not via the gun. The gun does the dirty work but it's the person who brings the dirty.

But then I saw footage from the war in Ukraine. Saw Russian soldiers chased down by Ukrainian drones strapped to grenades and realized that what I was watching was also being filmed by a Ukranian drone. That men were no longer using guns to kill people. They were using remote controls.

Casey Neistat may have made the quadcopter drone famous. But Zelenski is making them infamous right now.

The question posed then, is if there is any difference between death by trigger or death by joystick. I imagine one is more fun for the sinner. And also less fun for the sinner. And I also imagine this is what it's meant when we're told war is hell. Sinners sinning against each other. The Ukrainians are embodying our much-praised value of innovation. They are exhibiting our much sought-after virtue of resourcefulness. But most of all, I think, they get what technology is and what technology does. They understand the difference between precept and concept, as it comes to drones. And it's exactly that which robbed them of their honour and courage. Even if it gives them a remote control edge on the battlefield. To be clear I have no dog in this fight. Both sides are bad guys by this point. And if you don't see that, you're drone footage needs to be a bit more clear.

When we look at tech as the church, we need to look at it as it actually is. Not how we think it will only get used. Calling virtual services, A.I., even smoke machines, tools as if that's all they are, is naive and a great example of conceptualization. We get enough of a grasp of the thing to use it without handling it long enough to understand it.

Most kids have this with video games. They have a concept of what it means to drive and jump and shoot. But have them attempt those things in the real world, doing real jumping and driving and shooting and a very different sort of thing happens. Kids who can ace a platform game like Mario can't get close to the rim of a basketball net, even when the court is as platformed as it can be, being the ground. Kids who have top scores on any given track in Grand Turismo, stall a standard transmission on their 1st through 20th time behind the wheel. And kids who fire a real gun, get a real level of respect for the destructive power that a firearm has when nefarious or negligent kids get behind them. Technological reality splits from technological use. And they learn to perceive the things they only have conceptions about from behind the controller.

We praise every online platform we can get our hands on, because of their innate ability to reach people. Oblivious that their creators don't use them and won't let their children use them either. That is like a gun maker raising pacifists but recording record sales in the Donbas.

"Don't worry too much. We know how this works, we're going to use this gun to do some non-gun things. I'm sure no one will get hurt. Now hand me that box of hollow points will you? We have missionary work to do."

Did that last bit of fiction have more kick than expected.

I'm sure DJI and GoPro are confident their flying cameras have found their intended market. What with the billions of dollars being spent on them in the Ukraine right now. And just like it would be absurd to think a gun made to kill people could bring them to new life in Christ, so is the idea that drones made for B-roll footage couldn't be used to send people to heaven. Technology is not neutral, because technology is only ever used by sinners. In some cases, in narrow and difficult circumstances, non-neutral technology is used for good. But it is always used by sinners. Sinners outright or sinners saved by grace. There are no innocent or pure people with tech at their disposal. The best we can hope for is sinners washed in the blood of the lamb before they end up shedding the blood of their neighbours. 

So if your church uses technology, nay, depends on it for its operation, maybe it's time to take a good hard look at its faux neutrality.

Are the projectors and lights and sound system helping your congregation grow in worship. Or are they performative outcroppings of a neutral view of tech? Because by that same neutral standard, we could turn every karaoke bar into a church plant. With only a few willing missionaries and a proper view of alcohol in the laity. All I did there was take your church's worship standard and their technological standard and remove the couch cushion reserved for the Holy Spirit. The same Spirit getting sidestepped by the emotional manipulation of a dark room and bright lights. But if I know that this is what gets asses in the seat, why wouldn't I pray at that church.

That by all means I might save some, right?

What we are rubbing up against is the chain of technology's saw. Do yourself a favour and look up why chainsaws were made, and what for. And that rub is only there because of the design of the thing. Turns out, it is the perfect instrument for a completely unrelated field. Forestry. One as distant from breached births as the east as is from the west. And I would argue that much of tech is actually not meant for church in the very same way. Designed for, sure. Intended for sure. But actually at home in drastically different settings. Worship and concerts shouldn't be as similar as they are. But when your songs are written with click tracks and light cues in mind, they don't lend themselves to other uses unless we shove them there. It's the shoving that does the damage. Especially with chainsaws.

How many choir lofts got the proverbial axe (read Gibson guitar), so that congregations could get worse at singing in church? How many baptistries got inserted into a sound stage so we can hide what was no longer important to liturgies of our faith. Because inflatable pools and cow troughs do the trick. 

Technology isn't neutral. And you can see that by looking around most churches using technology, to keep up with churches who use technology. There are pieces of this body lying everywhere. Blown off as old fashioned and backward as if it stopped working. Well, the truth is it was stopped from working. That moving a goalpost from filled pews to dynamic views on a live stream, changes the proverbial battlefield. You may think door-to-door evangelism is a dead idea. But statistically, it's not. You just can't use what it does for TikTok material. Basic, exegetical, through the books of the bible preaching is called boring but for some strange reason, everywhere Mark Driscoll does it, his church grows. Hard to repackage ad absurdum into 4-week bible study guides you can sell on Right Now Media. But great for the tithe.

Technology isn't neutral. It's actually more like a reverse gear in a standard. If you put it into place when a vehicle of faith is making good enough progress forward, it can kill the transmission of the gospel. The engine of the thing gets torn to pieces and the whole thing needs to be rebuilt. Don't worry. I hear you can find a YouTube video for that kind of automotive work. Why take an evangelical K-car to the dealership these days. 

Technology isn't neutral.

And neither are the people who use it.

What Actually Happens At An Online Baptism

The logistics are easy enough to figure out. A pastor likely is on one side of the camera or another and the baptizer is the same but conversely so. Which side they're actually on doesn't play into the issues that arise when you say something as bold as "Online Baptism" to a blogger like me.

Baptisms are public declarations of faith in Christ and a symbolic death and resurrection that a new Christian is participating in, among the Christians that they will be in fellowship with. 

They can happen outside of a church context, because the meaning behind them isn't church membership, but rather affinity or solidarity with Christ's church. 

The online aspect of these new kinds of baptisms is again where the Thing/Place distinction shows up. More on that later.

If the baptism is being performed to witness a new Christian joining the church body locally, then the internet does what it does best and connects the separated person to the church via video and audio on the streaming platform of each church's choice. Is that "Together" or "At the same Time"? Before the internet, you could not baptize yourself in your bathtub and let your pastor know by letter you were doing so and have it mean what it means when you are baptized in the presence of the congregation or public in the case of open water baptisms in rivers and lakes.

What actually happens at an online baptism is a written account of the events in both directions in real-time. The happenings of the baptizer are being written into computer code by the camera, translated into different code by the computer and internet network, then translated a third time, at least, by the screen on the receiving end. Because this is happening in both directions so that the congregations can witness the baptism and the baptized person can see the congregations. we double this translation process.

If we slowed the technological quality down to introduce lag, the congregation and baptizer would start to see how the connection isn't the same as in real life but can appear to be. Would the event of a baptism be perceived differently if instead of thousands of frames of pictures paired to the audio of the vent, you only received hundreds? a choppy video of jerky movements between the questions asked of the believer's belief and trust in Jesus' Death Burial and Resurrection, and the dunk? 

What changed? What made this as unreal as it just felt? All we did was give you less of the lie.

Maybe lie is a strong word here, let's go with illusion, still too strong, how about impression? What word would you like for a commentator to use when talking about the strange thing that happens when you start a service off with a 1080p 60k streaming video of the baptism and then dial it back to 144p at 30k? All I changed was the resolution. The wires and screens and cameras are all still there but I'm no longer using them to their fullest capability. 

Is the baptism different or invalid because you can see the pixels now? Because truth is, you could always see the pixels you were just cool with it when it looked cool. When it looks dated you want to leave such practices in the past. It's 4k video for true online ministries or bust. If you don't believe me, type those bolded search terms into youtube and see how many experts tell you the bare minimum for church streaming as far as resolution and cameras go. 

Church and tech don't mix, they stack. And baptisms are a great place to see this in action. Stack anything on water and what happens to it? It sinks. What is a baptism again? It's the ceremonial submersion of a believer under water to declare their belief and join the body of believers in the church. Is that what is happening to the viewers on the screen? Well, no they are just seeing a representation of what has happened in person through the manipulation of pixels and soundwaves in unison both ways. What about the other way? Is a church witnessing a baptism if they watch a father and son in a backyard swimming pool over Zoom while the pastor asks the questions from the stage? Again, no because then they are the ones being subject to audio-visual manipulation. 

No one on either side wants there to be manipulation, but the manipulation is so good these days, that we accept it as a proxy with little to no objection. but the at-home baptist is not with their church, and you could see that by dialing back the technological speed a bit.

If a letter and affidavit stating what the baptized person said before their dunk, pictures of the dry clothes and wet cloths with dates on them, and a photo of a post-baptismal hug in the tank with their parent suffice for proof of baptism? The only difference between that compartmentalized account and the 4k live stream is the amount and quality of pictures and audio and their union in video format.

At some point we let tech past the pews and onto the stages of our churches, we did so with little to no discussion of the metaphysical and theological implications of saying something is one way when it is another. And where that brings us is a place where things meant to be done in public are now done in private. We have tragically all seen this kind of thinking before. especially in the church but not the way you're likely to think.

Porn behaves this way, just the other way around. 

Porn takes what is meant to be private and makes it public. Takes what is meant to be individually possessed and makes it widely available. It takes pixels and soundwaves and tries its best to convince you it's flesh and blood. In every flavor and position, you could think of.

Are you as uncomfortable now as you were when we were talking about the video in 144p? Maybe you should be.

The distinctions and definitions we use in our faith matter. Bread, wine, and water matter. They matter because they point to Jesus and have their roots in Jesus and are part of the instruction of Jesus. Who of all people would have known the way the internet could change the way the church does the sacraments he left for us. Yet we aren't told to interpret these practices into time and space as technology progresses. We are told to baptize people in the name of the Father, Son, and Spirit. and that the gates of Hell will not stand against a church that does so. 

Now that we're decades into the use of these things for Christ's church's name, perhaps we should see if they're capable to use righteously. To jump into theologically deep but available waters and to declare like Christians before us Christ's lordship over all.

To make his will done. Online as it is in Heaven.