Less Time on Websites, More time for Witnessing?

In his final sermon as the outgoing president of the Southern Baptist Convention, Bobby Welch expressed his unhappiness with the bloggers of his denomination. I cited several of his comments in my last post. Today, and in the days ahead, I want to respond to Welch's concerns in some detail.

According to BPNews, "Welch said he’d been wondering about Southern Baptists and that if 'we’d spend less time on these websites that we’d be able to spend more time witnessing?'"

In case you're not familiar with conservative Christian lingo, witnessing is another word for evangelizing. It usually describes what others might call personal evangelism: one-on-one conversation about Christ with the purpose of converting a non-believer. Baptists believe that all Christians should witness, that is, should "share Christ" with people around them.

I'm not a Baptist, but I also believe this. I realize that this isn't conducive to postmodern relativism, but a consistent relativist will at least allow me to believe what I in fact believe. I do believe that Christians should share the good news of Christ with others. I do not defend rudeness or arrogance, however. Personal evangelism doesn't have to be obnoxious, though some well-intentioned Christians seem to prove the opposite point. Evangelism, in its literal meaning, simply telling others about something good. If I see a good movie, I want to tell my friends. If I read a good book, ditto. So how can I not share the best news in life?

I've said this to make it clear that, though I might not sound like Bobby Welch, I agree with his idea that we Christians should "spend more time witnessing."

But does that necessarily mean we should "spend less time on these websites"?

Well, it all depends on the content of the websites, doesn't it? To take the simplest case, a website might be a way for communicating the gospel, rather like an online tract. Time spent doing a website might be time spent witnessing.

But even if a website isn't overtly evangelistic, it seems to me that blogging enables Christians to engage the larger world. Though my website occasionally evangelizes in the narrow sense (through my sermons, largely) I am regularly engaging the ideas, concerns, and values of the world in which I live. My website helps me to interact with the culture in a way that might be called "pre-evangelistic." It helps me to know the people to whom I'm called to witness, and it helps me to enter into constructive dialogue with them.

My guess is that Bobby Welch, given his perspective on the Internet, hasn't spent too much time checking out various Christian blogs. No doubt he thinks of blogging largely in terms of Southern Baptist politics. I'd recommend that he spend some time reading the blog of Albert Mohler Jr., president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. Here Welch would find serious engagement with the culture from a clear, conservative, evangelical Christian perspective.

If Christian blogging can have value, even from an evangelistic point of view, does this mean it's just fine for Christian bloggers to spend all the time in the world on their websites? Of course not. Though he didn't put it this way, what Bobby Welch should have said is that we all need to think about how we spend our limited time on this globe. Blogging can be an enjoyable hobby, even an effective ministry. But it can also be a time-waster, a distraction, or an obsession. I would confess that there have been times when my blogging has taken me away from more important activities.

So, though I don't agree exactly with Bobby Welch's either/or position, either websites or witnessing, I do receive his challenge to look carefully at how I spend my time and to re-think my "mission" in my own website.