Less Time for Blogging, More Time for Baptizing?

Bobby Welch, the outgoing president of the Southern Baptist Convention, doesn't like blogging. In my last post I examined a line from his swan song sermon at the recent SBC meeting. He wondered if "we'd spend less time on these websites that we'd be able to spend more time witnessing?" Staying on his alliteration roll, Welch asked, "Do you think if we spent less time blogging we might have more time to do some baptizing?"

I'm tempted to ask a rhetorical question back in Welch's direction: Do you think if we spent less time messing around with church politics we might have more time to do some baptizing? I freely admit that blogging can be a waste of time. But so can church politics. In fact, there are few things that are more hurtful to the cause of Christ than church politics run amuck. When Christians bash each other, play power games, and outdo the world in worldliness, this doesn't exactly draw the heathen into the kingdom. Of course not all church business is like this. But much of it is.

Bobby Welch may be a wonderful man and a wonderful pastor. I have no reason to believe otherwise. But it's obvious that he hasn't thought much about how to reach the younger generations with the gospel. To be sure, face-to-face relationships matter to these generations, as to the rest of us. But folks under thirty are techies. They live in an e-world, where the Internet is as normal as the telephone system. E-mail, blogging, websites, online chat rooms, Myspace – all of these are simply normal tools of living for people born after 1980. If we're going to communicate with them, we need to speak their language and use the modes they use.

Eric, my high school director, does lots of ministry through the Internet and through text messaging by way of cell phones. He stays connected with more than a hundred kids by a wise use of technology. Eric also understands the importance of personal contact. He's always hanging out with kids. But the Internet is a valuable tool in his collection. I don't know for sure, but I wouldn't be at all surprised if Eric knows kids who first got interested in our youth group by way of the Internet. And if it hasn't happened yet, I expect that before long we'll be baptizing some new believer because of the Internet.

My answer to Bobby Welch's question on blogging and baptizing is this: It just may be that if we Christians spent more time engaging the culture and the people around us through blogging, then we'd end up needing to spend more time baptizing as well. Why give up a potentially powerful communication tool, especially when that tool has such impact among younger generations?

(In the picture to the right, I'm baptizing a high school girl by immersion. You may notice that we Presbyterians don't have state of the art baptismal pools.)