Faith Today - July/August 2013

Church to speak to such challenges? LS: This isn’t something completely new. I don’t think it has changed much. I grew up with slam books. They were composition books. You would open it and at the top would be a person’s name and people would write what they thought of that person. It could be nice.

It could be nasty. But those words stayed.

The only thing worse than opening the book and finding out what they had written about you was not finding your name. If you were not ranked, rated or talked about, you just didn’t count. So there has always been this type of thing. It’s not something new that has just appeared. In this world of social media there is a levelling, and so everyone has to have an equal voice.

It is not just kids that are being cyber-
bullied. I have hate sites out there. I have
a lot of them, but some of my friends have
some really nasty ones. Some people be-
lieve what they read just because it is on
the web. I had one of my most savvy stu-
dents who saw one of these sites come to
me and say, “So sorry about what happened
to your friend.” What,
are you kidding me?
This is just not true.

LS: That’s a real problem. That sort of flaunting is very common and it is part of our celebrity culture. It comes down to our methodology. We are in the culture, but we are not of it. Would Jesus tweet? Of course He would tweet. The question is what would Jesus tweet? Jesus would tweet, but not as the world tweets.

In my travels, where can I point to what God is up to or what God is doing? Not what are you doing, but what is God doing? We use social media not to sell ourselves, but to point to God. Now if I publish a book, I see that as something God does do. So I will mention that.

It is a danger. It was John Calvin who said that the mind is the factory of idols. That’s something we have always done. Social media allows us to do it faster. The challenge for those who become a part of this celebrity culture is to use their celebrity status not to become an idol, but to become an icon – an icon that points toward Christ. Christian celebrities should work hard at not becoming idols.