Chris Turner, the manager for the Tennessee Baptist Mission Board’s social media sites, says he often finds himself shaking his head after reading social media posts from Christians.
In a recent oped for Baptist and Reflector he wrote that over the past five months he’s seen three topics in which Christians are torching their gospel witness at the speed of a click: Politics, race relations and the COVID-19 pandemic.
He did an unscientific survey of his personal Facebook newsfeed and found that 17 of the 30 most recent posts made over the past 38 minutes fall into one of these three categories.
He has some suggestions to keep social media from negatively impacting your witness….
- Do your posts reflect the Fruits of the Spirit?
You don’t have to avoid politics and other issues, but how’s your tone and the content?
- You won’t win an argument or change someone’s perspective through social media.
In fact, the impersonal nature of social media emboldens people to be more aggressive than they would likely be in a face-to-face engagement.
- Determine you’ll redeem social media.
By concentrating on solid discipleship.
- And finally, Consider the spiritually lost reader.
Is what you are posting drawing that spiritually lost person closer to saving faith in Jesus Christ or pushing them farther away?