Sometimes I get distracted by angry blogs. Especially by bloggers talking about one form of Christianity they don’t like. Usually I feel like they should just calm down.
Tonight I was reading a blog about a prominent pastor in the US who recently had a 10-minute rant about Calvinists. I felt a little annoyed by it, not because Calvinists don’t deserve a good ranting at every now and again, but he just didn’t really seem to know much about Calvinists. But then as I read around this blog the blogger was feeling pretty upset about everything who wasn’t clearly very conservative-Calvinist. I had the feeling that this blogger is a Sydney guy, so I thought “Chances are, if he’s from Sydney, he knows the organisation I work for.” I was hoping he’d have written an angry blog about my work, because I know there are probably a few things he would have had a go at. But alas he’d not mentioned us.
Firstly I think it’s offensive. I think we deserve an angry blog post. At least one. Everyone blogs about Hillsong. But this year, my work is going to reach somewhere in the vicinity of 100,000 young people. That’s not too shabby when it comes to market penetration (for want of a better term). That deserves a bit of blogger scrutiny doesn’t it? Couldn’t just one pastor rant about us because we’re too reformed? Couldn’t one reformed blogger complain we’re not reformed enough? Is that too much to ask? Isn’t there someone out there who could publicly complain that we allow women to have their heads uncovered, or that we don’t have enough “Holy Spirit fire” when we sing?
But I searched Google blogs for us; Nothing. No one cares. It’s so sad. I want go to work and feel empowered that we’re in danger of becoming mild-martyrs in the blogosphere. But alas it probably won’t happen. The main reason, I think, is because the organisation I work for reaches children and teenagers, and few really listen to children and young people, and not many people take much time to find out what’s being taught to children and young people. So we do our work, free from the angry bloggers.
Now before you worry about my work running off and preaching heresy to the young people of Australia, there are plenty of people who hear what we say. There are teachers, and chaplains, and visiting speakers, and leaders, not to mention plenty of switched on people under 18. They can and do listen carefully to what we say and watch carefully what we do. And we have clear doctrinal statements which are publicly available and policies about how to approach certain issues and situations. So we’re not running off brain-washing any young person we can find. All I’m saying is, it would be nice if people cared enough about the young people of Australia that we got an angry blog once in while. Why do Driscoll and Houston get all the angry blogs, what about us? I feel left out.
And as usual, I’m not going to say who I work for, because while I wish we got an angry blog post about us, I don’t want to be the cause of one happening. Just keep believing I work for wolves.
