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September 23, 2009

Is That Obedience?

by Thabiti Anyabwile

Matt, thanks for sharing the internet baptism.  Mike, thanks for starting us off with the correct tone: charity.  Brothers, thanks for the interesting thoughts about pastoral relationships and the mediate/immediate nature of communication.

For me, the weakness of the approach isn't really captured in whether or not this form of "gathering" leaves something out or not.  I'm sure it does leave many important things out, but if I were pushing back from the other side I think I'd argue that in-person communication doesn't guarantee any more authenticity than does impersonal forms.  Arguably, impersonal forms reduce social inhibitions that elicit more passionate and typically concealed reactions.  Witness internet confession sites, chat rooms, and many comment threads on blogs.  At the same time, personal social settings include a host of rules that suppress certain kinds of information.  We even have phrases to describe the ways we deceive in person--poker face, good front, posing, masquerading, and so on.  So, I can imagine proponents of this idea saying that the video feed between the two sites does much of what you all are wanting in the gathered setting, and that the gathered setting isn't a guarantee of getting "real" or "genuine" or "authentic" "stuff."  She's excited, he's excited, the people there were excited.  What's the difference?

Where I fell down with the video was the internet pastor's opening comment: "God has called us to be obedient and follow His example in baptism.  That's exactly what we're doing."

Really?  "Exactly" what's going on there is obedience and following the example of Christ?

I was left with a question: Does any method for doing something constitute obedience?  If I tell my daughter to make her bed and find that she in Tom Sawyer fashion tricked her siblings into making it, does that constitute obedience?  Suppose I'd previously given her many examples of how I make the bed and told her to do likewise, is her "obedience" exactly like that modeled when she uses her siblings? 

My response is simply I don't think this is what any NT writer had in mind or experienced when they set out to follow our Lord's command to make disciples and baptize them in His name. 

Then I'd have all the questions about what at internet campus really is, and what an internet pastor does.  And, in what sense is this young woman a "member" of a church, being discipled and taught all that Jesus commanded.  With only the bit in the video to judge from, imo, it's all too free radical to be NT church.






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