The Wilful Sunflower

Sometimes I wonder about us Christians. We seem to have a need to yell, "I'm Christian! I'm Christian! Look at me!" But shouldn't that be evident in the way we live, the things we say, and how we treat others, to say the least?

I've seen contests where Christians vote for the Christian contestant simply because he's a Christian. "Wouldn't it be wonderful if a Christian were to win? Wouldn't that glorify God?" -- as if God needed help with His PR.

It doesn't seem to occur to us sometimes that the prize should go to the most deserving one, that it is dishonest to vote for a person based solely on the person's confessed faith rather than on his/her real abilities. Do we not realise that, in effect, what we are doing is rigging the votes? Is that not dishonest? Does that truly bring any good to God's name?

So it seems like we often tend to think God needs a little bit of "help", and I really wonder about that...

The latest development among international Christian bloggers lately has been the setting up of a "Blogdom of God Alliance". Listed on the Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem, it is a drive to get Christian bloggers more visibility and to push them further up said ecosystem. Since the ecosystem works by counting the number of blogs who link to you (the more links you have, the further up you go), the Alliance's rallying cry is, "God bloggers, unite!!!"

The Alliance's founder, Dr Adrian Warnock, writes,

We need to link to each other. This can be done in our own blogrolls... or via the two aggregators 'The Blogdom of God' and The Evangelical Aggregator. More importantly than all that though is that we read each other's posts and link to them in our blogs regularly. I am not calling for what could be described as cheating. But listing your favorite Christian bloggers in a post every now and then would go a long way to drawing more traffic in to us all.

[...]

What we need to do is build a Blogdom of interconnected blogs that work together to bring our message to bear on the Blogosphere.

I have reservations about this, not least because it feels to me like we are forming a clique of Christian bloggers. Already a blogroll survey by Bene Diction shows that 35% of the 88 male bloggers surveyed did not link to people outside their faith group. How does linking to each other and interacting with other Christian bloggers help to "bring our message to bear on the Blogosphere"?

This brings me back to my original point, which is -- does God really need our help? Does He need our help to go all out and garner more traffic in order that more people will have the chance to be exposed to our so-called message?

Do we sometimes get too excited in our zeal, forgetting that we are simply called to be faithful in what He has asked us to do? If you are faithful, can you not trust Him to bring in the harvest?

Of course that's easier said than done. As a writer I know how frustrating it can be to write and write and have no one seemingly interested in what you have to say. But what if your life's work is simply to influence a single person for God? Is that possible? I don't know. But I do know that Jesus was focused; He concentrated on His 12 disciples. He didn't worry that He should have more, and He didn't worry that His influence wouldn't be sufficient -- despite having the advantage of knowing exactly when He was going to die (an advantage we don't have!). He knew what He was called to do, and He did it.

Let's not try too hard to help God out. It can be too easy to deceive ourselves, saying, "It's ok for me to do this because it's in the name of God". Is it ok to go all out to gain readership -- even to the point of "Google bombing" -- because we are so-called "god-blogs" and have a message to proclaim? Is it ok to send out "Christian spam" (like what Rachel Cunliffe recently received) because we have a message to proclaim?

Perhaps there's no real parellel between the two, but you see how both are rather grey areas. No one could say either is exactly wrong, but... it doesn't seem right to me.

 

UPDATE:
In saying that I feel we could be forming a clique of Christian bloggers, I neglected to say this: Dr Warnock himself expressly told me that is the last thing he wants to happen. Which is why there are no "rules" for joining the Alliance; as long as you consider yourself a "God-blog", you are welcome to join. I apologise for the inadvertent omission. And, in case it was not clear, I am discussing the idea of the Alliance here, not Dr Warnock's character, motives, person, or intentions.