Arguing With Bots While Our Church Bleeds
From the Dashboard >
In a recent interview on BlazeTV, host Steve Deace sat down with pastor and writer Michael Foster to talk about something many church leaders quietly worry about but rarely name plainly: the slow, corrosive influence of social media “influencer culture” on the pulpit.
Foster’s concern is straightforward and biblical. Pastors are called to shepherd actual sheep, not perform for abstract audiences. As Deace put it, too many ministers today are no longer preaching to “Michael in the third row whose marriage is on the rocks,” but instead are preaching to “@dontjewmebro43 on X.” The sermon is no longer shaped by the needs of the congregation but by the temptations of engagement, virality, and approval.
Foster explains that when pastors begin tailoring their message to a national online audience, they inevitably drift away from the real, particular needs of their local church. See the crisis…
Social media rewards:
Broad generalizations
Outrage
Commentary
Pastoral ministry requires:
Presence
Patience
Specificity and love
The solution, Foster argues, is accountability and humility: strong elders, sermons shaped by real congregational needs, and a deep suspicion toward fame. “You have to have an abusive relationship with celebrity as a pastor,” he says bluntly. “You have to hate it.”
He’s right. And the warning is needed.
But I’d argue the problem and the danger runs even deeper.
Because this isn’t just a temptation for pastors.
It’s a temptation for all of us.
Scripture doesn’t divide the church into professional ministers and passive consumers. It calls every Christian an ambassador of Christ. Every believer is an irreplaceable part of the body. Every member is gifted for the building up of others. We are commanded to exhort one another, encourage one another, bear one another’s burdens, and spur one another on toward love and good works.
That work happens in real places with real people:
In local churches.
In living rooms.
Around dinner tables.
In hospital waiting rooms.
Over coffee.
In messy relationships that require patience and grace.
But increasingly, many of us are abandoning that mission field for a digital substitute:
We will spend hours arguing with strangers on Facebook threads.
We’ll wade into Twitter pile-ons.
We’ll craft the perfect takedown for someone who may not even be real — just a bot from halfway around the world.
We’ll chase the dopamine hit of likes, shares, and approval from people we will never meet, all while the actual people God has placed directly in our lives quietly struggle nearby.
The lonely church member who needs a friend.
The young believer who needs discipling.
The exhausted mother who needs encouragement.
The couple whose marriage is fraying.
The teenager who needs someone to notice them.
The neighbor who doesn’t yet know Christ.
Those are not abstract audiences. They are our mission.
The cruel irony is that many Christians who claim to care deeply about truth, church, discipleship, and cultural decay are pouring their energy into the least fruitful arena possible. Online conflict produces heat, not light. It shapes our tone, hardens our hearts, and inflates our pride, all while leaving the real work of ministry undone.
Influencer culture has trained us to believe impact is measured in reach. But Scripture teaches that faithfulness is measured in obedience.
Most of the work God calls us to will never trend. It won’t go viral. It won’t earn applause. It won’t generate followers. But it is precisely the work that actually strengthens the church and changes lives over time: showing up, loving consistently, serving quietly, and walking patiently with people who are hard to love.
Foster is absolutely right that celebrity is poison to pastoral ministry.
But the deeper truth is that platform-chasing is poison to Christian discipleship altogether.
We don’t need more Christian commentators. We need more faithful church members.
More servants. More disciplers. More encouragers. More people who are deeply embedded in real communities with real responsibility for real souls.
The mission field is not primarily our timeline. It’s our local congregation, and it’s still right in front of us.