As a virtual community, we have one primary concern: We need to communicate with each other. We need that fellowship and communion on whatever terms we can get it. Correlating to this concern is that we are able to communicate the gospel message. This is threatened, both online and in real life. The people who run our federal government have long stated their desire to silence the gospel message, and to compel active compliance with their agenda. In other words, they intend to force us to sin.
We don’t know what to expect with any useful degree of precision. We know only what we should expect in broad general terms. I would be loath to advise you to do what I do in real life, except in the broadest general terms of my motivations. However, the nature of our online fellowship pretty much requires we be on the same page of music.
We’ve seen some of the threat so far: kicking people off certain publishing platforms. Their intended audience is Trump supporters, but anyone who resists their sinful agenda will be lumped in with those they hate. They don’t even want us talking to each other privately. For the time being, their options are limited. Censoring us on Facebook is nothing new, but is generally limited to more obvious political expressions. However, if you object to the vaccine mandates the way I do, you’ll be silenced on that issue. Other popular platforms like Twitter are doing something similar.
A primary response is to stop trusting those services. It’s not as if we are going to conduct a strong outreach with the gospel message to the people who use those services. Because of the saturation of the mainstream churchianity version of the “gospel message,” the world at large is highly immunized to verbal appeals. To be honest, it’s exceptionally difficult to have a strong witness online. We do a whole lot better with a lot less effort pursuing it in the real world by how we live. The vast majority of folks we can influence online will be those already converted, those who simply need some encouragement in the faith they already have. There is very little evangelistic fruit to be had online; that’s simply a matter of how God works.
Thus, we return to the primary concern: Communicating with each other, and fellow believers in a wider audience. For purposes of this discussion, I’m going to distinguish just a bit between our private communications versus our invitation to the wider world of believers. We’ve already seen how some religious institutions are using the Internet as yet another means of keeping their folks in the corral, so I’m not talking about what they do. I’m talking about open communication with no strings attached.
Private communication can continue in several different ways, primarily via email, the forum, and our collected blogs. None of this is high traffic, and doesn’t catch much censorship. If worse comes to worst, we can all get encrypted email accounts on the same service (I recommend Proton Mail) and no one will ever see it but us. It’s the stuff we do to call out to our brothers and sisters out there in the wider audience of Christian believers that is likely to get unwanted attention. That’s what blogs are for, and those are under threat. It’s well established that we are more likely to draw other believers if we are using a service that includes a social aspect, something that tends to bring us to their attention.
A blog on an active common platform like a WordPress account on WordPress.com is about as good as it gets, but it also flags us for censorship, because it’s wide open to non-believers, too. A blog like this one on a private server account (only using the WordPress software, but not the service) doesn’t get much attention at all, so we have a very low likelihood of persecution, but also virtually no chance to get the attention of believers outside our small community. It becomes defacto a private sharing vehicle. I take that into account for everything I post here, including this appeal for community prayer on the issue.
How are we going to speak to fellow believers when the current ruling regime gets rolling? Does God want us to keep reaching out to churchians and the few random folks who are outside the mainstream church? I believe He does. I further believe that the Internet is one of the best places to do that. A part of our appeal is saying the very things that get us censored by the globalist cult. Where can we go with our message online without being silenced by those who are honestly not part of our audience? Even the New Testament Apostles faced censorship in some parts of the Roman Empire, but we have nothing like the open forums they did for reaching those who are ready to hear it.
I’m not sure how much longer my older blog on WordPress.com will remain uncensored, but right now, it’s my best shot at drawing a wider audience. But this isn’t just about me — what are the rest of you folks doing with the message? What means of publicity do we have open to us? More to the point, what will be open to us a couple of months or years down the road? We need to pray; we need guidance from the Lord.
