Mission Tactics and Resources

When the truth becomes so important to you that you’ll pay for the privilege of sharing it, then you can claim to be a messenger for God.

I’m waiting to see how many Christian authors will keep writing and publishing when Big Tech locks them out of the market. It’s already happening, so it may not be long. I’m waiting to see how many private projects replace the current reliance on popular social media, and people actually start using those alternatives. What kind of people still think Facebook, Twitter, etc., are still worth the trouble?

At some point you have to wonder what kind of people you are addressing. Think about the audience that patronizes those services. If you have a political message, then you will never get the attention of your opposition, except to raise your profile as an enemy worthy of targeting. If your message is the gospel, then your audience will always be some thin slice of the readership. If your message is more neutral, aimed at a general audience, then keep that polarizing stuff out of it.

What does God require of you? If you believe you are supposed to fight, then fight without whining. Be a true soldier for your message. If your message is the gospel, decide which thin slice of the wider audience is yours. Don’t be surprised when you get persecuted by the majority, and don’t you dare whine to sinners about sin. But if you are promoting something else, then tailor your message to the audience you seek.

But the whining must stop. The First Amendment is not in the Bible, nor does it reflect the attitude of God and His people. God’s wrath is going to destroy the USA, and whether or not we have any vestige of a constitutional republic has nothing to do with it. If a platform isn’t provided for free, then build your own and pay the price.

I took out a new Facebook (FB) account last year solely to promote my bike touring. That’s the kind of crap FB management likes. What got biking shut down for a year was the false Corona Virus pandemic. Commenting on that very much will simply make bad karma against my ostensible message there. During the past year, my FB account has been loaded with corrupt propaganda advertising on the one hand, and boneheaded partisan political pandering by my relatives on the other hand. I don’t spend much time on FB because of that. I’m still keeping the account alive because I hope to return to bike touring this year. Without that, I will most certainly close my FB account again.

Side note: There is some difference between bikepacking and bicycle touring, but not much. The former implies mountain bikes and trails, while the latter is just about any bike on back roads. Both tend to involve camping. I will keep promoting bikepacking, but the sad truth is there are almost no significant cross-country trail systems across Oklahoma like there are in other states. While those trails do sometimes follow paved roads here and there, in Oklahoma it’s virtually all roads. I’ll call it “bikepacking” to promote more public access routes.

That promotion is part of my divine calling. I’m still praying about it, but there is the standing question of how sharp the division between faith and hobby should be. There has to be some compartmentalization, and I’m sure it’s a moving target with Big Tech services. I’d like to put up a channel, on YouTube or some similar service, for some short videos. I’ll keep an eye on what I can say without risking censorship, because I can’t afford to pay for video hosting on a more tolerant service. In this case, the money is the issue. But if that’s not feasible, then there likely won’t be any videos.

Normal still shots will be a primary emphasis. If the images don’t speak for themselves to some degree, there’s no point in photography. Snapshots are easy to include; it’s cheap. I’ll throw in some narrative, of course. I’m not that good at making videos, but without having a videographer with me, it shuts out a very large audience I’d like to reach if I don’t try some of it on my own. It’s a language I’ll have to learn to speak.

It’s no secret that I hope to use this hobby as an opening for the gospel. If nothing else, the reaction of people to various efforts will tell me something about how God works, and how He wants to work with me. There’s enough cycling stuff out there that I don’t need to compete with them in trying to be vanilla. I’m hoping I can reach other believers who need this message, and it will happen to be Christians who are interested in cycling and nature images. That’s my target audience.

Let’s see what God provides for this mission, because that determines how it will be carried out.