Beware of the public persona people present on social media sites, in church, at work, and at school functions. Too many people are more concerned with how they present themselves to the public than their actual behavior. The thought process for many people is as follows: go to church on Sunday and present as a solid religious person, go to work on Monday and tell everyone exactly what they want to hear, post media posts with the latest socially acceptable pictures and posts, take their kids to school events, and end their week with a sports events. Sounds and looks like a great upstanding person right?
Here’s what really happened. Joined a church to get people to trust them and easily manipulate them. Now they have a church supporting their character enabling them to abuse their family, embezzle from their job, and be a drunk or drug user in the evenings and on weekends. They now have an entire church who is willing to testify that this person is a fine upstanding church member. The church will go to the matt to defend this person because their first priority is their church’s image and the persona their members present to the world. Churches will address behavior on social media or controversial public behavior because it makes them look bad. At the end of the day, most churches first priority is to keep up appearances. If push comes to shove, the church will defend it’s member as innocent regardless of their behavior if it’s in their own best interest.
The reality is that we are all sinners. The reality is that we are forgiven for our sins if we repent. Oh yes, that’s right, we actually have to repent and try to do better. In the end, God is the one who judges our own individual actions. We aren’t deflecting anything when it comes to his judgement. We don’t get to point at someone else and say but look what they did in order to make ourselves look better. That’s not going to work. Yes, image is important as we are supposed to be role models and example setters. The church is doing neither by refusing to minister to it’s members when they don’t act as they should but instead hide or cover those actions up.
What I don’t understand is why the churches don’t understand why their memberships are down. Read the above.
Middle of the Muddy Road 