If You Can Come for Pastors But Not a President
The audience was always the point
I’d seen the post and thought I had something honest to add. So I replied.
Not combatively. Not as a troll. I said I personally hadn’t witnessed what he was describing — that living in Bozeman, Montana, predominantly white and middle class, meant the algorithm hadn’t surfaced it for me. A simple reply. The kind of thing you’d say to someone’s face without thinking twice.
He replied in my DMs. Warm. Agreed with me. Said that’s exactly why he posts about this stuff — cultural awareness. Asked where in Montana. We talked. It felt like a conversation.
Then I saw it. My reply on his Instagram stories. Cropped. My name removed. His caption over it: part of the problem. He had 26,900 followers. I had quite a few less. Somewhere in those 26,900, people were now looking at my words — stripped of context, stripped of my name, stripped of the DM conversation that had just happened — and forming a verdict about a person they’d never meet.
I reached back out and called it what it was. He deflected. Acted like I was misreading the situation.
So I reached out to a mutual friend — someone I trusted, someone who knew him. I explained what happened and how it landed. His first response: I was reading the situation wrong.
That friend was part of the same circle.
I sat with that for a while. Three interactions. Three opportunities to say yeah, that wasn’t right. Three times the circle closed instead. And I kept coming back to the same question: why didn’t he just reply to me? The reply button was right there. We could have talked. I might have learned something. He might have.
Instead, he went to the audience first.
That’s not a hot take. That’s not a misunderstanding. That’s a method. And once you see it — really see it — you start recognizing it everywhere.
What happened to me wasn’t unique. I know that now.
The cropped screenshot, the public caption, the deflection when confronted, the friend who ran the same play — none of it was random. It was a pattern. And once you’ve been on the receiving end of it, you start recognizing the shape of it everywhere.
This week, a public theological debate lit up my feed. A ministry account with a significant platform published a multi-slide carousel arguing against two other Christian voices — sophisticated, theologically framed, historically sourced. The comments filled fast. One of the people being criticized showed up to engage the argument directly, carefully, with evident goodwill. What followed wasn’t dialogue. It was a dismantling. Ad hominem. Condescension. Not a single concession, not a single acknowledgment that the other person had a point worth considering. Just the performance of dominance dressed in theological vocabulary.
I went back and looked at the account’s broader history. Same pattern, over and over. Confident assertion. Dismissal of challenge. No ground given. Ever.
What struck me wasn’t just the conduct. It was the gap. The same account that quotes Augustine on their website — “unity in essentials, liberty in non-essentials, in all things charity” — couldn’t extend basic charity in a comment section. The mission statement claimed Augustine. The comment section revealed something else entirely.
A person I respect — someone with a front-row seat to the whole situation — said something to me privately I haven’t been able to stop thinking about.
They saw it. They just don’t care.
That sentence isn’t cynical commentary on one bad actor. It’s a diagnosis. Because the issue isn’t that these people don’t know how to be corrected. The issue is that correction was never the point. The audience was always the point. And when the audience is always the point, truth-telling stops being alētheuontes — the living, embodied, body-building fidelity Paul describes — and becomes something else entirely. Performance. Dominance. A platform protecting itself from accountability by making accountability look like an attack.
I’ve been in that position. I know what it feels like when the circle closes.
The question underneath all of it isn’t who was right. It’s what got built.
The Way We Fight
There’s a word Paul uses in Ephesians 4 that usually gets translated “speaking the truth in love.” It shows up in verse 15, and the Greek underneath it — alētheuontes — is richer than that translation suggests. Some early manuscripts read it as “doing truth.” Because in the Old Testament, the phrase was used specifically for fidelity between two parties — the kind of truth that shows up not just in what you say but in what you do.1 Paul isn’t offering tone advice. He’s describing what healthy bodies do. They truth each other — in word and in action — and they do it in love.
The context sharpens this. Paul is contrasting this posture with something specific — the cunning schemes of people who exploit immature believers, using theological sophistication not to build up the body but to prey on it (Eph. 4:14).2 Alētheuontes en agapē is the antidote. And the goal of that antidote isn’t winning. It’s oikodomē — the Greek word for construction. Every true word spoken between believers is building material. It either goes into the wall or it doesn’t.
The verb Paul uses for the church’s growth — auxanō — is the same word used in Ephesians 2:21, where the church grows into God’s holy temple.3 The body that truths in love is being built into a dwelling place for the Spirit. That’s not a metaphor for inspiration. That’s the actual goal of the way believers speak to each other.
Which means when truth is deployed as a weapon — when the goal is position rather than construction — it has stopped functioning as Paul intends. The content might be accurate. The theology might be airtight. But if it’s cunning rather than constructive, it has already failed the test the apostle sets.
The second thing. Jesus, in Matthew 18, gives a pattern for what confrontation between believers looks like — and it’s almost universally misread in the digital age.
Go privately first. If that doesn’t work, bring one or two others. If that doesn’t work, bring it before the church. The movement is always private to public — never the reverse. France calls it the principle of minimum exposure: other people are only brought in when the private approach has failed. The goal throughout is pastoral, not judicial. The singular “you” in verses 15–17 is deliberate — one disciple, concerned about another’s spiritual welfare, taking personal responsibility for the relationship.4
Blomberg puts the failure mode plainly: how often personal confrontation is the last stage rather than the first in Christian complaints. It frequently seems as if the whole world knows of someone’s grievance before the person is personally approached.5
That is the entire ecosystem of Christian social media conflict. Broadcast first. Private conversation never. And France’s observation cuts deepest: when the private step is skipped, the method has already answered the question about motive more honestly than the content ever could.6
There is an exception. Doriani notes it: when a public person commits a public sin that touches the gospel itself, public rebuke is fitting. Paul rebuked Peter before everyone in Galatians 2 because Peter’s hypocrisy was public and its implications for the gospel were immediate.7 The exception is real — but narrow. The rule is always to go private first, to seek the person’s restoration before you seek the audience’s approval.
This matters for our witness and for the immature believers Paul is trying to protect. But naming what’s broken is only half the work. And the church has been doing only half the work for a long time.
Now What?
This section has two addresses. Because the challenge looks different depending on where you sit.
If you have a platform:
Let’s be honest about what happened in that comment section this week. A person showed up to engage the argument — carefully, charitably, on the merits. What they received in return wasn’t engagement. It was demolition. Ad hominem. Condescension. Not one concession. Not one acknowledgment that the other person had raised a point worth considering. Just the sustained performance of dominance in theological vocabulary.
That’s not prophetic boldness. That’s pride with a proof text.
So before you post, before you respond, before you screenshot — three questions worth sitting with:
Posture: Is the goal of this content to build up the body of Christ, or to establish your position within it? Paul’s criterion in Ephesians 4 is oikodomē — upbuilding. If the honest answer is that the content is designed to win rather than build, it has already failed the test — regardless of whether the theology is correct.
Method: Did this dispute begin privately? Because Matthew 18 isn’t just a church discipline protocol. It’s a revelation of what public theological conflict is actually for when the private route is bypassed. Broadcast-first engagement serves the platform. The person being addressed is not the real audience. When that’s true, the method has answered the question about motive before a single word of theology is spoken. And your followers can tell — even if they don’t have language for it yet.
Outcome: When this is over, what will have been built? Not argued. Not won. Built — in the person you addressed, in the people watching, in the body of Christ that was supposed to be served by this exchange? If the honest answer is nothing, then the argument functioned as noise. Loud, sophisticated, theologically fluent noise. But noise.
One more thing. If you can’t concede a point, can’t acknowledge validity in a challenge, can’t give ground when ground is warranted — that’s not theological conviction. That’s a closed system. And closed systems don’t build anything. They only protect themselves.
If you don’t have a platform:
The temptation for the rest of us is to perform the debate as spectators — share the takedown, add the comment, signal which side we’re on. Every share of content that wounds without building is a small vote for the method you just watched.
But there’s a more personal question underneath that. Have you been on the receiving end of this? A cropped screenshot. A public caption. A circle that closed when you tried to raise a concern. If you have — you already know what this method costs the person it’s used on. Which means you also know why it matters that someone names it.
Name it. Not to win. Not to perform your own version of the takedown. But because the body of Christ deserves better than this, and someone has to be willing to say so — privately, directly, in the right sequence.
That’s not weakness. That’s the method Paul actually describes.
Imagine a church where theological disagreement was actually dangerous — not because people got canceled for their views, but because the arguments were so good, so honest, so willing to concede what was true in the other position, that you couldn’t dismiss them. Imagine leaders with platforms who went private first, every time, without exception — not because they were weak, but because they understood that the goal was the person, not the audience. Imagine a comment section that looked less like a courtroom and more like a conversation between people who actually believed they were members of the same body.
That’s not a naive vision. That’s Ephesians 4. That’s Matthew 18. That’s what Paul means when he says the whole body builds itself up in love.
The watching world isn’t waiting for the church to win more arguments. It’s waiting to see if we actually believe what we say we believe about each other. Every exchange is evidence. Every comment section is a witness statement.
Make yours count for something.
This piece is part of the ongoing work at Theologetics — culturally engaged theological writing that takes orthodoxy seriously and asks what it actually looks like to live it out. The method behind this work, Redemptive Correlation, is developed fully in my forthcoming book, currently under proposal. If this kind of thinking is what you're looking for, you're in the right place — and the book goes deeper than any single article can.
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F. F. Bruce, The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1984), 352.
Benjamin L. Merkle, “Ephesians,” in Ephesians–Philemon, ed. Iain M. Duguid, James M. Hamilton Jr., and Jay Sklar, vol. XI, ESV Expository Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2018), 76.
Lynn H. Cohick, The Letter to the Ephesians, ed. Ned B. Stonehouse et al., New International Commentary on the Old and New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2020), 275–276.
R. T. France, The Gospel of Matthew, The New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publication Co., 2007), 692.
Craig Blomberg, Matthew, vol. 22, The New American Commentary (Nashville: Broadman & Holman Publishers, 1992), 278.
France, Gospel of Matthew, 692.
Daniel M. Doriani, “Matthew,” in Matthew–Luke, ed. Iain M. Duguid, James M. Hamilton Jr., and Jay Sklar, vol. VIII, ESV Expository Commentary (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2021), 274.