Focus on people, not social media

One Sunday as I stood at the front of the sanctuary I was approached by a church member.

“Do you have a moment?”, she asked.

I cut my eyes up to the screens that had giant numbers counting down the seconds to the start of the service.

“I have 2 minutes and 47 seconds according to the countdown,” I replied with a smile.

“I just wanted you to know sister so-and-so’s mother’s surgery went well. She should go home from the hospital tomorrow.”

I tilted my head to the side and with an obvious look of confusion I said, “I didn’t even know she was in the hospital.”

Instinctively and indignantly, she retorted, “How could you not know? It was all over Facebook!”

And there it was. No one had told me. There had been no phone call, no text, no email. Not so much as a carrier pigeon or smoke signal. It didn’t matter that this sweet woman who was hospitalized didn’t attend our church or live in our town! I was supposed to know. It wasn’t enough for the God of the universe to be omniscient. As a pastor, I was expected to be all-knowing as well.

These kind of two-minute-warning drive-bys before the service are common for every pastor, but this one hit different. Not only was I supposed to address and handle all the needs I knew about, but I was also somehow expected to be incessantly scrolling and trolling social media just in case something had missed my attention.

You should have seen the shock on her face when I said as kindly and matter of fact as I could, “I’m not on Facebook.”

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to know or care to know. I just couldn’t have known.

Pastors cannot know everything about everyone everywhere. Nor should we. It is a weight we were not designed to bear. This kind of expectation is a recent development in pastoral history. It is a product of the information age and has been accelerated to light-speed by the existence of social media. We have never had more access to news and information. This information includes everything from military conflicts happening in distant countries whose names we cannot spell to what kind of burrito Steve ordered at Chipotle.

And the information doesn’t stop coming. Yesterday’s crisis is today’s distant memory. And with that reality comes an increasing need to be in the know, and a mounting pressure to interact with every piece of information. I need to voice my opinion about the geopolitical development de jour on X, leave a “We’re praying for you!” on Tammy’s Facebook post about her bunions, and like Larry’s picture on Instagram of the fish he caught on Sunday (while he wasn’t at church). And regardless of how hard you try; you’re going to miss something.

We weren’t designed to process this much information. Just a few generations ago you only had access to what was going on in your community. Everyone read the same newspaper and watched the same 30 minutes of news in the evening. I don’t believe we were intended to know about every tragedy in every town in every corner of the world and world wide web. And pastors were never called to pastor all the people in all the churches in all the places. Nor were we called to be abreast of every theological tiff and methodological squabble happening in Christendom.

The apostle Peter gives pastors a word of exhortation in 1 Peter 5:2 that is so freeing. “Shepherd the flock of God that is among you.” Pastor your church. Shepherd your people. Be far more invested and interested in your congregants than strangers on the internet. When it comes to online matters you don’t have to be the first to know or the first to post. Being perpetually online may help you rack up followers and get you a seat at the internet’s cool kids table, but your flock likely doesn’t know, they definitely don’t care, and they certainly would rather you give some of that attention to your family, your sermon, and your church.

If you are a pastor, one day you will stand before God and give an account. It will not be an account of how you pastored the internet. It will be an account of how you pastored your church. Maybe you need to deactivate an account (or twelve). Perhaps you need some screen time limits. Just do whatever it takes so that you can be obedient to 1 Peter 5:2.