Sydney Sweeney's Jeans and Christians Responding to Media Manipulation

Theological foundations for a church's communications ministry

After a short winter hibernation, Joel McMaster, Stu Crawshaw and I were able to get the band back together and kick off a new mini-series on the theology, strategy and practice of one of Soul Revival Church’s ministry teams.

For this series, we are digging into our Communications Team that Joel leads. How do we think about communication biblically and theologically and how might we use communication wisely and helpfully in our church.

As a foil to wise and helpful communication, we start off by discussing media manipulation and outrage culture, most recently seen in the Sydney Sweeney jeans/genes controversy. How is controversy engineered, why does it spreads so quickly? More importantly, how can Christians develop discernment when engaging with modern media so they are not evangelised by it?

We then switch back to the topic at hand: the theology of communication.

As disciples of a God who uses his “Word” to create and communicate, we discuss the theological foundations for how a church can communica…