This article is adapted from a presentation given at MNA’s NextGen Summit in Littleton, CO.
Several months ago, a friend and fellow pastor noticed his dog was whining and pacing at their back door more frantically than usual. Once out, the dog made a beeline for the back corner of the yard and started sniffing around like he was looking for something. When my friend investigated for himself, he noticed a shallow depression had been dug into the lawn and was lined with bits of grass and fur — a rabbit’s burrow.
The mama rabbit was nowhere to be seen (likely scared off), but my friend took his dog to the front yard to do his business so the mama rabbit would have a little privacy while birthing her kits. It was the least he could do.
His dog, of course, strongly disapproved. He whined, scratched at the door, and barked in protest
Unable to focus on sermon prep, my friend caved to his dog’s heckling and compromised: he opened the main door, but kept the screen door closed. The dog still growled and barked, but being able to surveil the mama rabbit at a distance was satisfying enough to reduce his complaining to (mostly) tolerable background noise.
This stalemate continued for a few days until it seemed the mama rabbit and her litter had left for good. To confirm, he returned to the back corner of his yard, where he made a grisly discovery: the mother had devoured her young.
Apparently, under sustained anxiety and stress, a mother rabbit will sometimes eat her newborn kits. Meant to hide their scent from predators lurking nearby, this is an instinctual act of self-preservation and — to a rabbit — a perfectly justified response to an existential threat. Filtered through a screen, there’s no discernable difference between ravenous wolves and domesticated chihuahuas. Danger seems too imminent to bother quibbling over such nuance, or risk being wrong.
At its best, Presbyterian polity acts like a dialysis machine – it filters anxiety out of the system by guarding doctrine, providing a process to navigate disagreements, and provides healthy gatekeeping to distinguish between actual and perceived threats.
Social media, on the other hand, accelerates everything our Book of Church Order was written to mitigate. Devouring one another is not an unintended consequence; it is the inevitable rabbit-like consequence of trying to mediate differences within a digital ecosystem designed to make those differences seem existentially threatening, imminent, and intractable.
Dogs, Rabbits, and the Screen Between
Our motives for using social media may be relatively innocent, loudly zealous, or consciously predatory. But intention is irrelevant because, even if we did have a way to discern the difference between them through a context-flattening screen, algorithmic incentives reward us for responding to all users as if they’re wolves, even if they’re only a dog or rabbit.
This “digital liturgy” uses a kind of call and response to create a vicious feedback loop: we feel threatened, so we post, share, argue—in other words, we bark. Others feel threatened and react accordingly.
If we label everyone who feels threatening as a “wolf,” we are more likely to justify our own wolf-like behavior in the name of saving our denomination. We become more fractured the more deeply and frequently we engage, cultivating only more righteous indignation and frustration in ourselves and others. Eventually, our digital barking spills over to become real-world biting, and, over time, biting turns into devouring. We become the predator we seek to purge.
I witnessed this dynamic first-hand in 2022 and 2023 when I watched friends and fellow Acts 29 pastors leverage social media to mediate differences over financial transparency and philosophy of ministry. Disagreement devolved into devouring with nary a speedbump, and some churches departed the network (both voluntarily and otherwise).
While PCA polity uses a far more robust system of checks and balances to mitigate institutional fracturing, we are still susceptible to the erosion of trust and widespread sense of alienation that can cause similar departures.
This is why literal and digital screens are the most important part of the parable. Social media platforms introduce and amplify conflict to keep us in a state of sustained, unrelenting anxiety. Any church, denomination, or institution that tries to work out its differences on social media does so under the constant surveillance and howling of wolves who do not have its best interests in mind.
Under such pressure, the heckler’s veto will seem more influential than any commissioner’s vote. The entire point of online mobs (often coordinated offline) is to make leaving the PCA seem easier and more attractive than staying and dealing with the drama.
“But Brad,” you may be thinking, “we’re smarter than rabbits! We can tell the difference between real threats and digital drama.” Unfortunately, neither intelligence nor discernment have anything to do with it. Tristan Harris argues that every element of a social media platform’s design is intended to weaponize our behavioral psychology against us:
Negative information garners more attention and shapes emotion and behavior more powerfully than positive information… (I)n the pursuit of survival, the potential loss involved in a singular experience of threat outweighs the gain involved in singular experience of pleasure. It is unsurprising that social media content generating fear, anger, and disgust spreads much faster than positive content. We marinate in this negativity… Fear and outrage become the norm and can erode our sense of goodness and shared humanity (emphasis added).
The combination of algorithmically-curated newsfeeds and a constant stream of notifications delivers a sucker punch to our sympathetic nervous system. They are designed and finely tuned to bypass our rational faculties and keep us in a perpetual fight-or-flight response.
We are all aware that social media isn’t “real life,” but that doesn’t mean real life is immune to what happens on social media. I wrote a whole chapter in my book, “The Reason for Church,” on how social media platforms are “counterfeit institutions” which “bypass gatekeepers, hijack incentives, and manipulate user behavior.” The net result is a pervasive atmosphere of hyper-vigilance that neuters the strengths and exploits the weaknesses of institutions.
Once power replaces trust as currency for relationships within an institution, it’s only a matter of time before a denomination loses the ability to faithfully steward God’s truth, goodness, and beauty.
The problem isn’t that social media is categorically or necessarily sinful, but that it introduces, as L.M. Sacasas puts it, “an ever-present field of temptation” that requires “monastic degrees of self-discipline to manage.” It is an environment that is actively hospitable to vice and passively hostile to virtue. If we succumb to its incentives — if we indulge algorithmic anxiety, distrust, and suspicion faster than our Presbyterian polity can filter it out — we will devour each other.
Insisting that we are different, that we are somehow immune to social media’s deformative influence is, at best, foolishly naïve and counterproductive. At worst, we will use social media to cannibalize the peace and purity of the Church in the name of preserving her.
Denominational Health and Leadership in a Digital Age
To anyone following denominational controversies erupting online over the last year, one would think we’re hurdling headlong down a path toward divorce, if not catastrophic implosion. The challenges that our denomination faces are very real and significant, but reports of our demise are wildly distorted and amplified by social media.
It’s a strange comfort (but a comfort nonetheless) that none of our present dysfunction is unique to the PCA. The same social media-induced disruption is playing out across every Christian denomination and eroding trust within every American institution. That dynamic will continue wreaking havoc within the PCA until we stop trusting social media to achieve our desired outcomes more than we trust God to work through our Presbyterian process.
Admittedly, we may sometimes relate to our PCA fathers and brothers as adversaries. Presbyterianism assumes nothing if not that our sin nature makes that occasionally inevitable! But it should be incredibly rare for fathers and brothers to see one another as genuine enemies within the gate. Where that ceases to be uncommon, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Part of why I am writing this now is because it took writing a book about our radically anti-institutional moment for me to connect the dots to social media and realize that I, too, am part of the problem. I am more likely to resent online stone-throwers than pray for them. I have quote-tweeted bad faith criticisms and amplified what I should have ignored.
I would still rather feel self-righteously outraged from a safe distance than respond by moving toward a brother in Christ. In fact, another pastor graciously modeled the right response to me recently when, after I expressed concern in a Facebook group about a public statement he had made, he called me to offer context, clarification, and, most importantly, basic Christian charity. Presbyterian polity incentivizes all of this, but it can’t make us do any of it.
We all need to step away from the screen, touch a prairie’s-worth of grass, and honestly ask whether we are contributing to the problems we seek to solve. Devouring and being “consumed by one another” (Galatians 5:15) is cancerous to the body of Christ, and never a viable option for ordained elders entrusted to care for his Bride. We cannot remain above reproach if we believe ourselves to be above fraternal love and accountability.
Let the dogs whine and the wolves howl. It’s what they do. Bad faith and envy are most evident in how loudly one protests healthy Presbyterian gatekeeping. Shepherd the flock entrusted to your care. Don’t devour them or consume fellow shepherds. If Jesus builds his church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against her, then neither will the vain efforts of conflict entrepreneurs and influence chasers.
Brad Edwards serves as lead pastor of The Table Church in Lafayette, Colorado, and wrote Christianity Today’s 2025 Book of the Year: “The Reason for Church: Why the Body of Christ Still Matters in an Age of Anxiety, Division, and Radical Individualism.”