James Spencer, PhD

In 2018, I was serving as an academic dean when accusations of doctrinal drift were leveled against some of our faculty. Certain administrators, me included, were charged with allowing the drift. The accusations were both untrue and damaging. As the story went public, high-profile evangelicals offered their perspectives without taking the time to investigate. The pattern of other schools that had "gone liberal" was proof enough to condemn our institution. Nuance, discussion, and explanation were pushed out by a polarized, overly simple narrative.

The people reporting the story knew it from a distance. It didn't help that the institution opted not to offer a more detailed account of what was happening. The strategy seemed to be to wait out the storm. The simple story became the only story, and that made it compelling. Unfortunately, it wasn't a story that could help the institution. Leadership and policy changed, but the diagnosis was wrong. The institution fixed problems it didn't have, while the more complex structural, cultural, and theological issues remained long after the news cycle moved on to the next crisis.

After leaving my position, I found myself on a personal crusade that led me into the same kind of simplified storytelling I found so troubling. My fight-fire-with-fire approach was, as I would eventually recognize, a sign of my own immaturity. Before publishing several articles in what amounted to a vigilante campaign against certain forms of Christian media, I asked my wife what she thought. She told me not to publish them. They were too angry and too raw. She encouraged me to go back to the drawing board.

She was right. My tone and posture were reactive and defensive. I was playing into a digital world that rewards bickering, scandal, and outrage. I was responding to the situation as if God were absent or irrelevant, rather than responding to God from within it.

Once I realized the underlying problem was formational, not informational, I began to see that what was needed was calm, thoughtful, theological discussion, even if it wouldn't draw as many views, clicks, followers, and subscribers. Thinking Christian grew out of that conviction. It is an attempt to slow down, to be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to anger (James 1:19), and to help God's people recognize the patterns that form us before we notice them. The Thinking Christian Framework names those patterns and describes how we respond faithfully to God within them. Digital Discernment tells this story at greater length and works out what it means for life in a digital age.