(Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series exploring what it means to love our neighbors in an increasingly digital world. In Part 1, Amy Knorr considers the church’s calling to practice compassion, peacemaking, and genuine neighboring online. Part 2 explores practical ways Christians and churches can cultivate healthier, more Christlike digital communities.)
Recently, in the small Pennsylvania town where I live, a controversy brewed. I know — shocking.
What held my gaze this time was the vitriol flung into the online spaces frequented by the citizens of our town. It began to feel like a microcosm of the national social moment, and I felt a deep sadness, particularly at the way neighbors were castigating neighbors, berating in ways I cannot imagine would happen in on-ground spaces if the habit had not first been formed, practiced, and encouraged in online spaces.
Something else struck me, too. There were no visible peacemakers. No church in my town publicly spoke up, offered space for conversation and healing, counseled their members toward a more Christlike way of entering this hard conversation.
Sacred communities like churches used to be the place where civility was nurtured. The monastics, like Benedict of Nursia, called for silent listening, respect for elders, hospitality to strangers (making everyone your neighbor), and restraint in speech, all values for their monastic brotherhood, but values that were seen by the outside community as desirable and holy.
Erasmus spoke into the beginning of the Renaissance emphasizing that external civil behavior is a reflection or measure of internal behavior, and you can hear the echo of the teachings of Jesus. The Puritans believed that external behavior deviating from the desirable behaviors described in Scripture would lead to the failure of the Puritan movement and a decline in the fervor of those following Christ. By the Victorian Era, bad manners or subpar etiquette were equated with moral or spiritual failing.
All of this history certainly comes with a justified concern and criticism that too much emphasis was placed on “good” outward action that belied the “bad” inward state. Jesus named this during his earthly ministry when he called out the Pharisees as being “whitewashed tombs” (Matt. 23:27).
Certainly, we do not want fake civility while our hearts smolder with unspent rage. Neither do we want unchecked rage destroying all hope of peace, kindness, or self-control. What are we to do?
Who Is My Neighbor?
I wonder if the concern is met in the questions of the lawyer testing Jesus so long ago, asking what one must do to inherit eternal life. When Jesus turns the test back on the lawyer, asking him to quote the Law, the lawyer responds with this:
“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind’; and, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” (Luke 10:27)
Jesus affirms this answer, emphasizing the impossibility of living out this command both internally and externally. The lawyer’s response? He attempts to limit the law and justify himself.
“Who is my neighbor?”
Surely, my neighbor is the person who has the same faith as I, whose skin is the same color, whose language is mine, someone who agrees with my opinions, someone who is not inconvenient, someone who is real and not just a name on a screen. Oof. I feel an unwelcome kinship with this lawyer who sought to justify himself, redefine the law, and show that he had fulfilled it. Do you feel it, too?
Jesus, with a directness and grace that draws me, met this question with a story. He told of a beaten man and a Samaritan, defining neighbor not as a noun but as an action and telling the lawyer (and us!) not to go and be a neighbor but to go and do neighboring.
Neighbor, then, is not a description or a label but an action of love, a moving toward that endures all, bears all, hopes all — and perseveres in this love, overcoming fear, shame, disagreement, disdain, or any other barrier.
So what does this look like in our modern lives with their handshake of online and on-ground living? It is no longer as simple as looking someone in the eye and feeling empathy.
Online spaces have made violence bold. Most of us would not think of lying in wait for someone on a country road and then jumping out upon them, beating them and taking what is theirs. And yet, online, this is exactly what we do.
A 2021 Pew Research Survey found that more than 40% of US adults have faced harassment online with the number of physical threats consistently rising.
This makes me weep.
We lurk online, in anonymity or pseudonym or simply emboldened by the distance online spaces can provide. When we see someone enter the conversation who is not like us or who does not agree with us, we jump out and unleash on them all the vitriol, snark, character-bashing we can muster, beating them down until we have taken their very humanity and crushed it under our heel. We walk away feeling our power and our righteousness.
Or, just as ugly, we watch and then walk away, our silence echoing across millennia, crossing to the other side of the road with the priest and Levite.
“Who is my neighbor?”
In the parable Jesus tells, we are meant to see ourselves as the beaten man and Jesus as the Samaritan, moved with compassion, binding up wounds and carrying the man to safety, to healing, to new life. We are meant to know our vulnerability and recognize our need for the saving power of Jesus.
And we are meant to follow Jesus as a model for our own neighboring…even into online spaces.
Go and Do Likewise
“Go and do likewise.”
Now, we arrive. Go and do.
What does it look like to be moved with compassion in the online space? To bind up wounds online? To carry someone to safety from the danger of an online fracas? What does it look like to nurture communities that cultivate the action of neighboring?
And what might it be like for the church to lead the way into new and beautiful ways of being with one another online and on-ground?
As I think about my small town controversy, I know there are people hurting — people who have been left beaten and people in whom the doing of irreparable harm has left its own terrible wound. Much of the hurting was done in the online space, where it spilled into and encouraged the same hurting in on-ground spaces.
There is work to be done, neighbors.
Neighboring does not belong only at physical tables. Flourishing does not belong only to physical gardens. In online spaces, there is cultivating work to be done, and I believe that it is a critical work that will bear fruit in individuals and in communities, in neighborhoods both online and on-ground.
Yes, there is work to be done, neighbors…hand in God’s hand.
In Part 2, “Becoming Better Online Neighbors: Cultivating Christian Community in Digital Spaces,” Amy offers practical ways individuals and churches can begin doing this cultivating work.
Amy Knorr is a spiritual director and digital community architect who loves to nurture contemplative spaces in real life and online. Amy spends her days facilitating one-with-one spiritual direction, group workshops/retreats both in person and in digital meeting spaces, and in growing and shepherding digital communities like The Neighborhood, The Black Barn Online, and RealRest. She earned a BA in English from Texas A&M, an MA in Christian Formation from North Park Seminary, and a certificate in spiritual direction from the C. John Weborg Center for Spiritual Direction. She was awarded a Louisville Institute grant to study the cultivation of intentional online spaces for the purpose of spiritual formation, and is currently writing about her findings. Amy lives with her husband and two teenage girls in the Amish country of Pennsylvania. When she’s not writing, speaking, or facilitating community, you can find Amy on a trail with her big, goofy Goldendoodle, in the garden fighting weeds and rabbits, or in her library with a good book and a cup of tea.
