Outsourcing Discernment: I discovered something on my television the other day that I had somehow missed for years. Apparently, there is an entire religious universe living above channel 300. Entire networks, twenty-four hours a day, filled with preachers, prophets, ministries, miracles, prayer lines, promises, and opportunities to sow a seed. Why are there so many? Who is paying for all of this? Who is watching it? And with this many people claiming to speak for God, how in the world are we supposed to decide who should be believed? Or have we simply stopped testing the message because discernment takes work, and somewhere along the way we decided that work was somebody else’s job?
That raises another question. Why are so many people so easily taken in by religious television? I don’t think the answer is simply biblical illiteracy. Some of the people sending money to these ministries have owned Bibles for fifty or sixty years. They have attended church most of their lives. They know the language of Christianity. They recognize the verses, the songs, the familiar phrases, and the name of Jesus. And yet somehow discernment has been handed over to somebody else.
And what about the person who has never really thought much about any of this until the years begin disappearing? Suddenly eternity is no longer an abstract idea. They are getting older. Friends are dying. Their own mortality is becoming harder to ignore. They need to get “spiritualized” before they check out. So where do they turn? Very often to the same medium that has shaped so much of the rest of their life: television. After decades of entertainment, even religion arrives as another program to consume. Sit down, listen, send something in, say the right words, and be reassured that everything is settled. There may be no market more vulnerable to cheap certainty than people who have only recently begun asking eternal questions.
Perhaps part of the problem is that we have grown comfortable with an outsourced Christianity. Someone else studies the Bible, someone else tells us what it means, and all we do is mail the money. It is wonderfully convenient. Show us a hungry child, a suffering family, a missionary story, or some desperate need on the other side of the world, and suddenly asking what the ministry actually teaches can feel almost heartless. After all, who wants to stop and ask theological questions while somebody on the other side of the world is suffering?
There is something disturbingly convenient about all of this. Turn on the television, settle into the chair, and let someone do the thinking for you. They will tell you what God wants, what the verse means, what you need to do, and why everything is going to work out. No need to search the Scriptures. No need to test the claim. No need to ask whether the comforting message is actually true. Just keep listening. At that point, we are no longer examining truth; we are consuming a religious product dressed in Christian language.
That may be the most dangerous part of the whole arrangement. We can own a Bible, listen to preaching every day, support ministries, talk about God, and surround ourselves with religious language while still allowing somebody else to decide what is true for us. That is the danger of outsourced discernment. The Bible can remain on the table while the responsibility to examine what we are hearing has almost completely disappeared. And once that happens, almost anything can be sold to us in the name of God. MPJ