Investment Metaphor #6: Live 24/7 Webcasting

Apr 24

Apr 24 Investment Metaphor #6: Live 24/7 Webcasting

The worship pastor at my church, Bobby Marchessault, just posted a blog post on an article he ran across about a new trend in ministry: pastors who are webcasting their lives 24/7 for the purpose of keeping themselves accountable to their congregations. I have very mixed thoughts on this trend, both in terms of its propriety in the ministry and in terms of its applicability to personal finance. I shall deal with the ministerial issues first, but feel free to skip down to the latter part of this post if you are interested only in the personal finance issues I will raise.

So what do we make of this idea as a model for personal accountability in ministry? I would first of all like to commend the pastors who are participating in this program for their desire to live lives that bear good fruit and that are free from hypocrisy. That being said, I have serious concerns about the motivation behind this idea. The immediate analogy that comes to mind is the ever-present eye of Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984. Rather than pursuing righteous behavior for its own sake, my concern is that 24/7 webcasting of a pastor's life may promote a concern for not getting caught with wrong behavior rather than pursuing right behavior for its own sake. I may be more of a Kantian in terms of ethics than I have previously realized, but it strikes me as obvious that doing the right thing so you won't get caught has less moral worth than doing the right thing for its own sake.

Another concern for the ministry I have about this plan is that the transparency of the video camera actually creates a barrier of distrust between a pastor and his/her congregation. If the congregation feels the need to check up on its pastor, my concern is that the congregation does not actually trust the pastor to be genuinely committed to Godly living. Also on that note, an essential feature of Christianity is the view that humans are sinful and imperfect beings by definition. This is the reason that Christ sacrificed himself for our sins, which we will end up committing because of the nature of our being, despite our best efforts at living better lives. It is an unreasonable expectation to have that our pastors are any less sinful than the rest of us: "...for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God..." (Romans 3:23).

Accountability is fine and good, and that is part of the reason for regular fellowship with other Christians, but if we are looking for perfection in human behavior then we are likely to be incredibly disappointed in our pastors and in each other. We are all sinners, and that is the reason for the necessity of the forgiveness to be found in our Lord Jesus. Our God is a just God, but a loving and forgiving God. I worry that this webcam idea may inadvertently create an impression of a God similar to Orwell's Big Brother, ready to catch you in the act and bust you around every corner, rather than a God who hungers to forgive a repentant sinner.

Now, getting back to the personal finance issues, I wonder what impact it would have on our personal finances if every money decision we made were to be webcast live in real-time on the internet. Would we all make better finance decisions, or would we look for subtle ways to evade the gaze of the camera and splurge in private? (Same thought about the webcasting pastors. I have no doubt that they will still sin, but will they be seeking out ways to sin in private just off-camera?) Maybe blogging about personal finance is a subtle form of this same principle. We finance bloggers tell ourselves that we are being transparent about our finances for the purpose of accountability, but does this actually cause us to seek out more creative ways to cheat on ourselves and our financial plans in secret, away from the prying eyes of our readers?

I would love to hear any thoughts from you, my readers, on this issue; whether regarding ministry and Christianity or regarding transparency in personal finance. It is certainly a provocative proposal, in any case, but my hunch is that this idea calls for careful scrutiny. Part of my own belief requires that I not be judgmental towards others, as Christ forgives my own personal sins; so I do not intend to be judgmental toward those pastors who participate in this program with honorable intentions. But I believe this program as an institution can and should be scrutinized for its potential but unwitting promotion of dishonorable intentions among those who agree to 24/7 exposure to the world at large.