If you want your posts to carry Christ’s way and not only his name, start with one habit: before you publish anything with an edge to it, ask whether you would say those exact words to that person’s face. Dr. Christina Edmondson, a higher education administrator who works with college students, treats this as a working rule for her own online life. This guide turns her rule into a seven-day discipline. Each day adds one question to the face-to-face test, so by the end of the week you have a short filter you can run in under a minute.
You can work through it alone or with a few friends. If you are using it with a group, meet once before the week starts and once after it ends, and let the days in between be private practice. Nobody has to show anyone their drafts. The discipline works whether or not you ever talk about what you deleted.
A post has an edge when it corrects, criticizes, mocks, answers a critic, or responds to something that made you angry. Announcements, photos and encouragement are not the target this week. The target is the post you feel a small charge about before you hit send.
Before day one: take a baseline
Open whichever platform you use most. Scroll back through your last fifteen or twenty posts and replies. Don’t judge them yet. Just sort them. Which ones had an edge? Of those, which were about a specific person, and which were about an idea? Count how many times that person could have been reached privately: by text, by phone, by email.
Write the numbers down somewhere you can find them in a week. You will come back to them at the end. The point is not to feel guilty about your feed. The point is to see your actual habits before you try to change them, so you can tell later whether anything moved.
Three passages to read slowly
Read each passage twice. The first time, read only for what it says. The second time, ask what kind of text it is and who it was first addressed to.
Matthew 7:12 records Jesus saying, “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets.” Notice the scope: all things. Jesus does not exempt speech, and he does not exempt speech about people who are wrong. The verse also gives a standard you can actually test. You know how you want to be spoken to when someone thinks you are mistaken.
James 1:19 reads, “Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath.” James is writing to believers, and in the surrounding verses he ties anger and careless words to self-deception. This is instruction, not narrative. It describes an order: hearing comes before speaking, and speaking comes before anger has had its way. Online platforms tend to reverse that order. A reply box invites speech before anything has been heard.
Matthew 18:15 says, “Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother.” Read it carefully. Jesus is addressing a personal wrong between members of a community, and the verses that follow describe a longer process within that community. It is not a rule that every public disagreement must first be handled in private. What it does show is the instinct Jesus builds into his followers: when a relationship is at stake, the first move is toward the person, and the goal is to gain them back.
Pause here with one observation question. What do these three passages share in how they picture the other person? Hold onto your answer. Edmondson’s test is built on the same picture.
What Edmondson adds
Edmondson told Lisa Fields that she values congruence, which she describes as being the same in multiple spaces. Her rule follows from that value: “whatever I’m willing to say to someone online, I should be able to say to their face.” She doesn’t mean it as permission to be harsh in person. She means the two versions of you should match.
The useful part is that she treats the test as a diagnostic, not a slogan. She asks herself, “am I being passive aggressive in the way that I’m communicating?” Then she draws a practical conclusion: “So if I have access to someone on the phone, I probably should call them.” That sentence changes the question. It is no longer only whether the words are fair. It is also why you are choosing an audience when you could have chosen a conversation.
She does not turn this into a ban on indirect speech. Some posts rightly address an ideology or theology rather than a person. The question she puts to her own heart is “when am I being cowardly and lacking love, which is an expression of cowardliness, and when am I trying to speak to a principality to an issue?” The same sentence on a screen could be either one. Only honest self-examination can tell them apart, which is why the test has to happen before posting, every time.
Lisa Fields arrived at the same insight from a different direction. She asked for the chairs at a live event to face each other, not the audience, because “it’s hard to disrespect another person” when you are looking straight at them. The week ahead is an attempt to set up those chairs in your head.
The seven-day discipline
Each day, keep the earlier questions and add the new one. When an edgy post comes to mind, stop, run the questions in order, and then decide whether to post it, rewrite it, move it to a private message, or save it as a draft. If no edgy post comes up on a given day, use one from your baseline scroll and run the questions on it after the fact.
Day 1: The face test, out loud
Picture the specific person, not their avatar. Read your draft aloud as if they were sitting across a table. Would you say these words, in this tone, to them? If not, stop there. That is today’s whole practice.
Day 2: Could I reach them?
Add Edmondson’s phone question. Is this person someone you could text or call? If so, try that version first, or ask yourself honestly what the public version accomplishes that a private one would not.
Day 3: Person or principality?
If the post is indirect, ask which one it is. Are you addressing an idea that is bigger than any single person, or talking around someone you would rather not face? Rewrite one draft so it is either clearly about the idea or clearly addressed to the person.
Day 4: Name or way?
Edmondson warns against using Christ’s authority to add force to an argument without following his manner: “You want his name, you gotta take Jesus’ way.” She adds that “Jesus wasn’t flipping tables every day.” Today, look for places where your draft invokes God, Scripture or faith. Ask whether the tone matches what Jesus did most days, giving grace and speaking truth together, rather than his rarest scene.
Day 5: Do I love this person?
Edmondson asks herself, “Do I get to correct those who I don’t love?” For her, correction is an expression of love, so correction with no love left in it has become something else. Before posting a correction today, name one thing you want for that person’s good. If you cannot name anything, hold the post.
Day 6: Have I heard them, and what is the goal?
Edmondson tells people, “you gotta listen to people long enough to know that you disagree with them.” Read the post you are responding to twice. On the second read, write down in one sentence what they are actually saying. Then add Lisa Fields’s question: “What is the goal? I think that’s one of the things we should ask ourselves when we post.” Retweets are not a goal.
Day 7: Who can tap you on the shoulder?
Choose one person you trust and ask them to tell you when a post does not sound like you. Edmondson calls the lack of such a person “a reflection of our personal immaturity and pridefulness when we have not given that invitation to people to tap us on the shoulder.” You might give your friend her question to use: “Hey, are you sure you want this to be the way you represent yourself when you look back on this a year later?”
A fair objection to test yourself against
Someone may worry that a week like this teaches Christians to stay quiet when injustice needs naming. Take that worry seriously. Edmondson herself affirms that social media has given a platform to voices that were historically marginalized, and she says Christians speak truth to power. She describes publicly challenging an older woman whose view of modesty focused on church attire, because young women who were close to leaving the church were watching. She did it in a way meant to show respect, and some of those young women later thanked her.
So the test does not decide whether to speak. It governs how and why. Her reminder that “people are watching our gospel witness, we are witnesses. That means we stand out” cuts both ways: silence can fail that witness, and so can contempt. If during the week you find yourself using the filter as an excuse to avoid every hard subject, notice that too. That is a different failure, not faithfulness.
For groups meeting before and after
At the first meeting, read the three passages together and talk through the observation question about how they picture the other person. Then walk through the seven days so everyone knows what to try. Keep the meeting short.
At the second meeting, start with the baseline. Invite people to say whether anything changed, without asking anyone to describe specific posts. A leader can model this by speaking about patterns rather than content. Mentioning that you moved two drafts to private messages says enough. If someone shares a painful conflict, listen rather than adjudicate it as a group.
Questions for discussion or private reflection
- Which of the three passages pressed hardest on your actual posting habits, and why that one rather than the others?
- Edmondson connects cowardice with a lack of love. Do you find that connection convincing? Where might it not hold?
- How would you tell the difference, in your own drafts, between addressing an idea and avoiding a person?
- Is there anyone whose online style makes it hard for you to see them rightly? What would it look like to engage them offline instead, as Edmondson describes doing?
- Edmondson says that “the things that make us angry, say something about us.” What did the posts you held back this week reveal about what you want, such as respect or being heard?
- Which day’s question felt least necessary to you? What would it take for you to discover you were wrong about that?
Back to the baseline
At the end of the seven days, scroll through your posts again and count the same things you counted before. Compare the numbers. Then look at your drafts folder, if you kept one. Lisa Fields observed that “so much of what we post often has nothing to do with the outside world. It has everything to do with what’s going on inside.” Your drafts are a record of what was going on inside this week.
Decide which of the seven questions you will keep. Most people do not need all seven forever. Some will keep only the face test and the phone question. Others will find that the love question on day five was the one that changed them. Choose the questions that caught something real, and keep running them on the posts that have an edge.