The draft is finished. It’s accurate, it’s a little sharp, and it would probably do well. What stops your thumb usually isn’t doubt about whether the point is true. It’s a quieter question: should a follower of Jesus say this, here, in this way, to this person? Dr. Christina Edmondson, a higher education administrator who spends her working life around college students, offers a test for that moment. Post only what you could say to the person’s face. Correct only as far as your love for them reaches. Remember that a human being will read it. And set up rest and accountability before you need them.
Each part of the test examines the person posting, which is why it is useful on an ordinary weekday. Edmondson doesn’t hand out a list of forbidden subjects or tell Christians to go quiet about injustice. She asks whether you are the same person offline, whether you still love the one you’re correcting, whether you can still see them, and whether anyone has permission to tell you when you’ve drifted.
Could you say it across a table?
Edmondson calls her first value congruence: being the same in every space. In conversation with Lisa Fields, she said that “a high compliment would be someone saying to me that I’m similar to how they experience me online.” The practical form of that value is blunt: “whatever I’m willing to say to someone online, I should be able to say to their face.”
This test catches something a truth test misses, because a post can be accurate and still be cowardly. Edmondson checks herself for passive aggression and draws a simple conclusion: “So if I have access to someone on the phone, I probably should call them.” If the person is reachable and she goes public anyway, she has to ask what the public version accomplishes that a private call would not. Sometimes the honest answer is that the audience is the point.
She is careful not to overcorrect. She admits it took her a while to learn what subtweeting was, talking about someone without naming them, and she still sees a place for speaking above a particular person to an ideology or a theology, to what she calls a principality. 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 indirect sentence could be either one, depending on whether she is avoiding a person or addressing an idea bigger than any one person. Lisa Fields adds the observation that sits underneath the whole test: people choose their words differently when they are looking someone in the eye.
Borrowing his name means taking his manner
Christian posting carries an extra temptation, and Edmondson names it. Believers appeal to Christ’s authority, dropping what she calls the God card, to give an argument more force. Her response is short: “You want his name, you gotta take Jesus’ way.”
She defines that way by the steady pattern of Jesus’s ministry rather than its rarest scene. People love to reach for the temple tables, but as she puts it, “Jesus wasn’t flipping tables every day.” Most days, she says, he was giving grace, speaking truth, calling people to account for sin and living a life of humble submission. A Christian who claims prophetic boldness has to carry that whole pattern, including the ordinary days.
Paul makes a related point in Ephesians 4:15: “But speaking the truth in love, may grow up into him in all things, which is the head, even Christ.” In context, Paul is describing a church maturing together toward Christ. Truth and love belong to the same act of speech, and the goal of that speech is that people grow toward Christ.
How far can correction reach?
The second part of Edmondson’s test is the most searching. She asks herself “what does it mean when we attempt to correct people beyond the scope of our love?” Then, more pointedly: “Do I get to correct those who I don’t love?” For her, correction is a form of love. So if she notices she is correcting someone she no longer loves at all, the correction has probably turned into something else, and she has to ask what it is really about.
Her reasoning is practical as well as moral. She describes a grandmother whose love she never doubted, whose corrections went deep because there was no way to write them off as dislike or a bad mood. From that, Edmondson draws a principle: “the people who are gonna have the greatest impact are the people who have made it clear that they are motivated by love”. Correction from someone obviously building a platform is easy to dismiss. Correction from someone who has plainly been for you is much harder to shrug off.
Proverbs 27:6 describes the same pattern: “Faithful are the wounds of a friend; but the kisses of an enemy are deceitful.” A proverb states how life usually goes rather than guaranteeing an outcome, but it fits her point. A relationship gives a hard word its credibility.
That reorders the posting question. Before asking whether your correction is right, ask whether you have any standing in this person’s life, or any love for them at all. Edmondson applies this to people leaving the church angry. She wants them to go back to the family members and congregations they say they love, because love is what equips someone to ask, in effect, have you considered this? A stranger’s reply rarely carries that weight, however sharp it is. Lisa Fields offers a question worth keeping near the keyboard: “What is the goal? I think that’s one of the things we should ask ourselves when we post.” Many of her own finished drafts, she says, stay drafts.
The person you are about to answer
Edmondson’s third conviction is that the format hides the person. In her words, “the internet has a way of making us think that we’re just talking to a screen, but there are people behind the screen.”
That conviction leads her to unfollow some people, and her reason is surprising. Their style of engagement provokes her, and she knows she will struggle to love them as she should. “I would rather engage with them offline so that I can be reminded of their humanity.” Stepping back protects her ability to see a brother or sister rightly. She treats blocking the same way. When an account seems to exist to build a brand by picking fights with her, she shuts the exchange down, partly for the other person’s good, because she doesn’t want to keep handing someone an occasion to sin against her.
Seeing the person also means hearing them. Edmondson tells people “you gotta listen to people long enough to know that you disagree with them.” Lisa Fields puts the danger plainly: “make sure we’re disagreeing with them and not the straw man we created.” Edmondson thinks quick-reading people are especially prone to this, since the ability to size someone up fast makes it easy to stop listening and answer the type instead of the person. She applies the same listening to allies. Christians who decide someone is in their camp often stop paying attention, then feel betrayed by views that were visible all along. Listening long enough works in both directions: it keeps you from attacking positions people don’t hold and from endorsing positions you never noticed they held.
She also turns the question inward. When someone online gets under her skin, she asks God what the exchange is teaching her, because “the things that make us angry, say something about us.” Sometimes the anger is legitimate, and she names hatred of injustice as one example. Even then, she wants to notice what the moment reveals about her own desire for respect or how important she thinks her voice is.
Doesn’t this make Christians timid?
The strongest objection is that a test like this becomes tone policing. If every post must pass a love check, injustice may go unnamed, and the people with the least power will be told to speak more gently to those with the most. Edmondson takes this concern seriously. She describes social media as giving a necessary platform to historically marginalized voices, says plainly that she is not trying to police anyone’s tone, and affirms that Christians speak truth to power.
Her own practice shows that the test governs manner and motive while leaving her free to speak. She describes publicly engaging an older woman who had tied modesty almost entirely to what women wear to church. Edmondson pushed back, pointing toward Scripture’s concern with money and display and toward where that line of thinking can lead, while showing respect for an older sister. She engaged partly because she knew young women who were close to done with church were watching, and afterward some of them wrote to thank her. On another occasion, she privately messaged someone she was disagreeing with in public to point out who was likely watching, so they could both adjust their tone.
She grounds this awareness of an audience in Philippians 4:2, where Paul writes, “I beseech Euodias, and beseech Syntyche, that they be of the same mind in the Lord.” The text itself is a direct appeal to two women in the Philippian church who, the next verse says, had labored with Paul in the gospel. Edmondson’s application goes a step further: their conflict mattered enough to the church that it ended up in a letter. That is a reasonable lesson to draw, held as application rather than the verse’s main claim. Disagreement among believers is visible, and the way Christians disagree becomes part of what people see of the gospel.
The honest limit is that no test settles every case in advance. Whether an indirect post is cowardly or wise depends on motives that only self-examination can reach, and Edmondson admits she gets this wrong. What her test offers is a set of better questions, asked before posting instead of after.
Rest, and a friend with permission
The last part of the test sits upstream of everything else. A person with no rest and no one to answer to will eventually post something they would never say to a face, however clear their principles are. Edmondson describes online engagement as habit-forming and builds in sabbatical breaks from the internet. Her approach is to leave abruptly and say so publicly, not because she expects to be missed but because announcing it holds her to actually going. Rest also lets her limit what she takes in: she honors people’s suffering without forcing herself to watch every traumatic image.
Then there is the friend. She says “you need a social media accountability partner,” and she has people who screenshot a post and ask whether it really sounds like her. She treats the absence of such people as a spiritual problem: “it’s a reflection of our personal immaturity and pridefulness when we have not given that invitation to people to tap us on the shoulder”. The question she invites others to ask her works just as well asked of yourself: “Hey, are you sure you want this to be the way you represent yourself when you look back on this a year later?”
She also recommends an audit, going back through a few years of your own posts the way you might reread an old journal. Lisa Fields names what such an audit tends to reveal: “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.”
That brings the hovering thumb back into view. The decision about whether to send is mostly a decision about what is going on inside you, and whether a few trusted people are close enough to see it too. Congruence, correction bounded by love and remembering the person all depend on that kind of self-knowledge, and rest and honest friends are how it is kept.
