John Piper ruined Twitter.

This blog­ger thinks so. He blames Piper for the rise in cringe­wor­thy Chris­t­ian sta­tus updates — par­tic­u­larly on Twitter.

I like the cut of his jib. Piper can get away with it. If you’re fol­low­ing Piper you expect to encounter the real, pas­sion­ate man that he is. If you’re not that man (or woman) don’t pre­tend to be.

But then I lost all my nor­mal “friends” on Twitter.

They all turned into lit­tle John Pipers. I used to see real tweets from peo­ple.  Some would talk about their lat­est blog posts or posts they found inter­est­ing. Oth­ers would talk about their recent stud­ies in Scrip­ture or what books they were read­ing. Many of them were fun and humorous.

Now many of them are just pre­ten­tious and there­fore obnoxious.

Once the nature and style of Piper’s 140 char­ac­ters or less were released, peo­ple started to mimic him.  Gone are the “fruit­less” tweets about how their tod­dlers did some­thing cute or about the inter­est­ing things that hap­pen day-to-day.  It has been replaced with numer­ous (and annoy­ing) pithy state­ments and faux-holiness. How do I know these are “faux?”  Because most of you changed over-night. While it takes a life­time to be sanc­ti­fied, it only took your Twit­ter accounts 24 hours.

Amen brother.

But I’ll bal­ance this cri­tique of all the wannabe Pipers with a cri­tique from Piper that made me think a lit­tle… When Abra­ham Piper (John Piper’s son) asked what he should say to a room full of Chris­t­ian blog­gers his father replied:

Tell them that it takes relent­less inten­tion­al­ity to keep a Christ-exalting blog from become a clever blog. The temp­ta­tion to enter­tain is almost irresistible.

Now. I started this out as a clever blog — being a Christ-exalting blog hasn’t really been my “inten­tion”. Maybe it should be. Though then it would lose its place as an out­let for my cleverness.

John Piper ruined my blog.

Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He is currently a student at the Queensland Theological College. In a previous professional life he worked in public relations for an economic development and tourism marketing organisation. He is married to Robyn. He likes coffee and the internet.

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