Outside the Gospel Coalition Looking In

I have been reading along and trying to interact with two blogs on the Gospel Coalition website for a while but will now be dropping them from my blogroll and, well, I thought I'd register my discouragement.

Thing is, I hate to say this because I really believe such efforts at dialogue and debate are worth the effort in the context of Christian community. I do believe that if we were in a church together we could talk to each other and find some common ground. Even in disagreement I would confess our communion in the Lord Jesus Christ and enjoy fellowship in a peace that passes our understanding. As it is I also think that in theory we could meet online and experience something of the same dynamic. I confess that this is probably easier to pursue in a blog like mine, where almost every commenter is an acquaintance and there is a history or a context to most of the conversations.

But as we are only connected by their celebrity and influence within a big thing called evangelicalism, and since I have found their blogs more discouragingly mystifying than helpful, and because they have not once interacted with my comments and questions, and since those of their followers who have interacted with me have not appeared to consider anything I've said, I have decided that their blogs are hardly worth the effort. I actually feel that my presence there has only served to solidify other commenters in their allegiance to their views.

Without downplaying my deep disagreement with most of what I've read there, I will chalk up the actual disconnect to the limitations of widely-accessed blogs and the anonymity of the interactions that go on there. I am also dropping a couple other more resonant but widely read blogs from my blogroll, simply because there doesn't seem much point in involving myself in such massive conversations at the expense of those contexts to which I have been called and invested. This would be different if I felt needed or called (or in the case of the Gospel Coalition, welcome) to those wider conversations, but I don't. I wish them all the best and trust them to the Christ we confess, but I'm done.