One-on-One with Matt Brown on ‘Truth Plus Love’

“Truth plus love, I believe, will give us influence with people around us.”

Ed: How has the existence—and our use of—the Internet created a greater challenge for Christians to exhibit truth in love?

Matt: For five to six years now, the concept of truth and love have rumbled around in my heart and mind. I knew I needed to write out my thoughts in a book. Several years in, I stumbled on an old Francis Schaeffer book, The Mark of the Christian, written more than a half century ago, where he talks about our great need for both truth and love.”

He shares, essentially, that we must rediscover the balance of truth and love, and it must be “constantly and consciously developed—talked about and written about in and among our groups and among ourselves as individuals.”

He said we need to be able to see a distinguishable difference between how Christians disagree and how the rest of the world does it. I don’t think this need has changed since he wrote it a half century ago! In fact, it has grown explosively.

If you think about it, we are the first generation of believers that has the mass connectivity of the internet, 24-hour news media (which is often negative), and a social media “megaphone” where we can respond and state our opinions about everything that is going on.

So we know what’s going on like we never have before (internet), we are baited to give our opinion about all of it (24-hour news media), and we can quickly and easily share with hundreds or thousands of “friends” (even people we went to middle school with!).

This is the perfect storm. And I think we see this being played out in our nation today. It is not the result simply of political leadership, but also very much the mix of all these online tools that we need to understand ...