The Gospel must speak to the crises of its time—or else it will drift into irrelevance. Just as the Muktiveda never reduced salvation (mukti) to a single formula, so too today the Good News must be rethought afresh for our digital realities.
In this century, the Shepherd has been quietly replaced. The Lord no longer leads souls; instead, social media has become the shepherd—guiding humanity not toward peace, but toward comparison, vanity, and endless want. People laugh with those who never laugh with them, and weep for those who cannot weep for them. The fellowship is a smoke-screen, the shepherd an algorithm.
Joshua Gilbert captures this modern dilemma in his parody-psalm:
If Social Media is My Shepherd
By Joshua Gilbert
If social media is my shepherd,
I shall always be in want.
It makes me lie awake scrolling endlessly;
It leads me into comparison and envy.
It drains my soul;
It guides me in paths of distraction
for its own algorithms’ sake.
Even though I walk through the valley
of anxiety and self-doubt,
I will fear every judgment,
for the comments are with me;
Their likes and dislikes, they control me.
It prepares a table of trends before me
in the presence of my insecurity;
It anoints my head with vanity;
My cup of dissatisfaction overflows.
Surely stress and restlessness will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of scrolling
forever and ever.
This parody rings true because it reflects our own captivity. The most urgent need today is not to send people to heaven later, but to rescue them from the hell of distraction now. Humanity is dissolving into data points, while flesh-and-blood relationships are being traded for screens. Before AI converts human beings into mere statistics, the Good News must be preached afresh: Remain human first.
Recycling 18th- and 19th-century missionary stories or contextualization strategies will not address this crisis. Those pioneers spoke to their generation’s idols; we must speak to ours. Otherwise, we risk endlessly circling the past, publishing archives that do little more than echo a bygone era.
Learning from the past is important, but it must serve the present. Today’s preaching or writings remain mere “echo chambers”—recycling old stories in the name of learning from the past but failing to address the present. Like an echo that produces only indistinct sounds without clear words or meaning, much of today’s teaching merely repeats noise without clarity or guidance. The Gospel must break this cycle of vanity and distraction, confront the idols of our age, and offer true mukti for a humanity that is more connected than ever—but lonelier than ever too.
In the end, nothing fresh is being offered. What we see is only the recycling of old stories and articles, passed off as if they were new. And that is nothing more than an echo — a noise without meaning.
Ashram, August 30, 2025
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