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Should You Turn Your Testimony Into Content?

Should You Turn Your Testimony Into Content?

Last updated on: August 3, 2026 at 12:41 pm by Esther O’Reilly

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Should You Turn Your Testimony Into Content? 2026-08-03T12:41:51-04:00 Esther O’Reilly

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Christians love a good testimony. Sometimes, if we’re honest, we prefer a good graphic testimony. The worse the sin, the greater the grace, after all.

I am sometimes guilty as charged in this regard. Not that I need every detail, but if your story is “gritty” in some way, you will keep my attention. You have chosen to open up the book of your life to me, and I can’t put it down. I need to know what happens next. Did you have a nightmare drug trip? Did you get drunk and crash your car? Did you have gay sex with a demon? The worse the better!

Pulpy testimonies aren’t really a new thing in evangelical circles, although it’s probably safe to say there’s been a little loosening of the parameters since my parents’ generation, certainly around sexual stuff. In particular, people who came out of the gay scene wouldn’t generally publish material with their own names and faces on it, although they might have worked with an apostolate like Courage or given an ex-gay testimony at a church.

Over the decades, that’s gradually changed, and now in the Internet age you don’t even need to write a book. All you have to do is turn on the phone camera and hit record.

From a certain evangelical perspective, you could say praise the Lord. This just increases the reach of a great testimony by orders of magnitude. Think of how many more people might be saved!

I understand the impulse. But I worry that, like so many other things, people’s testimonies are becoming Content.

Let’s suppose you’re a baby-new Christian, full of zeal but still a work in progress, still carrying the scars and the baggage of whatever hellscape Jesus has rescued you from. Let’s say that one day, you record that video. It’s raw and honest and delivered with transparent sincerity. You’re unsure what will happen when you put it on Instagram or TikTok, but you hope it blesses someone. Then the next day, you wake up and discover you’re going viral. The views and likes are climbing. Messages are pouring in. People in the same boat you were in are asking for guidance.

What do you do now?

One evangelical answer would be to say “Congratulations! You now have a social media ministry.” I am not at all convinced this is the right answer. In fact, I will go one further and say this is the wrong answer.

Why do I say this? Because that word “ministry” conjures a wealth of associations, all fraught with hazards for this baby-new Christian. In a season when his own healing is still incomplete, he is suddenly facing an inbox full of messages from even more wounded people who feel like he may be more “relatable” than a pastor or family member. He will do his best to help them, of course, but what if he then has a relapse of his own? Does he hide it and feel like a phony, or does he share it as a “one step forward, two steps back” progress update so that his followers know he’s the real deal? And what if it happens again? And how is he going to come up with new videos every week, now that he has however many thousand subscribers?

The Christian generating “content” under these circumstances may sincerely want to use the content to point to Jesus. But the harsh truth is that in the nature of content creation, *you* are the product. *You* are on display–your wit, your quirkiness, your photogenic qualities, all the things that make you a successful influencer. It’s baked into the medium. And as Marshall McLuhan says, the medium is the message.

This gets worse if you’re trying to take your career beyond just putting videos out there on TikTok. For example, the gay Christian speaker Pieter Valk is a therapist who regularly advertises himself as uniquely qualified to help people struggling with their sexuality. He also advertises himself as a uniquely qualified speaker in church circles, helping people understand how to apologize properly and Do Better in how they interact with “the LGBT community.” Awkwardly, Valk himself is a less than fully recovered sex addict. But he has framed this as only making him *more* able to help people. When a young man wanted to talk about feeling defeated by addiction, Valk says he could make him feel better by talking about his own not-too-far-in-the-past relapses (two “thorough” in five years, and other messy boundary-crossings in between). See how this works? And all of this delivered in the cutesy “Hey guys” package of Content. (There is also the fact that Valk is wildly misguided on what even constitutes an appropriate sexual boundary for himself. In that same post, he says he’s still mulling over whether it’s appropriate or not for him to “cuddle” with another man.)

Now, that’s an example of someone who’s using the Content to deliver messed up doctrine. Not all my criticisms of Valk will apply to someone who’s less generally full of himself and understands quite well what the actual boundaries are, even if he struggles not to cross them. However, the danger remains that he will feel compelled to continue putting himself and his story on display for the cause of the gospel. And if certain besetting temptations prove tougher to root out than he’d expected, the extra shame of failing in public could be devastating.

By the way, I use the generic “he” here, but this absolutely applies to men and women alike. When the former OnlyFans star Nala Ray started sharing her testimony, there was some controversy as people wondered whether she was sharing too much too soon. I tended to be on her side in that controversy, particularly since it appeared that she was in a good marriage and that she was using her Instagram etc. to post content unrelated directly to her testimony–cooking videos, showing off gear from her Christian clothing line, and the like. Although, even there I couldn’t quite escape the uncomfortable sense that she was repurposing the talent for displaying herself on camera that had made her so much money in her former life. Some women expressed not entirely unreasonable worries that she was still doing little things with her body and face that she wasn’t even consciously aware of. Part of me wanted to say they should leave her alone, but another part of me wondered whether they might have a point. Sadly, other women attacked Nala in distinctly mean-spirited and unhelpful ways, shaming her for trying to share her testimony at all.

This is why it’s difficult to have any profitable conversations about such things, because the two extremes tend to dominate: the one extreme of pushing new Christians to be as public-facing as possible, and the other extreme of saying they should never speak about their past lives in public. We can and should do better. We shouldn’t shame fragile new believers, but nor should we be encouraging them to risk too much too soon out of their understandably overflowing desire to use their stories for good. Instead, we should be encouraging them to seek good pastoral care, plant themselves in local community, and if needed find in-person accountability partners.

So much is contained in that phrase “in-person.” With the digital age has come a great substitution of the virtual for the real, including virtual community. I fear that as it becomes increasingly difficult to find real community, these content creators might come to see their audience as a substitute. They might come to see the Internet as their accountability partner. It also doesn’t help that in too many large churches, the pastor isn’t even readily accessible to his congregants. Without a very intentional plan of action, it’s too easy for someone to get lost in the shuffle. But that’s a whole topic unto itself.

For now, I close with this: New converts are not means to the end of gaining still more new converts. They are ends in themselves. Treat them accordingly.

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