Blogging in Christ — Issue 26

Build Tools That Serve the Text

The counsel of the age has a last lesson for the writer who can code, and it is the most flattering of them all. Build the feature, and the readers will come. Add the tool, and the site will grow. The writer who can program need not wait for readers as other writers do; he can engineer them.

The inversion begins by asking what the tool is for. A tool is not a congregation. A feature is not a harvest. Code can do real work for the Word, and the work it can do is the work of a servant: it can carry the text faithfully, set it plainly before a reader, and then get out of the way. The moment the tool becomes the reason a man arrives, the order has reversed, and the text has become the excuse for the tool rather than the tool serving the text.

Scripture gives the pattern for skilled work, and it gives it at the place where God Himself dwells among His people. When the tabernacle was to be built, the Lord did not call for a man with a vision for growth. He called a craftsman and filled him:

"I have filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all kinds of workmanship, to devise skillful works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in bronze, and in cutting of stones for setting, and in carving of wood, to work in all kinds of workmanship." (Exodus 31:3-5)

Mark the order. The Spirit comes first, and the skill follows. The workmanship is real — gold, silver, bronze, cut stone, carved wood — and it is named in detail, because God delights in careful work. But the workmanship has a given end, and the end is not the craftsman's reputation. The gold is beaten for a lampstand that holds light for the sanctuary. The wood is carved for an ark that holds the testimony. Every skill bends toward one purpose: a place where God meets His people by His Word. The craftsman is not building a monument to his own mastery. He is building a house for the testimony, and the testimony is not his.

That is the first test of any tool the writer builds. Does it house the testimony, or does it house the builder? A search that finds a verse and sets it before the reader houses the testimony. A page that puts one chapter before a man plainly houses the testimony. The test is whether the tool, once built, points away from itself and toward the text it carries.

The opposite pattern is older than any software, and Scripture names it at the first great building project of mankind:

"They said, 'Come, let's build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top reaches to the sky, and let's make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad on the surface of the whole earth.'" (Genesis 11:4)

Here the building is the point, and the name is the purpose. The tower is not built to house anything but the builders' own fame. That is the shape of every tool built to grow a site: the feature exists so that men will speak of the feature, visit the feature, and return to the feature. The text becomes the content that feeds the machine, and the machine becomes the name that is made. The herald must see this shape for what it is. The men of Babel worked hard. Their bricks were well made. The sin was not in the building. The sin was in the end the building served: a name for ourselves.

Between these two patterns stands a second test, the test of plainness. When the law was read to the returned exiles, the readers did their work in a particular way:

"They read in the book, in the law of God, distinctly; and they gave the sense, so that they understood the reading." (Nehemiah 8:8)

Read distinctly. Give the sense. So that they understood. That is the whole job description of a tool that serves the text. The tool reads distinctly when it preserves the text whole and unaltered — the verse kept whole, the chapter kept in order, nothing trimmed to fit a screen. The tool gives the sense when it clears the path between the reader and the words: clean type, honest headings, a search that answers the question asked rather than the question that would keep the reader clicking. And the measure of both is the last clause: so that they understood. Not so that they stayed longer. So that they understood. A tool that lengthens a visit without deepening understanding has failed its only test, however impressive its numbers look.

A third test follows, and it is the hardest for a builder to pass, because it asks him to imagine his own work gone. Take the tool away. Does the text still stand? If the writing collapses without the feature, the feature was never a servant; it was the foundation, and the foundation was wrong. The Word does not need the tool. The apostle wrote it from chains:

"in which I suffer hardship to the point of chains as a criminal. But God's word isn't chained." (2 Timothy 2:9)

The Word was unchained when its herald was chained, and it is unchained when the server is down. A tool that serves the text keeps it in a form any man can carry away — plain text, whole chapters, nothing locked behind the feature that displayed it. The builder who locks the text inside his tool has built a chain, not a house.

Here the governing rule of this whole series returns and settles the matter. The writer plants and waters at most. The increase belongs to another:

"I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the increase. So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase." (1 Corinthians 3:6-7)

Code is planting and watering, nothing more. It can plant the text where a reader will find it. It can water the reading with plainness and order. It cannot give the increase, and the tool that promises to give it claims the work of God for the work of man. The herald who builds must therefore build without believing his own build. He writes the code carefully, tests it honestly, and then releases it the way a farmer releases seed: he does not stand over the field commanding it to grow.

This frees the builder in a way the age's counsel never can. The age tells him to build what attracts, and so he must watch the numbers to know whether he built well. The herald builds what serves, and so he knows whether he built well by a different measure: is the text whole, is the reading plain, is the tool quiet? A quiet tool is a good tool. The lampstand does not preach. It holds the light. The best feature a writer can build is the one the reader forgets while he is reading, because nothing stood between him and the Word.

Nor does serving the text mean serving it cheaply. Bezalel's work was gold and fine linen, not rough timber slapped together. The herald's tool should be built with the same care: tested, sound, honest in its smallest parts, and free to the reader as the gift was free to the writer. "Freely you received, so freely give." (Matthew 10:8) A tool that charges the reader for the text has stopped serving and started selling.

So build, if you can build. Build the search that finds the verse. Build the page that sets the chapter plainly before the reader. Build the storehouse that keeps a man's notes at the verses they belong to. Build them well, and build them to be forgotten in the reading. Then stop, and write. The tool is not the work. The tool is the table the work is laid on. And when the table is built, the herald's place is not behind the table admiring his joinery. His place is at the table, opening the book, reading distinctly, giving the sense, so that they understand the reading — and leaving the increase, as always, to God.