Today I am officially relaunching my blog 🎉🎆🥳
I have taken the past year off to finish a dissertation. I planned on starting back once the dissertation was completed, but there was a trip to the States, some other random craziness, and I wanted to have at least ten posts ready to post before I started it back up.
But now, here we are. Did you miss me?
Me & the Blog
I wrote my first ever blog post in 2006. It was about a bear I saw in Pennsylvania while heading to Ohio for a conference (you can read it here if you’d like). It was part of a series I wrote to our church back in Ithaca to keep them updated about the conference, and I received positive feedback. Since then, I have had an on-again, off-again, love|hate relationship with blogging. (much more love than hate to be sure).
On the positive side,
- It has given me an outlet to process and share some of the ideas I am working through.
- I love hearing from people who have read something I have written and that it changed how they thought or behaved.
- It made me smile when I met someone here in Ireland, and he said, “Oh, you’re the missional blogger.” (I had never heard that before, but it felt pretty cool).
On the negative side,
- I haven’t enjoyed the pressure I have placed on myself to make the blog grow…whatever that even means.
- Or the pressure to wirte something at all. Because of this, at different times over the past 16 years, I have shut it down for a bit because I needed to not think about it. And with the dissertation, I decided that one intense source of pressure to write was sufficient.
- Another stressor around blogging was a struggle with second-guessing myself. Sometimes I had something to say but was afraid that someone would come along and tell me I was wrong or that I would make somebody angry. And as the internet can be a nasty place, I have erred on the side of saying nothing. (I am an INTJ and a 1 on the Enneagram, so being wrong is hard enough, let alone publicly.)
- One of the hardest things for me has been writing something that I think is good and that it is going to get a conversation going. And then crickets. This is not a plea for feedback or a bunch of notes saying I like the post. I’m just sharing my ups and downs with this space.
where next?
This has led me to think about what I want this space to be. I do enjoy the process. I love writing, and I love how it helps me think through things I’m learning.
And I do have ideas that I want to explore.
For example, I want to write about the topics I covered in my dissertation, such as different models for “doing church”, specifically non-hierarchical leadership models…mutuality…stuff like that.
So, leadership, formation, and Jesus-centered faith will be topic I’ll dig it to regulalry.
I also enjoy letting people know about stuff I have found and enjoy. So I will share some of the tools I’ve discovered that I use and find helpful. We’ll start with some of the tools I picked up over the past year and explore whether I’ll stay with them or not. That could be software or services or whatever.
Related to that, I plan on writing about some books as I read them, but I feel I’m hedging a bit. I have bad memories of book reports.
I’ll share more photos.
I’ll share more stories about Ireland. Both my thoughts, as well as links to stories that seem relevant.
I am planning to post two or three longer posts (500 or more words) each week. Photos or links would be in addition. But we’ll see how things progress.
a brief sidenote
I began reposting what I wrote on this blog over on Medium last year. Shortly after, I got paid $.03 because people started reading what I wrote. In one period, I tripled my earnings and made $.09 💵! I think I might actually crack double digits this year. When I investigated, the faith-related stuff was not what people were reading. They were reading a post or two I had written about Ireland and a couple of posts about the Red Sox. Maybe I’m supposed to be a baseball blogger!
So, although I probably won’t be blogging here about the Red Sox, (even though it looks like that’s where the big bucks are) I’ll will keep my options open.
Finally, one other thing I’ve attempted to do was clean up some of the technical problems on the site. The form to subscribe to the blog by email should be working now. You can use the form at the bottom of this post, or the home page. If you use an rss reader, and wish to subscribe that way, that link should be working as well.
And if you sign up and it doesn’t seem to work, use the contact form at the bottom of the home page and let me know.
Any thoughts?
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Photo by Andy Hermawan on Unsplash