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In which I’m changing my approach to blogging

09/04/2012
blogging, Writing
4 Comments

I’ve decided to change my approach here at New Ways Forward.

For the past couple years I’ve posted every day but Sunday. That started as a challenge to myself to stretch my abilities as a writer, but it ended up transforming this blog and dramatically increasing the number of readers here.

It was a valuable practice for me. At least for the time being though, I’m going to pull back a little.

My plan at this point is to post on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday each week. So I’m certainly not abandoning the blog, and I still find this a valuable outlet for my writing and a brilliant community to dialogue with, but I think forcing myself to blog less might help me let go of some unhealthy practices I’ve picked up along the way.

See, as my readership grows, I’ve felt an increasing pressure to shape my blog according to certain pragmatic conventions.

There is this feeling of risk with every post – that it will either make or break the momentum I’ve so precariously built here.

There is a push towards immediacy, the pressure that I must have an opinion on everything and be willing to share it at a moments notice.

In this relentless push for immediacy, my ability to see things in perspective gets easily warped. The latest controversial tweet from a mega-pastor or blog series attacking a book I enjoyed become disproportionately important, and I end up adding to the drama instead of ignoring it and letting it fade away.

Finally, blogging has simply ended up taking an unhealthy amount of my time. Not just writing, but reading, commenting, keeping up with the latest trends or viral posts. Pulling back from all that will, I hope, give me more time to read, pray, garden, sleep, dabble in drawing, invest in one-on-one relationships.

I know all of this is exactly what I shouldn’t be doing according to the advice of most blogging experts, and I’ve made my peace with that. If anything it encourages me that I might be on the right track.

I will still be sharing my thoughts and writing here at NWF, but hopefully this will allow me to do so in a way that is more authentic, and less about building a brand or sustaining my stats.

Grace and peace,

Mason

of Blogs, Branding, and Consumerism

06/04/2012
blogging, Consumerism, Writing
4 Comments

“You need a platform.”

“Learn how to build your brand in 5 Easy Steps”

“Promote your writing by getting a Blog, and a Facebook fan page, and a Twitter account, and networking on Linked in, and signing up for Google + (well…)” 

We are brands.

And every post we write, tweet we share, Facebook profile adjustment we make, and book we review adds to our brand’s image so we need to be intentional about what we write, we need to stay up-to-date, in-the-loop, relevant. Otherwise our words don’t matter, and no one will be listening.

Or at least that’s what we are being told.

Novice writers are instructed that they must develop a platform if they hope to get published, consultants and bloggers give endless advice about branding and building name recognition – and the thing is, sometimes it works.

But perhaps pragmatic questions about its effectiveness allow us to ignore the fact that such an approach is simply the logical progression of consumerism.

Because all we’ve really done is moved from consumer to product.

We have become so culturally conditioned by consumerism, that the idea of turning ourselves into a brand is almost second nature, and any push back on it is seen as behind-the-times, naïve to the realities of the information age and the relentless movement of the social media machine.

In such a context, when people are dehumanized as products, brands, and resources, perhaps the most revolutionary act for a writer is to not write at all. Or, more specifically, to write things no one else will read, to write for themselves with no thought of platform or brand or even sharing that writing with the public.

Perhaps the writer who sits down with a pen and paper – those antiquated tools – writes words that might never be seen again, and goes on a walk or works on a garden is the writer who is actually doing something countercultural.

Perhaps we need to rethink the idea that anyone should be a brand, even if we can be, even if it works.

Why Do We Blog?

02/04/2012
blogging, Writing
8 Comments

Blogging has been a part of my routine for years now. Six days a week I sit with my laptop, often long before the sun rises, and type out a post.

No small commitment, but it is a commitment that many of us have made. Three, five, seven posts a week, sometimes even more. The blogosphere is constantly marching forward, always growing, always adding new content, more voices and opinions.

But why do we choose to add our small voices to the roar?

This question is partly sparked by some recent reflections on the way I go about blogging, but mostly it is sparked by curiosity. Curiosity about your stories, about the people on the other side of the blogs I read, and those who read here.

So, any of you who blog – why do you do it? 

What motivates you to write post after post, to share your opinions, experiences, and life with the blogosphere?

The Celebrity Pastor Industrial Complex

14/02/2012
blogging, Church & Culture
3 Comments

Last week I pointed you towards a post by Rachel Held Evans that looked at the Church’s obsession with celebrity pastors and the problems it often causes.

In response Skye Jethani took a look behind the dangers to ask why. Why does contemporary evangelicalism seem to have such a preoccupation with megachurch pastors who expand their “brand” by writing and speaking at all the relevant conferences? He suggests that this can be attributed, at least in part, to what he terms the evangelical industrial complex.

“There is an evangelical industrial complex that helps create, and then relies upon, the existence of celebrity leaders. Have you ever wondered why you don’t see pastors from small or medium sized churches on the main stage at big conferences? Or why most of the best-selling Christian authors are megachurch leaders?

Here’s one possibility (the one people like to believe): The most godly, intelligent, and gifted leaders naturally attract large followings, so they naturally are going to have large churches, and their ideas are so great and their writing so sharp that publishers pick their book proposals, and the books strike a nerve with so many people that they naturally become best-sellers, and these leaders are therefore the obvious choice to speak at the biggest conferences. As a result they find themselves quite naturally becoming popular, even rising to celebrity status.

Is this possible? Yes. Does it happen? Sometimes. Is it the norm? I don’t think so.

Here’s the other possibility (one I’ve seen from the inside): Through any number of methods–powerful gifting, shrewd marketing, dumb luck–a pastor leads a congregation to megachurch status. Publishers eager for a guaranteed sales win offer the megachurch pastor a book deal knowing that if only a third of the pastor’s own congregation buys a copy, it’s still a profitable deal. The book is published on the basis of the leader’s market platform, not necessarily the strength of his ideas or the book’s quality. Sometimes the pastor will actually write the book, and other times a ghost writer hired by the publisher will do the hard work of transforming his sermon notes into 180 pages with something resembling a coherent idea.

Wanting to maximize the return on their investment, the publisher will then promote the pastor at the publisher-sponsored ministry conference or other events. As a result of the pastor’s own megachurch customer base and the publisher’s conference platform, the book becomes a best-seller.”

On the flip side, Bob Hyatt discusses the intentional pursuit of obscurity in his Out of Ur essay The Dangerous Pursuit of Pastoral Fame.

“Over the last few years, I’ve thought long and hard about “my platform” as a pastor, a writer, an occasional speaker. And as I’ve done so, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a danger to my soul in pursuing more exposure, more name recognition, more money to be made from thinking, writing, and speaking about ministry issues. Especially while I am still in full-time, paid ministry to a local community.

I want to be clear, though: I have no issue with writers/speakers who sell lots of books, go on speaking tours, and generally promote their works however they can. But there’s something very “off” in the proliferation of pastors who are mixing ministry in and to a local community with “building their brand.” I think a good case can be made that the self-promotion that’s inevitably needed to build a brand in today’s world in incongruous with the servant-leader model of pastoring and the attitude of humility that ought to accompany it.

The Celebrity Pastor certainly isn’t a new phenomenon. But the extent to which some take it today, I think, is.”

What do you think? Is the growing pushback on the celebrity pastor phenomenon justified? If not, why? If so, how can we work towards something better and what would that look like?

on Celebrity Pastors, Planting Roots, and Imagination.

10/02/2012
blogging, Community, Story, Theology
1 Comment

The issue of celebrity pastors has seemed to be front and center over the past couple years, but it has always been something the Church has struggled with. In her post When Jesus Meets TMZ at Relevant today, Rachel Held Evans discusses the difference between honoring and idolizing pastors and teachers.

“Everyone has Christian friends who speak about their favorite pastors with the same reverence and awe generally reserved for Jesus or Apple products. These folks hang on every word the pastor writes, preaches or tweets, and can seem incapable of forming opinions of their own without first consulting the person behind the pulpit. This reveals an unhealthy dependency that elevates celebrity pastors to near idols.

On the other hand, there are cynical Christians who like to find one or two outspoken pastors on whom to continually focus their anger. I really struggle with this in my own life, as I tend to vilify those celebrity pastors with whom I disagree. This may seem like an entirely different problem than the idolization of celebrity pastors, but these attitudes actually represent two sides of the same coin. Both flatten and objectify the pastors in question. While one group sees a pastor as wholly good, the other sees the pastor as wholly evil. But neither sees the leader for who he or she actually is—a person: fallen yet redeemed, imperfect and in need of our grace.”

At Christianity Today Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove  writes about the wisdom of stability in the article The Spiritual Discipline of Staying Put: Planting Roots in a Placeless Culture.

“The trouble for most of us isn’t so much that we cannot afford stability as it is that we don’t value it. We idealize and aspire to a life on the move, spending what resources we have on acquiring skills that make us more marketable (that is, more mobile). We want to “move up in the world,” which almost always means closer to a highway, an airport, or a shopping mall.”

Finally, at Baker’s $1 used book sale I came across Imagination: Embracing a Theology of Wonder. I’ve only just started flipping through it, but it seems like it has potential – expect more on this one if it proves to be a good read. From what I can tell it touches on themes of creativity and story which I am quite interested in right now.

N.T. Wright discusses Simply Jesus

08/02/2012
blogging, Books and Reading, Gospel, Jesus, N.T. Wright
3 Comments

The Hillhurst Review recently interviewed N.T. Wright about his latest book, Simply Jesus. Simply Jesus is a popular-level presentation of Wright’s theological project, including his developments over the last decade, and the Review did well in hitting on the book’s main themes.

The full interview is quite extensive, below is an excerpt about Wright’s rather interesting push to reclaim the idea of theocracy – God becoming King.
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“One of the things that I’m aware of is that this message of “God is becoming King” in the ears of a lot of our postmodern folks these days sounds very totalizing and it doesn’t sound like good news that anyone is becoming king, let alone of all people, everywhere, at all times. It makes me wonder why Jesus chose to talk about what God was doing using the same power narratives that had been used for ill for so long–you know, narratives about kingdoms and rulers.

Well, yes. I mean, it’s a very interesting question the way you asked that because, of course, we in the West are all dyed-in-the-wool social democrats to a lesser or greater extent, and we look at the tyrannies in old Eastern Europe or in some parts of the Middle East to this day and we shudder. We say, “We really don’t want to be like that.”

At the same time, of course, it has to be said that the great western democratic experiment has left a lot of people scratching their heads. I have read newspapers in America, and in my own country, which talk openly about the failure of our democracy and the crisis in our democracy and the fact that our democracy isn’t actually delivering the real choice and the real influence for ordinary people that it ought to. So I think more and more people are realizing that actually, maybe the way we have done stuff isn’t all that it was cracked up to be.

But at the same time, of course, the theme of God becoming King is one of the greatest themes of the Old Testament, right through Isaiah, right through the Psalms, right through many other passages going back as far as the Song of Moses in Exodus 15. And the idea of the true God becoming King is precisely the antidote to a false God becoming king.

I have met this pastorally in another context when people say, “You talk about God as father where there are a lot of the people we work with are people who have a lot of very damaged family relationships for whom the word ‘father’ simply means horrible man who comes home drunk every once in a while and beats everybody up and then disappears again. So how can we possibly use the word ‘father’ in that setting?” And I’ve struggled with that in real life pastoral situations. But for me, the word “father” is too good a word to abandon, and I would always say we need to work, in this pastoral case, towards recovering the good meaning of the word “father” even though for some people it may be very difficult.

In the same way, it may be difficult for some people to recover the word “king,” I think a lot of people find it really quite refreshing, especially when they’re scratching their heads and puzzled at the apparent failure, or at least hitting-the-doldrums mode of a lot of our present institutions. By the way, I should say, a lot of Americans say, “We can’t understand this language about ‘king’ because we don’t have kings and queens like you Brits do,” and my answer to that always is, “Actually, your president right now corresponds much more closely to a first-century king than anything we’ve had in Britain for at least a hundred years.” So. . .”

Read the rest of the interview here.

Doubt, Hope, and finding our place in the Story

07/02/2012
blogging, Doubt, Faith, Narrative Theology, Spirituality, Story, Writing
3 Comments

First off let me note that I was deeply encouraged by the response to yesterday’s post. My hope is that here on the blog, in our homes and churches, in coffee shops and pubs, we might find places to have the difficult and necessary conversations about how we are choosing to shape our identity and what it might look like to tell a better re-constructive Story.

Thankfully we do not have to start from scratch, the Christian story, though it has at times been twisted and bent into something that speaks darkness instead of light, has been told well by many brothers and sisters throughout the years.

We do well to learn from their wisdom, and to find inspiration in their stories as we reimagine our own.

One author who speaks to this beautifully is Lauren Winner. I’ve not read her latest book, yet, but after being urged by some co-workers I did read the preface and plan to pick it up once I finish a couple books I’m currently reading.

In those first few pages I found this quote, and I could do no better in explaining why the Story we tell is so important – it’s about more than propositions (though it includes those as well), it is about identity and hope, about who and where we are and what God is doing in the world.

“For whole stretches since the dream, since the baptism, my belief has faltered, my sense of God’s closeness has grown strained, my efforts at living in accord with what I take to be the call of the gospel have come undone.

And yet in those same moments of strained belief, of not knowing where or if God is, it has also seemed that the Christian story keeps explaining who and where I am, better than any other story I know.

On the days when I think I have a fighting chance at redemption, at change, I understand it to be these words and these rituals and these people who will change me.

Some days I am not sure if my faith is riddled with doubt or whether, graciously, my doubt is riddled with faith.” –From Still, by Lauren Winner

Despite frequent bouts of discouragement and disenfranchisement, that right there is why I keep returning to the story of Christ and the Scriptures, that Story has a power to explain and give hope that no other story does.

There’s more I might say, theologically, ethically, sociologically even about my faith, but I must say at least that – I find my place in life by taking part in the Story of what God has done, is doing, and will do in this world.

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