Nine months ago I took the risk of switching a [moderately] successful blog from Blogger to WordPress. I knew I would lose traffic and the Google ranking my old blog had gained, but thought the advantages of WordPress were worth is. As it turned out the first month on this new platform had more traffic then ever, and the second month topped even that.

However, for the last few months there has been a steady decree in my traffic – by maybe 50% at this point. Under other circumstances I would have found that quite discouraging, but actually it was expected and came about mostly as a result of some intentional decisions I’ve made about how I blog.

So, here is How to Kill a Blog in 6 Easy Steps.

1. Don’t Use Reader-Friendly Titles Like “6 Easy Steps to…” – I know, catchy titles drive traffic, but I just can’t seem to bring myself to use titles like that, at least on my personal blog. If I feel like naming a post “The Creed and/as The Pledge of Allegiance” I’m just going to go for it.
2. Post Less – One of the driving factors behind the growth I experienced was posting consistently, every day but Sunday for almost two years. Now I usually post three days a week (two if there is a holiday). I may go back to more frequent posting at some point, but I needed a rest from the demand that was placing on my time, and decided the loss of traffic was worth it.
3. Decline to Comment on the Latest Blogosphere Controversy, or to Have an Opinion on the Latest Issue Du Jour – Admittedly, this also drove a fair amount of traffic my way over the years *cough, Love Wins, cough* but I’ve become quite intentional about not doing this unless I find I’m personally invested in the issue. There are a few bloggers who do that well, but many who don’t, and I simply don’t need to add to the chaos of self-referential blogging tribalism, perpetuate the infighting, or act like I’m an expert on something just because a controversial book came out or some mega-church pastor was a jerk again on Twitter.
4. Talk Politics, but Don’t Side With (or Against) a Traditional Political Party – This one I’ve not done much of, but recently I have started to add political discussion to the blog. The problem is it has been framed as a conversation about the Church vs. Empire and Nationalism, and so partisan Left vs. Right debate – which is always great for traffic and terrible for my faith in humanity – has little room to begin. *[on a similar note, talk about God’s saving work in the world without discussing Calvinism vs. Arminianism]
5. Comment Less on Other Blogs – This one I feel a little bad about. There are so many brilliant blogs out there and I only keep track of a handful (at least for my own personal reading). Blogging is a community activity, or at least it can be, and when you don’t invest time in the community that tends to bode poorly for your chances of reciprocity in the form of comments, traffic, and links.
6. Don’t Treat your Blog as a “Platform” to Promote your “Brand” – This is the big one. I followed the advice of the blogging experts and did a lot of work promoting my blog through Facebook, Twitter, and guest-posting. And you know what? It worked. It worked very well in fact. But I really dislike self-promotion, and I felt like I was losing something important and indefinable in the process. So I stopped, and I’m glad I did.

And there you have it – defy the “best practices” advice of the blogging experts and you too can cut back on your traffic in 6 Easy Steps!

“Adam and Eve, as the story goes, were placed on earth as the image of the Creator God, and then told to tend a garden – because that sort of act matters. Changing our corner of the world, whatever God has entrusted us with, big or small, is no unimportant or meaningless gesture.

Somehow, mysteriously and by the grace of God, these acts add up into something more, something beautiful.

Loving my neighbor, growing with my community of faith, planting flowers around the lamppost.”

Read the rest here!

This would, hopefully, seem just a bit odd. Something about treating our family like a military unit feels inherently misguided, even if it “worked” in pragmatic terms.

Now imagine if the sequel to this New York Time Bestselling parenting book was entitled “How to be the CEO of your Kids”

You might start to ask yourself if the problem is deeper than a few sub-par books, that perhaps we’ve lost a sense of what the family is, and how it is different than other social structures like the military, or the corporation.

This is increasingly how I feel when I come across books on Church leadership – as if somehow we’ve lost our sense of the church’s identity, and as a result are flailing in the dark for some other form of leadership we can grasp onto.

The Church is not a corporation, and yet most books on leadership in a ministry setting are almost indistinguishable from the latest advice from America’s top CEO’s.

Yes, such methods can work. They have certainly been effective in transforming local churches into a new corporate form – but for all its pragmatic benefit I believe this trend has been incredibly destructive to the church and its mission.

When leading a church looks like pastor-as-CEO then the church becomes a business, the congregation becomes paying customers, and worship and the Gospel become consumer goods.

That this is a dangerous path to tread should be apparent, but with how enthusiastically such books are read and recommended, I fear that the lure of becoming successful by the standards of the world too often outweighs the danger that such success might just come at the expense of becoming something different, no longer a church but simply a business with religious trappings.

In it he speaks on the role of the Biblical prophets.

The people we later recognize as prophets, says Bible scholar Walter Brueggemann, are also poets. They reframe what is at stake in chaotic times.

[You can listen here]

It’s an excellent interview and an accessable introduction to the work of a brilliant scholar.

Brueggemann’s writing (along with scholars like Goldingay and Walton) has served to breath new life into my own reading of the Old Testament, much as N.T. Wright and others have re-shaped my reading of the New.

If you are interesed in engaging with his work on the prophets and the theology of the Old Testament, I would recommend beging with the classic The Prophetic Imagination and then taking time to wrestle with the more contemporarily focused Out of Babylon.

Grace and peace.

The first is some writing by my friend Preston, over at Deeper Story. He wrote eloquently today about something I know I’ve done my fair share of, using books to deal with the silence of God and my own spiritual angst.

“In the interim space between His silence and my learning to hear again, I made a few interesting choices. One of those choices was to burry myself in books.”

Not to imply there is no value in buying books, quite the opposite! But it’s a habit that can be turned towards both good and ill, like any other.

The other focus of my thoughts this morning is the book The Politics of Discipleship, which I began reading yesterday, and theotherjournal’s Church & Postmodern Culture blog (which is associated with the series The Politics of Discipleship is a part of).

Over the past years I’ve slowly shed most of my Religious Right heritage, but have found that a “Religious Left” holds little more appeal and seems to equally miss the point – albeit in somewhat different ways.

Reading The Politics of Discipleship is part of my attempt to wrestle with the question “what next?” What does it look like for me to faithfully follow Christ (and for the Church to faithfully act out its mission) in this place, this time, this empire, with all the complexities posed by our new post-Christendom post-modern context, particularly if the answers of both Religious Right and Religious Left are found lacking?

Or as Carl Raschke put in in a recent post,

“Every age of global “shift” like the present one – indeed, the very phrase post-modernity signifies  a transitional rather than an easily identifiable era – raises up prophets of an invisible economy.  We only have to consider Condorcet’s formulation of the “idea of progress” as he pined in his jail cell prior to his execution at the height of the French Revolution, or Bonhoeffer with his vision of “man come of age” as he also awaited the gallows in a German prison in 1944.   But how can we begin, perhaps in simply a thoughtful and less heroic manner, in this  current age of global upheaval – less than a generation after the collapse of the vision of a worldwide, democratic, market-based, neo-liberal future, as enunciated for example in Francis Fukayama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992), in light of the events of those fateful years 2001 and 2008?”

So far both the book and the blog have been helpful, provocative, and beautifully devastating to many of my long-held paradigms.

Over a number of hours I knelt in the heat, prepared the soil, carefully found spots for the plants, seeds, herbs, and flowers we had chosen, wrestled with fencing to keep our harvest safe, and watered the dirt that had become dry and dusty in the intense sunlight.

Image Credit – http://www.crinklecrankle.com/

And as I gardened I realized that, even though the work was quite draining, it was also incredibly peaceful and centering.

There is a reason that monastic communities have historically made gardening a key element of their daily work.

It forces us to remember where the food we enjoy each day comes from, to realize our interconnectedness, to reflect on our dependence on the Lord and the land he has given us to tend for a time.

Gardening can be a prayerful activity, even when you are not actively praying. Just the act of tilling soil, placing the plants in anticipation of a harvest months away, seeing life bloom out of barren earth – it becomes a form of embodied prayer. Gardening, for me at least, has come to serve as a sort of spiritual discipline.

“To Eberhard Bethage, April, 1944:

What is bothering me incessantly is the question what Christianity really is, or indeed who Christ really is, for us today. The time when people could be told everything by means of words, whether theological or pious, is over, and so is the time of inwardness and conscience–and that means the time of religion in general. We are moving toward a completely religionless time; people as they are now simply cannot be religious anymore. Even those who honestly describe themselves as “religious” do not in the least act up to it, and so they presumably mean something quite different by “religious.”

Our whole nineteen-hundred-year-old Christian preaching and theology rest on the “religious a priori” of mankind. “Christianity” has always been a form–perhaps the true form–of “religion.” But if one day it becomes clear that this a priori does not exist at all, but was a historically conditioned and transient form of human self-expression, and if therefore man becomes radically religionless–and I think that that is already more or less the case (else how is it, for example, that this war, in contrast to all previous ones, is not calling forth any “religious” reaction?)–what does that mean for “Christianity”?

It means that the foundation is taken away from the whole of what has up to now been our “Christianity,” and that there remain only a few “last survivors of the age of chivalry,” or a few intellectually dishonest people that we are to pounce in fervor, pique, or indignation, in order to sell them goods? Are we to fall upon a few unfortunate people in their hour of need and exercise a sort of religious compulsion on them? If we don’t want to do all that, if our final judgment must be that the Western form of Christianity, too, was only a preliminary stage to a complete absence of religion, what kind of situation emerges for us, for the church? How can Christ become the Lord of the religionless as well? Are there religionless Christians? If religion is only a garment of Christianity–and even this garment has looked very different at different times–then what is a religionless Christianity?

The questions to be answered would surely be: What do a church, a community, a sermon, a liturgy, a Christian life mean in a religionless world? How do we speak of God–without religion, i.e., without the temporally conditioned presuppositions of metaphysics, inwardness, and so on? How do we speak (or perhaps we cannot now even “speak” as we used to) in a “secular” way about God? In what way are we “religionless-secular” Christians, in what way are we those who are called forth, not regarding ourselves from a religious point of view as specially favored, but rather as belonging wholly to the world? In that case Christ is no longer an object of religion, but something quite different, really the Lord of the world. But what does that mean? What is the place of worship and prayer in a religionless situation?

The Pauline question of whether [circumcision] is a condition of justification seems to me in present-day terms to be whether religion is a condition of salvation. Freedom from [circumcision] is also freedom from religion. I often ask myself why a “Christian instinct” often draws me more to the religionless people than to the religious, but which I don’t in the least mean with any evangelizing intention, but, I might almost say, “in brotherhood.” While I’m often reluctant to mention God by name to religious people–because that name somehow seems to me here not to ring true, and I feel myself to be slightly dishonest (it’s particularly bad when others start to talk in religious jargon; I then dry up almost completely and feel awkward and uncomfortable)–to people with no religion I can on occasion mention him by name quite calmly and as a matter of course.

The transcendence of epistemological theory has nothing to do with the transcendence of God. God is beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village…How this religionless Christianity looks, what form it takes, is something that I’m thinking about a great deal, and I shall be writing to you again about it soon. It may be that on us in particular, midway between East and West, there will fall a heavy responsibility.”

The Rule of Saint Benedict 

Such is the blessing and the curse of working in a bookstore – great for being exposed to incredible new books, but terrible for my bank account.

This paraphrase was written by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove (author of The Wisdom of Stability, and contributor to Common Prayer), and brings the ancient words of Benedict crashing into our own day and age, while offering commentary that sheds light on the Rule and the practices of Benedictine communities.

So far I am quite impressed, and I would highly recommend reading and contemplating this retelling of a Christian classic.

Below is an excerpt from the introduction that situates the Rule in its historical context, a context not unlike our own.

“The story of The Rule of Saint Benedict is the story of how a small movement within Christianity changed the landscape of the world for everyone. This movement existed before the Rule was written, springing up in the Egyptian deserts during the fourth century. There women and men who longed to know true life in Christ devoted themselves to prayer, intentionally distancing themselves from a society that was in shambles—despite the fact that it was becoming “Christian” in name. Because these men and women devoted themselves to one thing only—to the love of God—these experimenters on the edges of Christendom were called monastics (from the Greek monos, meaning one).

By the end of the fifth century, when a middle-class, young Italian named Benedict left his home in Nursia to go to school in Rome, the Empire that had been centered there was in total disarray. The church whose faith had become the official religion of that Empire was in turmoil. It was in every way a time of transition. In short, it was a moment not unlike our own. Everyone knew that a new future was being born, but no one was sure just what it would look like.

In a moment of clarity, Benedict saw that the system of education that had been designed to prepare him for a world that was passing away could only lead to a dead end. While it could teach him what had worked in the past, the system did not have the resources to present a way forward. A different kind of school was needed. Benedict had a hunch that the Desert Mothers and Fathers were creating it. He went to a cave, built himself a prayer cell, and so matriculated in the “university” of the world-to-come.”

As the beneficiaries of present-day systems of economic and military power, is it difficult for us to hear the prophets’ warnings against empire and the call to be a set apart people with a different story? 

Take the story of Solomon for example. His reign is presented as the height of the united-kingdom’s power and glory. Never before [and never again] in the Old Testament has Israel been described as more prosperous, victorious, and expansive.

But there is a dark side to this story, one we easily, and perhaps instinctively, overlook.

Yes, we usually condemn Solomon for having hundreds of wives and concubines, and for the mixed religious loyalties this soon entails, but in reality such a harem was just a symptom of a larger problem and not simply a case of sexual excess.

His wives, usually described as foreigners, were most likely a result of political dealings – securing powerful relationships by tying families together, much like medieval European monarchies.

These political dealings served to further his acquisition of national wealth (II Chronicles 9:13-24), the massive expansion of Israel’s military (II Chronicles 9:25-28), and a series of building projects which, in a tragic irony, utilized slave labor to build palaces and fortresses for a people who had once been slaves themselves (I Kings 9:15-23).

Interestingly, in almost every sermon I’ve heard about Solomon, his sexual exploits and idolatry are condemned while his economic and military aspirations are ignored or even praised.

I wonder if that is because criticizing Solomon’s quest for empire strikes a little too close to home? Or, perhaps, are we so accustomed to seeing military and economic superiority as inherently good (or even a sign of God’s blessing!) that we fail to see the ways Solomon is turning Israel into yet another Egypt?

The Bible was written from the underside of empire. And for those of us who read it today from a position of power, I want to suggest that might pose a more significant interpretative hurdle than we tend to realize.

In other words, we all naturally read ourselves into stories as “the good guy,” but when the prophets speak their warnings against economic and military injustice, they just might be warning us.