What Does It Mean to Blog for God’s Glory?: Our Book’s Backstory

Our book Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World releases today.

Six months ago, when I picked November 3 as our publication day, I certainly wasn’t thinking about the fact that it was also the day of our presidential elections. But it happened, or I should say, it is happening—today.

I’ve never shared the backstory to our blogging book, but I’ll tell you now that the book started with my friend and coauthor John Beeson before either of us knew it would be a book.

Five years ago I wrote down a series of questions for John to ponder as he launched his blog. Actually, I didn’t write them. I used my phone’s voice-to-text feature to record my stream-of-consciousness thoughts while my children played in a McDonald’s PlayPlace. I cleaned the questions up a bit, sent them to John, and we talked on the phone for ninety minutes. A year later, I polished those questions brighter and wrote them into a blog post. I hoped the questions would help others launch blogs that would glorify God. I feared, however, only five people would read the post. After I submitted the article to two different online publications and received rejections from each, I suspected editors also thought only five people would read the posts. But then I submitted it to For The Church, who published the article in the spring of 2018.

Tim Challies shared a link to that post on his blog, and from there, Bill Feltner, the host of the show His People on Pilgrim Radio, saw the link and asked me for an interview to discuss Christian blogging. The interview made me wonder if there could be more to this topic than a few blog posts and an interview could cover. Eventually I circled back to John with the idea for this book.

I’m thankful for John running this race with me. John, when we began the project I never expected the book would become such an expansive resource for bloggers. Thank you for being a friend, encourager, and someone to swap stories with of blogging lows and blogging highs. I could not have written this book without you, and I wouldn’t have wanted to.

Alexandra Richter has poured over each word in each book I’ve written, and most of my published articles. Alexandra, I confess, I never know when to write who or whom, so I avoid writing sentences that feel ambiguous. But I know that if I did write a sentence that needed a who or perhaps a whom, you’d know when I needed which. And thank you for caring as much, if not more, about the theology as the grammar. Speaking of grammar, thank you Russ Meek and Cassie Watson for also helping us catch the little mistakes that make a big difference.

I’ve never had an acknowledgment section in my books; I think I feared the cliché of it all. Expected or not, I want to say thank you to my wife, Brooke. There would be no books or blogs without your blessing.

Below is the table of contents and full book cover. John and I would be overjoyed if you bought a copy of our book (Amazon). Thanks for all the encouragement along the way.