Two Podcast Interviews: How Improvement in Writing Is Like Bench-Press & How Our Church Stayed “Front-Edge of the Middle” During Covid
I have two podcast interview updates to share. One interview was about writing and the other about pastoring.
First, the podcast about writing. I was a guest on Amy Simon’s podcast, The Purposeful Pen. The episode released yesterday. It’s a podcast to encourage Christian writers.
On the episode we talk a little bit about what makes for good writing, the article submission process, and some specifics to writing for Gospel-Centered Discipleship, the website I help manage. You can find it here, “Episode 63: Improving the Craft of Writing with Benjamin Vrbicek.”
A piece of advice I give is that finishing one piece of writing often develops a writer more than starting five pieces of writing but not finishing any of them. My metaphor for this comes from the gym. Something about finishing a last set of bench press, especially if you go until failure, produces more physical gains than simply doing a few sets and not going to failure. Pushing individual pieces of writing to the final, public form forces authors to identify problems and find solutions in a way that merely jotting down the “good stuff” and moving along doesn’t do.
Second, the podcast about pastoring. The other week I was a guest on the MemeLord Monday podcast, which often takes a humorous (and sometimes serious) look at the Christian subculture. You can find it here, “What Happened to the Post-Pandemic Church?”
The podcast actually released a few years ago, but the host and my friend, Matt Matias, just released the interview to the public. Previously, the episode was only available to his paid subscribers.
Now, you probably have a legitimate question coming to your mind: Why in the world would I want to listen to a podcast about churches and Covid, especially when it’s so old? I get it. I wasn’t even sure if I wanted to listen to it either—and I was the guest! Who wants to relive that era, I thought. Let’s forget about Covid and move on.
But I did listen to the interview, and I found it fascinating.
I know, I know, you could say I’m an egomaniac and just love listening to my own voice. I don’t think that was the reason I enjoyed the interview so much. Listening to the interview felt like opening a strange time capsule. I had honestly forgotten all we went through as a church. Our church even had a malicious hacker ruin our online “reserved seating” by signing up fake names. Crazy weird and super aggravating. We had our guesses who hacked us, but we could never confirm it.
You probably remember, too, how there was something of a bell curve regarding how churches handled Covid. In the interview, I explained our unsophisticated guesswork about how to keep our church on the “front edge of the middle” regarding the “uncautious-to-cautious” spectrum. This involved prayer reading the Bible, arguing among ourselves, and talking to doctors, church members, and other pastors—as well as doing exactly whatever the government told us to do without question. Oh, we also cast lots a few times.
Well, maybe we didn’t do all of those. I’ll let you listen to figure it out. But our “front-edge of the middle” strategy was our version of the Goldilocks approach, our plan to hit the bell curve just right. This proved challenging as the backdrop matrix of Covid, culture, and churches kept shifting, and not always in the same direction. Alas, we did our best to be faithful to the Lord. He knows our hearts.
In the interview we also discuss pastoral abuse and why our church has a plurality of pastor-elders, rather than “the guy.” And we tell a few jokes.
If you listen to either podcast, let me know what you think. I’d love to hear your best tips to improve at writing and what your church did that was helpful during Covid.
The Purposeful Pen: “Improving the Craft of Writing”
MemeLord Monday: “What Happened to the Post-Pandemic Church?”
* Photo by ConvertKit on Unsplash