When the Wrong Voices Offer Shortcuts to Writing Success

[Dear Reader: I typically write blog posts that can be read in five to ten minutes. This is not one of those. I’ve been tinkering with this collection of words for literally years, and it has grown into a mega-post, something akin to a chapter in a book and a twenty-five-minute meandering journey. I know the algorithm and the need for clicks should push me to do everything I can to make you read . . . but I’m doing the opposite: Please feel free to pass. Seriously. This essay won’t be for everyone, even most people. It’s a long, personal exploration of how I became a writer and the temptations writers often face when they spend a decade trying to be a writer. I also overlay the essay with a tender yet fragile moment in Abraham and Sarai’s marriage, a couple who have been dead for about four thousand years. So, there’s that too. Without further ado, here we go.]

* * *

“Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, had borne him no children. She had a female Egyptian servant whose name was Hagar. And Sarai said to Abram, ‘Behold now, the LORD has prevented me from bearing children. Go in to my servant; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.’ And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife.”

Genesis 16:1–3

Ordinarily a husband ought to listen to his wife. God makes a husband and wife one flesh that each might bless the other. The first man, Adam, however, got himself—and the rest of us—in a lot of trouble because, according to God, he “listened to the voice of his wife” (Gen. 3:17). When Eve invited Adam to sin, he should not have listened to her. He should have said, “No, God is good, and God did surely say that every tree is ours save the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” But Adam did not speak up. He complied. Maybe he wanted to try the fruit too. Many years later, Abram fails as Adam failed: he listens to the voice of his wife when she invites him to sin (16:2).

After all the promises God speaks over Abram in the previous episode, a decade drags by, seemingly in silence. “So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan . . .” (16:3a). In this decade of silence, Sarai devises a plan. “Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her servant, and gave her to Abram her husband as a wife” (16:3b). What compels her to such action? And what compels him to listen to her plan?

Sometimes those with young children, those in the thick of child rearing, will say, “The days are long, but the years are short.” The energy required to raise children, volunteer at school, coach sports, attend to the home and meals and laundry, work one or two jobs, serve in a local church, write a blog post or two, maintain friendships, exercise, pay bills, and so on, becomes so time- and energy-consuming that the days never seem to end. You wake up and go go go until you go to sleep. Because the long days are filled so full, the years race by. One moment you’re holding a child in your arms after he’s stubbed his toe, and the next moment you’re a blubbering mess as you walk back to your car in the parking lot of a college campus without your son.

For Sarai, without a child to mark the days, the years were long. And that decade in the land of Canaan was especially long. With only the family business and her husband to occupy her attention, most of her days likely looked the same. So did the months. And the years.

Over these ten years in Canaan, if Sarai has a regular monthly menstrual cycle, she has one hundred and twenty experiences of not being pregnant. That’s one hundred and twenty times hope would rise and fall. We are not told, but perhaps during these years Sarai began to go through menopause. Indeed, this would put a thud in the phrase “Behold now” from verse 2. “And Sarai said to Abram, ‘Behold now, the LORD has prevented me from bearing children.’ ” Now any hope of having a child, at least humanly speaking, is gone. All her desires for a child, her desire to be “normal,” and all the insecurities about herself as a woman and wife who can’t find a way to become a mother—behold now, these desires and insecurities that she has carried and cultivated, shatter beyond repair. It is, she feels, the Lord’s fault: “The LORD has prevented me from bearing children.”

On the one hand, we wonder whether her plan to have a child through Hagar is her way of giving God a helping hand in fulfilling the call upon them to bless others. God had promised a child, so perhaps her plan is a means to that end. Her husband must have heard rightly that he would become the father of many children, but perhaps she wonders whether they were wrong to interpret the promises to mean that she would become the mother of many children, at least in the ordinary way. God, after all, had only said to Abram that “your very own son will be your heir” (15:4).

On the other hand, perhaps her plan is more about ending her pain. Sarai has probably hoped so much and hoped so hard and hoped for so long that she finally quits hoping because even her hope hurts, a cruel tease. Hagar will cauterize this hurting hope. Sarai doesn’t have it in her to keep fighting to believe that God is good and has a perfect plan. She doesn’t want to put another woman in her husband’s arms, except she might. He might just listen to her too.

Perhaps the shame she felt over her infertility led her to offer Hagar to Abram. Maybe she hoped the offer would be rejected—No, Sarai; we will do no such thing—but extending the offer still felt like the right move.

Regardless of which motives tempt the loudest, living in the land of Canaan plays a role in implanting the idea. If this is how other men of stature in Canaan, the patriarchs of the land, have more children, then why not them?[1] Perhaps the ways of Canaan are the ways God means to fulfill his promise. A decade is long enough to be established in the community. Long enough to make friends. Long enough, not only for the people of Canaan to be influenced by Abram and Sarai, but long enough for them to influence each other. There are other ways to have a family, they suggest. There’s Hagar, the village tells her.

* * *

In the summer of 2010, I had two jobs in different cities about a two-hour drive apart. That summer was also the time I became a writer. The change didn’t happen the way one might flick on a light switch. Becoming a writer was more like slowly scooting together four or five separate votive candles, closer and closer, until they became one big burning candle.

I couldn’t see it at the time, but one candle probably shouldn’t have been there.

After we got married, my wife and I moved to St. Louis, Missouri, where we found jobs and started a family. But that summer we split our time, spending three and a half days in St. Louis and the other three and a half days in Jefferson City. We lived in the parsonage of a church, and I worked as a pastoral intern.

During our weekly car drives, my wife and I would laugh as she read aloud from Jon Acuff’s book Stuff Christians Like. Acuff grew up as a pastor’s kid, and his book is a playful critique of Christian subculture. He makes fun of all the goofy things even godly Christians do: Sunday school teachers feeding kids their body weight in goldfish crackers, worship leaders sporting skinny jeans, and missionary dating. “Sometimes the mission field God calls you to is hot, single people,” he writes. “It’s rare, but it happens.”[2]

If his book does have any serious critique of Christians and the church, Acuff seems to rebuke without cynicism; he rebukes as someone who still wants to be on the inside, as someone who still loves Christ and the bride of Christ. I liked his approach. Listening to my wife read Acuff made all the driving we did that summer go a whole lot faster. It also, in ways I was not consciously aware of, shaped all the writing I did that summer. But I’ll have to explain a few things before that makes sense.

[I]

Back in St. Louis, I continued working the job I had after college, the one that put my engineering degree to use at a construction company. I designed fire protection systems for buildings, mostly hospitals and office spaces, and oversaw projects ranging from thousands to millions of dollars. Working there while also traveling for the internship, God again stretched my faith.

The church in Jefferson City had given their associate pastor a sabbatical and I attempted to fill in, leading youth group, preaching once a month, and doing whatever else needed to be done, including attending elder board meetings, helping with Vacation Bible School, and cleaning a toilet that had overflowed. You know, standard intern stuff.

That summer, the church continued its sermon series through the book of Genesis. We preached slowly and expositionally through the life of Jacob. Specialists in childhood development speak of certain years of a child’s life, typically the early years, as more formative than others. These early ministry years, in my pastoring generally and preaching specifically, proved more formative than others. But as much as I remember the sermons I preached that summer, I remember the devotionals I wrote even better.

My boss that summer was Pastor Mark Kiekhaefer. Mark is the sort of pastor who, some thirty years after seminary, can still sight-read a Hebrew text, in part because he is brilliant, but more so because he just stays at it, plodding through passage after passage, like the passages we plodded through together in Genesis.

On my first day as a summer intern, he told me that when he started in ministry, his boss had the practice of writing a short reflection about ministry every Monday morning in a journal. Mark had adopted that practice and wanted me to try it over the summer. So I did. At the time Mark was handwriting his reflections, but I decided to type them so I could fiddle with the words, though I didn’t know before the summer that fiddling with the words was something I’d enjoy.

I’ve written a few hundred articles since that summer, but these early reflections retain a vividness few other writing projects do.[3] In the tinkering with words that summer, words tinkered with me—who I was, who I was becoming, who I would be. I wrote the sorts of reflections I thought Pastor Mark, my boss and mentor, would enjoy. If he did enjoy them, as I remember it, he never told me. He didn’t need to tell me; I knew he enjoyed them because I knew who he was.

When I look back at them now, the devotionals I wrote that summer read like poor derivatives of Jon Acuff’s wit because they were. I hadn’t necessarily been trying to imitate his writing voice; the emulating just happened as I listened to my wife read his words. Writing the kinds of reflections I thought Pastor Mark might enjoy reading happened just as subconsciously. Again, it would be several more years until I could embrace the label, but writing these reflections to bless my boss and mimic Jon Acuff were two of the candles that slowly got scooched together to make me a writer.

Also, during that summer I taught an adult Sunday School class using material I had written. I titled the study “The Bible, Homosexuality, and Culture: Helping Christians Navigate the Issues.” In the class, I had thirty or forty people, including elderly women, reading Romans 1 and lyrics to Lady Gaga’s songs. It was something else.

I had written the study, all thirty thousand words, the previous winter and spring. Someone close to me was wrestling with whether the traditional view of same-sex relationships, for lack of a better phrase, was actually the biblical view. To be candid, though, this person wasn’t really wrestling with the issue anymore. They were already pretty convinced the traditional view of homosexuality was not the biblical view. When my friend first told me this, I didn’t have much to say, but I asked if he would let me think about it and send him an email with a few thoughts. He agreed, so I did.

That email to my friend about the Bible’s view of homosexuality grew into an independent study I conducted under the supervision of one of the New Testament professors at my seminary, a man careful with words, thoughtful about culture, and loyal to Jesus. When I finished the study, I had it printed at a local Kinkos and gave it to my friend. If my friend ever read it, he never told me.

The writing in that curriculum was rough, very rough. I have a copy on my bookshelf that I updated several more times. Through repetition, editing, and my maturation as a writer, each edition of the material improved. While that book remains nothing I’d ever show anyone today, that independent study produced a Sunday school curriculum—the work of researching the issues, writing the study, and teaching the class, all guided by the voice of a thoughtful professor—and became another historical relic from that summer that made me into a writer.

[II]

Not all the influences were as healthy. A year before that internship, in the summer of 2009, Pastor Mark invited me to preach at his church. At the time, they were in a series on the life of Abram. I preached Genesis 16, focusing on the story of Abram, Sarai, and Hagar. Looking back over old material, you always feel like you could have done better. For me, looking back over my Abram and Hagar sermon manuscript makes me cringe. I’m not sure I’d make it through listening to the audio unless someone paid me. The tone hits wrong, like I’m trying to be someone else, someone more brash. After my sermon, I remember a few people in the congregation coming up to tell me they liked the humor. I don’t remember Pastor Mark being one of them. Today, if I were in a congregation and heard a preacher deliver the same sermon I did, I’m not sure I’d approve either. It strikes me as too coarse, too shock-jock.

Of course, every preacher looks back on his early sermons and cringes, even as I assume the young Eliphaz in the book of Job eventually matured and regretted his bombastic zeal without knowledge. Every preacher and every writer wants to be better than we are when we begin, yet all of us can only begin the journey to the land God will show us from the land he already has us.

But the main reason I get a yuck feeling when I think of my early sermons, especially this one, is not just that I was a rookie but that a few of the strongest influences on my writing and preaching voice now make me feel, well, a little yuck. Another Pastor Mark also shaped my early preaching more than I probably realized. The brash, sometimes abrasive preaching voice of Mark Driscoll was the soundtrack to my construction work in St. Louis. A coworker in our engineering office, just a few cubicles down from me, listened all afternoon to conservative political commentator Rush Limbaugh. Because my coworker was hard of hearing, we all listened to Rush. Then I got to thinking about it; since I wanted to be a preacher someday, I should listen to more preachers. So I bought headphones and listened to John Piper, Bryan Chapell, and others, but mostly I devoured the online content from Mark Driscoll and Mars Hill Church.

Mark Kiekhaefer and Mark Driscoll were, and remain, two very different Marks.

I’m not sure whether Jared C. Wilson would use the same language to describe his early ministry influences, but he seemed to hint at it on social media when he shared a picture of four preachers with the caption, “My preaching journey,” and added the comment, “It’s been a wild ride, friends.”[4] The pictures moved from Bill Hybels to Andy Stanley to Mark Driscoll, and finally to Ray Ortlund. You might not be as enmeshed in the evangelical world of American preachers as Wilson and me, but trust me, those images, when compiled in that sequence, communicate a lot.

In Wilson’s thinking, his pictures depict a move from “pragmatic [preaching] to grace-driven,” a transition he has written about at length in books such as The Prodigal Church and The Gospel-Driven Church. But this sequence from the influence of one pastor to another communicates more than a shift from one philosophy of preaching to another. Two of the first three pastors were dismissed from their churches on moral grounds, with Driscoll being one of the two.

Our preaching journeys and writing journeys may be circuitous; indeed, they often are, even as Abram and Sarai’s journey led them from city to city, spending ten years here and ten years there. But when the greatest voices of influence over a Christian writer or preacher (or patriarch and matriarch) are not so Christian, it will eventually show.

The opening of the book of Isaiah comes to mind, with its list of kings: “The vision of Isaiah the son of Amoz, which he saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem in the days of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah, kings of Judah” (Isa. 1:1). These kings tell careful readers a story; they offer insights into the social and spiritual milieu Isaiah and the people inhabited. Mentioning these kings did for Isaiah’s audience what mentioning the names Washington and Lincoln, Nixon and Trump might do for us. They communicate the struggles Christians experience at particular moments in history, and the ways some Christians overcame those struggles and others did not.

William Zinsser, the author of several books, including the popular On Writing Well, testified to the power that our writing communities have over us in his book Writing about Your Life. The book is part memoir and part advice on how to write memoir. Zinsser includes essays and book excerpts from his writing career, then strategically inserts himself back into the prose to speak directly to readers about the decisions that arose while writing, why he made them the way he did, and how writers might approach similar decisions. In the chapter on writing about place, Zinsser includes a travel piece from early in his career. In it, he tells the story of landing in a faraway country and the troubles he had.

Commenting in hindsight on his early writing, he writes, “Today, I can’t imagine subjecting readers to such persiflage: the breezy language, the strenuous reaching for a gag, the racist patronizing of the Sudanese ‘boy.’ ”[5] His wife accompanied him on the trip, and she appears often in the piece, but even the two of them are “reduced to caricatures of irritable tourist, just as the customs inspector [in the story] has been reduced to a cartoon bureaucrat.” Indeed, Zinsser confesses that much of the dialogue was fabricated to conform to the expectations of readers. “It was the literary convention to treat indigenous people as comic props—quaint folk seemingly put on earth to torment Western writers and tourists with their ineptitude. The writers, in turn, deliberately put themselves in preposterous or dangerous situations at the hands of the ‘natives.’ ”

Modern readers would likely notice these flaws without a tour guide highlighting them. The original book containing his travel account, however, received “pleasant reviews” when it came out in the 1950s. “Nobody called it contrived or condescending; it was just another new arrival in a genre that Western readers had long enjoyed.”

And that was the problem. The community of travel writers and of travel readers had created a feedback loop in which xenophobia sold books. Looking back with what Christians would describe as contrition, even repentance, Zinsser concludes, “It had been much too easy for much too long.” Floating downstream through the land of Canaan always is.

[III]

If we read Genesis 16 merely as a passage about succumbing to temptation, we fail to see the culpability of Abram and Sarai not only in the moment when they doubted God’s promise and provision and devised a plan, but in becoming products of their world. Or, to use the language I’ve been using, Abram and Sarai were culpable for the voices of influence they curated and for the real consequences in their actions that resulted from listening to these voices.

If begetting an heir through a maidservant was a commonly accepted practice in Abram’s world for an affluent, powerful man, then Abram was not careful enough in how he curated his influences. He was not careful enough in who he sought to be like, not careful enough in whose voice he gave his ear and his heart to—his long discipleship and catechesis in the long wrong direction. The author of Hebrews states the principle in the positive: “Remember your leaders, those who spoke to you the word of God. Consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith” (Heb. 13:7). In short, first choose your leaders wisely, then listen to their voices carefully.

In a broad sense, the story of Genesis 16, my tale of votive candles becoming one larger candle, and all the ways you might be becoming a writer and being shaped as a writer raise the question of what kind of plausibility structure you build around yourself. We must be careful what sort of community we have around us, because that community, its leaders and followers, will tend to show us what we believe the good life should look like, how the good life can be attained, and what sacrifices are worth making to attain it.

For Abram, over time, what was merely a plausible idea became a reality to inhabit. If we choose the wrong version of the good life for a writer, we may make moral sacrifices to achieve that good life. In fact, as we make these moral sacrifices, they won’t appear to us as moral sacrifices at all, but simply the sort of acceptable behavior one does to get what one wants. The continued influence of Mark Driscoll might lead to following his path of using church funds to buy a spot on the best-seller list, gaming the system through well-orchestrated purchases. Such a move becomes plausible rather than unthinkable only if you surround yourself with people who think this way, people who believe that real authors do these sorts of things to obtain the writer’s good life. This example of Driscoll’s likely strikes you as egregious, and it should. But the publishing empire that was Driscoll & Co. became what it became via incremental justifications—ten years lived listening to the wrong voices. It’s likely Mark Driscoll was, at the outset anyway, called by God to write books, just as Abram was called to have children who had children who had children. But the legitimate calling of God upon a person to write books or preach sermons or start a family must be carried out in the ways of God, with his voice as the loudest. “Doing the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way is not some exotic thing,” writes Francis Schaeffer. “It is having and practicing the mentality which Christ commands.”[6]

The land of Canaan might be a decent way to describe where we all live. Any writer who lives “ten years in the land of Canaan,” as Abram and Sarai did, must be careful about the influences we curate. The words we tinker with will be tinkering with us. “Do not be deceived,” writes the apostle Paul. “Bad company ruins good morals” (1 Cor. 15:33). Social media can give a sense of belonging and purpose, which are critical ingredients in the writing life. Social media also allows writers to share their own work and promote the work of their friends. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this promotion. The infrastructure that connects good authors and good articles with interested readers isn’t inherently wrong. Yet we all know the pitfalls of writing that has been too influenced by social media culture and the pressure it produces. Social media pressures writers to write fast and be current, to give their take on every hot issue. This pressure cooker will shrivel the soul of most writers. Ten years spent writing predominantly in the land of social media will change us. Social media also tempts writers, for example, to spend exorbitant amounts of effort courting the attention of the biggest names on the biggest platforms as a shortcut to success. “This is the only way to get ahead as a writer,” you’re told. “There’s Hagar,” they say. “Just get her attention.”

Yet we need to consider how exhausting this effort is and how it siphons creativity from the work of actually writing words, shifting valuable energy toward the work of promoting words. This is not even to mention how fickle and fleeting the approval of those we consider big names can be. Paul Tripp’s book Dangerous Calling: Confronting the Unique Challenges of Pastoral Ministry has five endorsements on the back cover. Of the five people, three are no longer in ministry because of moral failure. This speaks to the dangers of pastoral ministry—a danger Tripp himself has wonderfully avoided—but it also speaks to the fickleness of writers and publishers who view endorsements from big authors as a shortcut to success. What shall it profit an author to gain the whole pantheon of evangelical endorsements if their voices turn out to be hollow?

You can see the influence of ten years in the land of social media when you see authors constantly running giveaways for those who follow, tag, retweet, and subscribe. A little is not wrong, but the frequency with which some authors run these types of posts might belie the desperation of Sarai. I’ve run these promotions myself because I felt I had to do them . . . or else.

I remember the afternoon I was on a Zoom call with a book marketing guru, and he told me I had to get a thousand more subscribers before I would get a book contract. Hearing that from such an expert sent me into a tailspin. I spent hours thinking about how to offer the perfect lead magnet on my website, how to craft the perfect call to action, and how to write the audience-driven, search-engine-optimized content that could—no matter the cost to me as a writer and, more importantly, as an image bearer—get those thousand subscribers. It was the pits. To please this guru, I made a series of five videos to give away some of my self-published books and get blog subscribers, but by the time I had shared the fourth video, I was so disgusted by the content I had made that I couldn’t bring myself to click publish on the fifth.

Self-publishing itself can—but does not necessarily have to—arise from unhealthy influences and impure motives. At its worst, self-publishing stems from an author’s refusal to wait upon the Lord, unwillingness to be professionally edited, and distaste for working on small, seemingly insignificant projects until the Lord brings the opportunity to work with a traditional publisher.

Influences from our writing community not only shape how we publish and how we promote writing that has already been published. Influences, especially unhealthy ones, can exert pre-publishing pressures as well, even down to how a writer cultivates her craft. We’ve all read wonderful writing on the internet that we could rightly classify as serious writing, in the best sense of the phrase. Still, the medium of the internet itself tends to encourage lazy thinking, short, staccato paragraphs, and clickbait list-articles, or listicles as they are often called (e.g., “7 Ways to Make Passive Income While Writing for a Christian Audience”). Additionally, writing that aims to appeal to search engine algorithms pressures writers to prioritize hot takes of an increasingly polarizing nature. Simply arguing for the talking points of your tribe, whatever you consider your tribe to be, won’t generate as many pageviews and shares as slandering those who are not in your tribe. Writing on the internet would seem to require you to craft prose that shouts louder and more belligerently than the next guy or you won’t be heard above the white noise. “I’m the good guy,” we shout. “They’re the bad guys. And I have the receipts to prove it.”

What then shall we say? Shall we then forsake serious, virtuous writing because it no longer “works”? The apostle Paul would likely say, “May it never be.”

[IV]

I became a writer under the influence of others, as all writers do, whether consciously or subconsciously. The influence of Pastor Mark Kiekhaefer nudged me toward becoming a self-reflective writer, a thoughtful pastor, a careful exegete of Scripture, a loving shepherd, and a preacher who cares about words and stories and the Word and the Story. The humor of Jon Acuff manifested itself in noticeable but mostly benign ways. My seminary professor encouraged me to write about difficult topics and taught me how to tailor my words to a small audience. Then there was Driscoll and his less positive, less benign influence toward bravado, the votive candle that didn’t belong.

We would be naïve to assume that we aren’t constantly shaped by a social and spiritual milieu. Since we are being shaped, we need to take care to choose the right voices. To use biblical language, we become what we behold, whether like idols or like Christ. The psalmist writes of idols, “Those who make them become like them” (Ps. 115:8). But when we behold Christ, we behold our future, not just in the sense of who we will be with in the future but who we will be like in the future. “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another” (2 Cor. 3:18).

Ten years in the land of Canaan, or ten years spent becoming a writer, will change a person for better or worse, depending on which voices speak the loudest to our hearts.

Oh, be careful, little ears, what you hear.

* Photo by Justin Ackison on Unsplash

Endnotes

[1] Many Bible commentators mention how common was the practice of using a maidservant to have more children. For example, Victor P. Hamilton quotes from four ancient sources that mention this: a passage from Hammurabi’s Code, a Nuzi text, an old Assyrian marriage contract, and a neo-Assyrian text. Then Hamilton adds, “All four demonstrate a marriage practice spread over two millennia in which an infertile wife procures a surrogate wife, a maidservant.” The Book of Genesis, Chapter 1–17, The New International Commentary on the Old Testament (Eerdmans, 1990), 445.

[2] Jon Acuff, Stuff Christians Like (Zondervan, 2010), 71.

[3] I’ll just mention one example from that summer of writing. In the final, eleventh week of the internship, I wrote a reflection titled “Interpreting Passages When the Details Leave a Character’s Motive Morally Ambiguous.” If the title strikes you as a ridiculous mouthful, wait until you hear the title of the appendix generated by that reflection: “A Mock Interview with Jacob and Esau: Genesis 33 As a Case Study for Interpreting Passages When the Details Leave a Character’s Motive Morally Ambiguous.” In the appendix I positioned myself, with as much verisimilitude as I could produce, as a police detective, even writing a script in which I questioned each brother, trying to draw out where each brother’s words seemed to lack congruence with their actions. I’m sure the time I gave to this stretched the intentions of the standard internship. But the writing exercise taught me how to proceed when exegetical ambiguity portends homiletical ambiguity.

[4] Jared C. Wilson, @jaredcwilson, X, 6:28 PM, May 10, 2022, https://x.com/jaredcwilson/status/1524154323319791618.

[5] William Zinsser, Writing about Your Life: A Journey into the Past (Marlow & Company, 2004), 73. (The rest of the quotes used from this book are taken from pages 71–74.)

[6] Francis Schaeffer, The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview, Volume Three, A Christian View of Spirituality (Crossway, 1985), 47.

The Ultimate Happily Ever After: A Miscellany of Guest Posts and Interviews

This spring and summer, I had the privilege of partnering with several organizations, writing guest posts and conducting radio and podcast interviews, as well as a full-studio interview that aired on television.

Many of the opportunities were related to the release of my new book, The Restoration of All Things: How the Promise of Christ’s Return Brings Us Comfort Today. In fact, I held a few “Return of Christ” seminars. I don’t have any audio or video from them, but they were so much fun. I affectionately called this my multi-state book tour. It had two stops, and one of the stops was at my own church. I’m hoping someone in Canada will invite me to speak. I’ll gladly go and gladly start advertising my “international book tour.”

But several of the partnerships weren’t about the book, such as the radio interview with Kathy Emmons, which I found delightful. That interview focused on an article I wrote for Christianity Today four years ago. For some reason, CT started resharing it, and it blew up, getting over 50k page views in August. I got a bunch of emails about it. Also, there’s a guest article on Desiring God about the pain of adultery.

I tend not to share these guest posts and interviews on my blog, at least not individually, but I thought the end of the summer would be a good time to group them together in case others might enjoy them.

Thank you to everyone who read and reviewed my book. If you read it, please leave a short Amazon review (here). It really helps. It only takes about five minutes. I’m currently at 37 reviews and really want to get over 50.

Thanks,
Benjamin

Podcast and radio interviews

“Hope Restored | Episode 95: Benjamin Vrbicek,” The Bright Side Podcast, a ministry of Live Faith First, September 2, 2026

“The Ride Home with Kathy Emmons,” The Ride Home with Kathy Emmons, August 31, 2026 (radio interview begins around 1:07)

“The Missions Podcast - Overtime Bonus Interview,” The Missions Podcast, a ministry of ABWE, August 18, 2026

“The Ultimate Happily Ever After: Christ’s Return and the Great Commission,” The Missions Podcast, a ministry of ABWE, August 18, 2026

“Living Like We Really Believe in the Return of Christ,” The Pastor-Writer Podcast, July 29, 2026

“‘Punchy Prose and Godly Promotion’ – J. A. Medders with GCD and Benjamin Vrbicek,” Gospel-Centered Discipleship, June 12, 2026

Guest post articles

“The Ultimate Happily Ever After,” Gospel-Centered Discipleship, June 26, 2026 (book excerpt)

“Benjamin Vrbicek on Why the Church Can’t Lose Sight of Christ’s Return,” Practicing Theology, June 23, 2026

“Communion Points Us Forward and Backward at Once,” Christianity Today, June 23, 2026 (book excerpt)

“The Terrible Possibility of Adultery,” Desiring God, June 13, 2026

“The Comfort of God’s Individual Care,” Gospel-Centered Discipleship, June 3, 2026

“When Christians Forget Their Bright Future,” EFCA Now, Evangelical Free Church of America Blog, May 28, 2026

“Join a Church Before It’s an Emergency,” Christianity Today, May 6, 2026

Jesus Didn’t Return Last Night, and That’s a Bummer

A few days ago, someone told me he looked forward to reading my book about the return of Christ. “But wouldn’t it be awesome,” he added, “if Jesus returned before its release?”

Indeed, it would have been awesome if Jesus had returned last night.

But I woke up this morning to the sound of my iPhone vibrating on the nightstand, not to the thunder of the rider on the white horse splitting the sky.

And that was a bummer.

Perhaps you’ve heard people say they want something to happen before Jesus comes back. Maybe you’ve even said it yourself. “Lord, please come back . . . but could you let me get married first?” “Please come back, Lord, but could you let me have a year of retirement after all these decades of work?” I’m sure some authors might even want their book to come out before Jesus returns, even if they wrote about the glorious return of Christ.

There are better and worse reasons to want Christ to delay. All of us have friends and family members who seem far from the Lord, and it would be right for us to want the Lord to give them more time so that the people we love could find repentance and faith. This is a good reason to want the Lord’s return to delay.

The apostle Peter describes the Lord’s patience in his return for this very reason: “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. The Lord is not slow to fulfill his promise as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing that any should perish, but that all should reach repentance” (2 Peter 3:8–9).

Still, Peter adds to this reason for delay that “the day of the Lord will come like a thief, and then the heavens will pass away with a roar, and the heavenly bodies will be burned up and dissolved, and the earth and the works that are done on it will be exposed” (2 Peter 3:10). That will be a better fireworks show than anything that will happen in Washington, D.C., on America’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday.

I’m so thankful for the partnership with Baker Books on The Restoration of All Things: How the Promise of Christ’s Return Brings Us Comfort Today. From the beginning to the end, they saw what I hoped to do and made it better. After nearly seven years of work, I’m thankful it’s finally available for purchase.

Recently, I did an interview with Baker about the book, talking some about why I wrote it. “For many years,” I said, “Christian teaching about the return of Christ has tended to focus on the controversial matters of the end times. The average Christian now mainly associates the return of Christ with debates, as though the Bible’s clear and repeated teaching on the return of Christ were actually a fuzzy, peripheral doctrine. The writers of the New Testament couldn’t have seen it more differently. They confidently saw Christ’s return as bringing Christians the ultimate happily-ever-after: all of God’s people finally and fully glorifying him and enjoying him forever in a recreated and perfected paradise.” Then I mentioned that when we “relegate the return of Christ to controversy, we lose Christian hope and comfort.”

And it’s this comfort that I want you to have. I believe it’s the comfort God wants you to have, especially if you are suffering. When we suffer, it tends to pull our gaze downward and inward. But God wants us to look up. And when we look up in faith to his return, a resilient hope comes from knowing that if the worst happens in this life—if the shaking building really does fall and collapse on you while you’re inside—there is a life coming with no more sorrow, no more pain.

That will be a wonderful day. Come, Lord Jesus.

* You can read the full interview about the book on Baker’s new practicing theology website, and you can buy the book at most online retailers, including, of course, Amazon. I’d love for you to check it out.

** Photo by Clint Patterson on Unsplash

Join the Launch Team for “The Restoration of All Things”

The other day I saw an Instagram clip of Ann Patchett being interviewed about writing and book marketing. Patchett is an accomplished author and the owner of a large, independent bookstore in Nashville. The interviewer mentioned conventional forms of promoting a book, such as book tours, podcasts, and radio interviews. Then he asked Patchett, “What actually sells a book?”

“I can give you the definitive answer to that question,” she said. “It is not a book tour, an ad, a radio show, a television show, a celebrity book club pick. The only thing that actually sells books is a person reading a book and turning around to their friend and saying, ‘Oh my,* you have to read this book.’ Books are a word-of-mouth product like nothing else.” Then she added the insightful observation that she believes “the experience of loving a book is not complete until you have turned around and said to someone, ‘You have got to read this.’”

It’s interesting how similar her last line is to a famous C. S. Lewis quote. “I think we delight to praise what we enjoy because the praise not merely expresses but completes the enjoyment . . . . It is not out of compliment that lovers keep on telling one another how beautiful they are.” Then he added, “The delight is incomplete till it is expressed” (Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms). Lewis gives several examples of completing joy by expressing joy, and the first example is about a book: “It is frustrating to have discovered a new author and not to be able to tell anyone how good he is.”

Fascinating, right? In all our ways of marketing our books and gaming the algorithms, the most important step in actually selling books is word-of-mouth: when one human likes something so much that they complete their joy by expressing it to other humans.

I think about this a lot in the context of promoting church events. Ministry leaders want their pastors to announce their events from the stage. And I understand why. It does help. But the main way it helps, I think, is by making the event legitimate in people’s minds. Knowing an event exists, however, is not the main reason people go to an event. I can tell you that the definitive reason that people go to a Bible study, a men’s breakfast, an evangelism seminar, or a women’s retreat is not an announcement from the stage or a blurb in the bulletin, but when one person turns to another person and says, “Will you go with me?”

And I guess, according to Patchett, this is what also gets people to buy books.

So, here’s my question: Would you be willing to help me get others to buy my book, The Restoration of All Things, by joining the launch team? I wrote the book to help offer more hope to people’s lives. And I don’t know anyone who couldn’t benefit from more hope.

I’m setting up a launch team to spread the word. You can sign up here.

When you join some book launch groups, the authors or publishers often give away copies of the book. I’m sorry, but I’m not in a place to buy books for fifty people. I want to do that! I just can’t.

Instead, I thought of two different “giveaway” options that I think most people might enjoy better. Everyone who joins the launch team will get either 1) a phone call to chat with me or 2) a personally recorded section of the audiobook.

If you choose the phone call, there will be no official agenda for the call. If you want to tell me something you liked about the book or didn’t like—or ask something about the book—then that’s great. I’ll be up for that. And if you just want us to get to know each other or catch up and talk about life and ministry and writing or whatever, that’s great too.

I know some of you who read my blog are friends and family, so a phone call might not be that special. Indeed, I know I’m not that special to anyone! That’s why I also have the option of a personally recorded section of the audiobook. Just pick your favorite section, and I’ll send you a recording of it with a personal note about that section. You can build a fire and sit and listen, if you like. Doesn’t that sound pleasant? (By the way, the publisher Baker Books hired a professional voice actor, as they are called, to read the book, which is why a reading of the whole book by me doesn’t exist. So you’ll have something no one else has.)

In summary, here are the requirements to join the launch team: A willingness to…

1. Buy and read the book

2. Share about the book on social media (and tag me if you want to)

3. Write a super short Amazon review

4. Most importantly, tell a real human about the book in a real, in-person conversation

Once you do that, we’ll just set up a 15-20 minute phone call to talk or I’ll ask you for your favorite section of the book so I can send you an audio file of me reading it.

Are you up for joining the team to spread the word? It would mean a lot to me if you did.

* If you watch the Patchett clip, know that she says OMG, which I omitted when I typed her answer.

** Photo by Dominic Kurniawan Suryaputra on Unsplash

Soon and Very Soon: The Restoration of All Things

A gospel song from the 1970s belts out the lines, “Soon and very soon we are goin’ to see the King.” I’ve been singing it over and over for the last few months. It’s super catchy and happy and reminds me of the goodness of the return of Christ.

If you also want it stuck in your head, you can listen to the original singer and songwriter, Andraé Crouch, perform it live here, or you can watch another more modern version here, still featuring Crouch, but also with CeCe Winans. “No more dyin’ there, we are goin’ to see the King, Hallelujah, Hallelujah, we are goin’ to see the King!

Try to sing that and not smile. You can’t do it.

This is a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot—not just for the last few months, but for the last few years. Soon and very soon, the book I wrote on this topic, The Restoration of All Things, will finally be released by Baker Books. Launch day is less than a month away. But I actually wrote the first chapters of this book over six years ago! It took a while to get it published, but that’s another story.

Today, I’d love to invite you to pre-order the book. I know that’s a few dollars, and I feel weird asking. But I really believe in the book’s theme, specifically that remembering the return of Christ pours hope into a Christian’s life. And who couldn’t use more hope in their life?

You can pre-order the book at a number of places, Amazon or Baker Books, for example. The book releases on June 23, but pre-orders likely ship early, maybe even a week. And this might not be apparent to the average reader, but I’m told that the Amazon algorithm gets a lot of “juice” from pre-orders, so if you’re going to get it anyway, buy early and often, as they say.

On the Baker Books website, you can click the “look inside” button to read the entire first chapter. I have also listed the table of contents below. Most books tend to get less engaging as the pages and chapters progress. I think this book gets better and better toward the end.

And if you’d like to learn more about a seminar we’re hosting at church on this topic, we built an information page with all the details (here). It’s on Saturday, June 27. We’ll sing together some of the old hymns about the return of Christ, along with some of the best new ones. I’ll also teach two sessions about it. There’s an optional lunch and Q&A for those who have time. If you live in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania or want to take a road trip, registering for the seminar is a great way to get a free copy of the book (register here). If you’ve already pre-ordered, then you’ll have two copies: one to keep and one to give away!

Thank you,
Benjamin

Table of Contents

Introduction: This Train Is Bound for Glory    9

    1. Feasting for the Famished    35
     2. Rest for the Weary    51
     3. Bodies for the Broken    71
     4. Family for the Forsaken    93
     5. Justice for the Wronged    111
     6. Glorification for Strugglers    131

Conclusion: Loving His Appearing    151

Discussion Questions    161

‍

* Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash (with Baker Books cloud image added)

Naked Books Come into This World, and Naked They Return

Before I bought, read, and loved Andrew Peterson’s book Adorning the Dark, I held the book and admired it. What I admired most—before even reading it—was not the cover, wonderfully and gloriously stunning as the cover is. What I admired most was that Peterson had sent the book into the world without a foreword, an afterword, or a single endorsement.

I stood there, puzzling and pondering, feeling a little like the Grinch, looking at every Who down in Whoville and mumbling, “It came without ribbons! It came without tags! It came without packages, boxes or bags!”

The book almost seemed naked. Even though I had bought it, I wondered how a book so improperly clothed would reach readers and how offensive it was that Peterson could be so comfortable in just his own skin while the rest of us want-to-be authors would feel so insecure.

This was the summer of 2020. Peterson’s book had been published the previous year by B&H. Surely I’ve read many books that came into the world without endorsements and forewords. But Peterson’s is the first book I consciously recall noticing the absence of endorsements and forewords. This was over five years ago, but I can remember exactly where I stood in my church office, how I stood looking out the window, and how I thought about what courage it must have taken him to make this choice.

I say “courage,” but let me be clear that I don’t really know. I don’t know Peterson, and I don’t know how the conversation with his publisher went. Courage is the virtue I like to think bubbled up from his faith in God. But maybe Peterson asked every famous person he knew, and they all said no. (I’m confident this didn’t happen.) Or maybe the publisher told him not to seek endorsements for their own reasons, as a kind of experiment. Or maybe forgoing endorsements was just an idea Peterson had because he’s concerned about how fleeting and shallow the praise of men can be.

I don’t know which combination of the many possible reasons it happened. But what I’m highlighting is that it did happen. I stood there, looking at the book and thinking how thankful I was that the decision had been made. Maybe, I wondered, if in the future more authors and publishers would follow their example. Maybe endorsements don’t move the needle on book sales the way publishers once thought they did.

At this point, I’ve read so many endorsements that I even know the tropes. I call one of them the “whether you” statement. “Whether you’re a single mother or a Wall Street tycoon, this book about the prophet Ezekiel is for you.” And it’s not just beginning authors who use them. They look different for established authors, but they too seek blurbs from organizations they hope will confer credibility with their potential readers, credibility they hope will translate into buyability. “A heartwarming book,” says the LA Times. “A must read,” says the Washington Post.

In the future probably everyone will read fewer endorsements, and tropes will become less obvious. Last January, The Guardian ran a story about how one major publishing company would stop the practice of endorsements on some of its imprints. Sean Manning, president and publisher at Simon & Schuster, noted the time and effort endorsements drain from everyone—authors, editors, agents, and publishers. New authors should be working on their craft, and established authors should be writing the next book. Manning even noted that the kind of favor-trading involved in blurbs “creates an incestuous and unmeritocratic literary ecosystem that often rewards connections over talent.” Yuck.

Another reason the trend of seeking endorsements is fading, particularly in a Christian context, is that publishers have had to scrap so many books because the authors of the forewords and endorsements have since discredited themselves. I think of the book Dangerous Calling by Paul Tripp, which addresses the many dangers, toils, and snares of pastoral ministry. Ironically, of the original five endorsements on the back cover, three of the men have been removed from pastoral ministry for moral failure. I also think of the images that circulated online years ago showing a dumpster full of books by Mark Driscoll.

For the last few years, I’ve chuckled at the annual “Christian Book Endorsement Awards” Adam Thomas posts on X. I have no idea how he gathers this information, but he somehow does enough research to bestow awards for endorsements in super quirky, humorous categories. At the start of the long thread in 2024, he reminds readers that the all-time record for the most endorsements is still held by John Frame’s Systematic Theology, which has an incredible 69 endorsements. He notes other categories, such as “Most Endorsements from Australians” and “Most Endorsements from Immediate family members.”

I laughed out loud when I saw who won this year’s “Most Impressive Endorsement-to-Pages Ratio” title. It was Will Dobbie’s short but helpful book, A Time to Mourn: Grieving the Loss of Those Whose Eternities Were Uncertain. I laughed because I was one of the endorsers! Apparently, there were fifteen others, which, Thomas tells readers, meant one endorsement for every 4.38 pages.

When beginning authors seek endorsements, whether they are aware of it or not, something like “cantilevering” occurs. A cantilever is a beam that extends from a structure but is supported on only one side. Picture laying a beam of wood across a tabletop. You can keep scooting the beam further off the edge of the table until nearly half of the beam hangs over the edge. You can push the beam even further off the table if you press down on the table-side of the beam to anchor it.

When I use the idea of “endorsements as cantilevering,” I mean that authors try to cantilever as far as possible through their social networks—their tabletop, if you will—to reach people further along in their careers. And if you have a friend who knows a friend, it’s like anchoring the beam on one side to extend how far you can reach. Sometimes you can reach far enough to get a great endorsement, and sometimes they are too far out of reach.

Most authors I know find the process all so stressful. About a year ago, I teased an author friend about getting endorsements for her next book. This time, she told me, the publisher didn’t want endorsements, which made her very glad.

The stress of reaching for the stars, however, isn’t the only dynamic that happens with endorsements, and it’s not always the main dynamic. There’s also the sweetness of friendships. Sometimes an endorsement becomes precious to an author, not because it will potentially sell another book or because it stokes the author’s ego, but rather because a dear friend of the author took hours to read his book and another hour to write something nice, and all that time and effort became an expression of kindness beyond words.

This is a long post to say that later this summer, when my first traditionally published book releases, The Restoration of All Things: How the Return of Christ Brings Promise for Today, the book won’t have a single endorsement or foreword. And just to be clear, I did try to cantilever toward someone to write the foreword. Even with the anchor of a friend of a friend, I reached too far and heard, “Thanks, but no.”

After that attempt, my publisher told me endorsements wouldn’t be needed for the book, and that made me sad. Sure, I was sad that I might lose some potential sales, and that scared me. So much fear swirls around the publishing wilderness that even strong relationships between authors and publishers can seem fragile, making it impossible not to be affected. So that kind of “will my book ever sell” sadness hit me.

Far more than a loss in potential sales, however, I was sad because for a dozen years I’ve been writing and making author friends, and it would have been a kindness beyond words to receive their encouragement.

And yet the longer I’ve thought about it, the less sad and the more thankful I’ve become. I’m not wasting my time chasing endorsements, and neither are more established authors. So there’s that. But beyond the time saved, I’m thankful for the sobering reminder that all books are like grass, here today and out of print tomorrow. Only the one book that needs no endorsements remains forever.

In a few months, the publisher will mail me my first box of author copies. Maybe I’ll post a video of me opening that box, a trope I might just embrace. Or maybe I won’t post that video and leave the sacred moment to be just that.

Regardless, one day my new, shiny book will go out of print. I hope and pray it’s not after the first printing. But all of that is in the Lord’s hands now. And it always was. Because—in truth—with or without endorsements, books come into the world and return as people do: naked.

* Photo adapted from Eduardo Barrios on Unsplash

Writing as Driving: Some Reflections on Writing

I’ve been blogging online and writing guest posts for over a decade. Over the years many of the people who have subscribed to my blog know me well. Others know of me only from something I’ve written or from belonging to the same online writing community.

Because this second group of people makes up a large share of readers, I’ve been thinking for a while that it might be helpful to do a more “introduction”- type post.

Trey Perrot is a writer and non-staff pastor at his local church in Iowa. He recently asked me a bunch of questions about life and writing, and I thought it might help to share my answers with you. If you’d like to read more from Trey, you can find him on Substack.

Below is our interview. In it, I share a quote from Flannery O’Connor that I’ve been thinking about recently and explain why driving is a helpful metaphor for the kind of results Christian authors should hope for in their writing.

*    *    *

[Trey] Tell us a little about yourself, Benjamin. 

[Benjamin] I’m a pastor at a local church, a husband, and father to six children. They range in age from 8 to 19. At our house, we’re probably a bit too dedicated to sports. My wife and I met on the track and field team in college, so it’s always been part of our lives. I grew up in Missouri, but my pastoring has brought us to central Pennsylvania for the last dozen years. Growing up, I never thought I’d become a pastor or a writer. I used to hate reading! Following God has been full of surprises.

[Trey] In your website, Fan and Flame, you say, “As I write, I’m trying to keep my fire alive. But I also want to write to fan into flame your joy and passion and hope.” When did you start writing and how did it help you? At what point did you think your writing might help other people's passion and joy and hope? 

About fifteen years ago, the church I was at needed curriculum related to membership. So I put it together. That experience—which followed years in the crucible of seminary and a few other small writing projects—caused me to enjoy writing and see some of the ways the Lord used my words to help others.

[Trey] As you look back across your blog, books, and guest pieces, which piece of writing felt the most spiritually formative for you personally? Why? 

[Benjamin]  I could mention a dozen moments along the way, but I’ll just highlight the first blog post I ever wrote, a piece I called “Fresh Words, Fresh Language, Fresh Blood.” In that post, I quote someone I might not quote now, but even as I went back again and glanced at it, I still remember how God was stirring my heart to write about Christianity, not in lifeless, expected language but in accessible and riveting language. I like to think I do this better now than when I first started. Still, I feel I have more ground to take.

[Trey] You’ve been writing extensively about eternal hope and Christ’s return. What started your interest in that topic? What has been one surprising truth you’ve learned? How has the process of writing on this topic shaped and formed you? 

Buy on Amazon

This is a long story, which I share early in the book, The Restoration of All Things. In short: A few years ago, our church denomination (The Evangelical Free Church of America) changed one word in our statement of faith concerning the end times. We became more open to the four orthodox views of Christ’s return, instead of committing to just one or two. I was the first pastor in our denomination to be ordained after this change, which sounds neat. But it actually meant my ordination was highly scrutinized. That process deepened my love for this often overlooked doctrine, not merely from an academic perspective but from a pastoral one. Having a vibrant belief that Christ shall come with trumpet sound can sustain us through many trials.
 

[Trey] Many writers struggle to hold together calling and discipline. What practices or habits have most helped you keep writing even as other responsibilities compete for your creative attention?

[Benjamin] I think we all struggle with this.

There’s a line from Flannery O’Connor that I’ve been thinking about lately. Regarding the limitations of her health and how it affected her writing, she wrote to a friend, “What you have to measure out, you come to observe closer.” The idea is that when you have a limited amount of something valuable, you tend to use it more carefully, and that carefulness often improves the final result.

I’ve always tried to set specific times for writing. Those times have moved over the years. Currently, I have a longer session on Wednesday mornings, lasting about 3 or 4 hours, and a one-hour block on Sunday afternoons. Any other writing I manage to do is a bonus. However, carefully “measuring out” writing time seems to, in an unexpected way, improve both quality and quantity. Like most writers, including apparently O’Connor, I wish I had more.

[Trey] When you receive feedback about clarity in your writing or public communication, how do you decide what to embrace and what to discard? How do you make sure that “input” doesn’t change your voice?

[Benjamin] When it comes to critique of my writing after publication, I don’t get much. Beforehand, there’s a lot of private feedback from editors, though. I’ve heard you should set your default to “yes” when receiving corrections from editors. This approach has served me well. I try to push back on every tenth edit or so, just to show that I actually care about the minutia.

When it comes to preaching and speaking, I receive more feedback after the fact. I try to take that to heart as best as I can, believing people mean well even if it comes across as testy. Recently, just a few comments about how fast I preach led to a lot of rethinking (here).

To be honest, I don’t always accept feedback as well as I should. Ungodly discouragement comes far more often to me than ungodly confidence. But God has been kind to bring growth over the last decade. Leading a church kinda forces the issue.

[Trey] You’ve been involved with writing for years. If you could go back to your earliest posts, what would you tell that younger version of yourself about writing?

[Benjamin] All the publication angst isn’t helping your soul. To borrow from Jesus, I’d say, Do the writing work for a decade with your left hand, not worrying so much about what your right hand is doing.

[Trey] You’ve been an editor and writer for online articles. In your experience, what’s one thing that makes short-form articles most helpful? 

[Benjamin] The website I used to work for and the types of articles I tend to write are what would be considered “long-form.” But I get what you mean. Even a longer article is still twenty times shorter than a book and much shorter than even chapters. Probably the best aspect of website articles—whether short-form articles below 750 words or longer ones around 2,000 words—is the ability to provide godly “nudges.”

As we follow Christ, we need some “shoves,” those big events and big moments of transformation. But more frequently we need little nudges to keep us on the right path. Think of it like driving. Sometimes you must really turn the wheel sharply to stay on the road. But most of the time, you just need frequent but little course corrections to stay safely in your lane or to follow the gentle curve of the road. These adjustments may seem small and insignificant, but without them, cars crash. I think of articles like that. This approach level-sets expectations while also encouraging me that the lonely and laborious work still matters.

* Photo by Zoshua Colah on Unsplash

Godly Euphoria & the Christian Writer

Dear Reader: This is part of a longer project I’m working on related to the life of Abraham and the journey of Christian writers. I know these 2,400 words exceed the bounds of a normal blog post, but I wanted to share them together. Thanks for reading, Benjamin

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“And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Genesis 12:2–3

To grab only one half of the famous lines from Dickens, it is the best of times for Abram, the age of wisdom, the epoch of belief, and the season of light. The wind and flame of God’s Spirit carry him. Downhill. With a breeze. In the shade. Filling his belly, lifting his eyes, and quickening his heart with godly euphoria.

Abram knows he did not earn an audience with his creator through his good works; he receives God’s presence by grace alone. God sought him when a stranger. God pours promises upon Abram so rich and layered and unexpected that they surpass anything Abram’s prayers could have ever asked for or imagined. He considers it unmerited favor. The unexpected call of God is changing his identity.

For all the challenges inherent in forsaking the threefold cord of country, kindred, and father’s house, God promises a great nation, a great name, and blessings as far as the eye can see across all his posterity. For all the paternal protection that Abram counts as loss for the sake of following God, he finds a better protection provided by God, his Father. Indeed, how any outsider responds to Abram—God’s newly appointed representative and missionary to the nations—becomes the touchstone for how God will respond to the individual: If you bless Abram, you get blessings from God; if you curse him, you get curses from God. What a privileged position and sacred identity.

Then there is his name, a great name, God calls it. His name means “exalted father,” but when the Bible talks about a great name, it’s not the letters, syllables, or sounds that matter most. Instead, a name reflects one’s reputation and character. “A good name,” we’re told in Proverbs, “is to be chosen rather than great riches” (Prov. 22:1). The integrity inside you matters more than the money inside your bank account.

Abram’s riches are such that he will one day possess both a great name and riches. But even now, here at ground zero, we see a stark contrast to those in Genesis 11 who wanted to build a tower to reach heaven and make a name for themselves. What they failed to build with their works, Abram receives as a gift. Good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over—plops into his lap.

It is Abram’s spring of hope. He has everything before him. He is going direct to heaven, as Dickens wrote.

*     *     *

I’ve written parts of all my books in a university library just outside town. The best time to go is between Christmas and mid-January. During this period, students on break leave the campus almost empty. And when I visit during the summer, it feels nearly as deserted. You can sit alone in the quiet library to write, dream, and feel carried along by the wind and flame of the Spirit in a space as wide and tall as an auditorium and filled with rows of bookshelves reaching as high as a basketball hoop. You don’t want it to end. This is more than just a good writing day. It embodies the hope of God calling you toward something great, something that matters, a new identity.

In the introvert oasis of an empty university library, when you occasionally get up to walk around and stretch your legs, you pass by all the books and let your eyes behold all the spines and all the titles and all the authors and all the sections. A jazz music section catches your eye because you know nothing about jazz, yet the topic apparently warrants a whole wall of books. Many such sections exist, covering particular genres of knowledge of which you know not the slightest sliver.

Near the table where you work, you notice three bookshelves holding sixty-two thick books about Bob Dylan. Fascinating, you think.

This particular library is in a university with Christian roots, and so vast biblical sections also catch your eye as you walk past them. You see the huge sections of monographs on nuanced specialties, such as Acadian archaeology and commentaries on Zephaniah, a biblical book with only three chapters that warrants a dozen commentaries as thick as your wrist.

As you sit there and write the book you feel called by God to write, you feel the wind at your back as you run downhill with your heart quickened by, you hope, godly euphoria. You sit there writing, knowing that you participate in the same stream of common grace and grand knowledge that carried intellectual giants such as Socrates and Aristotle. As different as your life might be from hers, you understand why Maya Angelou’s caged bird sings. You realize that the same God of grace who called Athanasius and Augustine and Anselm to write words that changed the world also works within you.

It is the spring of hope with everything before you.

When I began following Christ in college, the hatred I harbored toward books changed. As I read and studied Christianity—at first informally on my own and later in seminary—new joys, passions, and hopes bubbled up within me, as if a chemical reaction were cooked over a Bunsen burner. Listening to good sermons, I felt God was calling me to preach. This call to preach seemed to pounce on me, irrevocably so, while listening to other men preach and feeling my mind and affections doused in a kind of spiritual kerosene so that I just knew I wanted to, and in fact had to, be involved in preaching to others.

During the early days of this feeling, if I could have hit pause during a sermon by any one of the many gifted preachers I was listening to, I would have described the experience this way: “What God is doing right now, through that guy, on that stage, behind that pulpit, as he explains that passage and the glory of God and the beauty of the gospel, with those words and those gestures, and that tone, and with all of that love and passion and urgency such that my heart is prodded and my mind is riveted, well, someday I just have to be involved in sharing that good news with others.”

This is what I mean when I say that my calling to preach came not only through opportunities to preach but also, even predominantly, through having it done to me. David Hansen, in his book The Art of Pastoring, describes his call in a similar way. As he heard a particular pastor preach, he says it seemed “the power, the conviction and the tender mercy of the gospel made the human sanctuary resonate like Pavarotti getting overtones from the rafters.” He continues, “I didn’t know what it was that he did. I just knew that if what he did was what pastoral ministry was, I would be a pastor,” he writes. “What I was made to be was being jangled by what I saw him doing.” I, too, know this feeling, this calling, this jangling.

And this rendition of the experience of the call to preach also doubles as my experience of being called to write, which came not long after. In his insightful book on the craft of writing, Stephen King said it this way: “Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing—of being flattened, in fact—is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you” (On Writing, tenth anniversary ed., 146). Through reading good writing, I felt God calling me to write. The reaction felt explosive, if only in my heart—or, to use King and Hansen’s metaphors, flattened and jangled. The words from Scripture had this effect on me, but also the writing of other gifted authors, especially but not exclusively Christian authors.

When did the wind of God’s favor first sweep you into the calling to write? When did words first become a thing for you? Which authors has God used to jangle your human sanctuary with overtones from the rafters?

In my office I have a few bookshelves. In the middle of all the shelves, I keep books from my favorite authors, those whom God has used most to call me into writing and to keep me writing. When any of those authors publishes a new book, I buy it, read it, and add it to their collection. Perhaps you do something similar. God often seems to call us into the craft this way.

This encouragement from other writers that compels us to engage the craft of writing and own our identity as writers, is true not only at the outset, but something that can help us in seasons of dryness. The call of God is meant to keep us moving forward, not just when we feel euphoric, but also when we feel writer’s block and frustration. During seasons of writing dryness, when ideas don’t seem to flow and every paragraph you write seems to stink, revisit those early voices that called you further up and further in. Set aside your own writing for a while and return to the words that remind you of the love you had at first.

Over the course of your writing life, the authors who most flatten and jangle you may change. You might begin enamored with the aesthetics of the Puritans and their concrete, imagistic style. Later, however, you may still admire their truthfulness and theological precision but also grow to prefer writing less wordy, writing that some might call less flowery, ornate, and affected. That’s okay. In this season you might come to prefer more the staccato writing of short, internet-sized paragraphs. That’s okay too. When God first called you to write, you might not have appreciated the beauty of a Shakespearean sonnet or the crisp euphony of “shook foil” in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. But perhaps now you do. Writerly tastebuds change.

An empty library might not be as enjoyable to you as the din of a coffee shop. Maybe you feel God’s pleasure when you write at home with the Interstellar soundtrack playing in the background. Maybe you sit by a stream and write with analog tools, the way everyone used to write. The point is not so much to copy what you perceive God uses to stir creative juices in others, but to embrace what God uses to stir creative juices in you.

Of course, it’s possible to elevate our reverence for great authors too much, to hold them so highly in our hearts that we always feel as though we write in their shadow and as poor derivatives of their work. We can taste and see so much truth, goodness, and beauty in the writing of our heroes that we fail to see what God is doing through our own writing. I know this feeling. We all do. It’s not wrong in itself to be intimidated by the greats, but, I believe, it is wrong by itself. The feeling of inadequacy should not be the main point we receive from the greats. This feeling of being overshadowed often appears to arise from a place of humility: Who am I to write words that matter? we think. But this has more to do with our pride and unbelief than our humility. It has more to do with looking at ourselves than at God. The promise Abram experienced, and the hope it produced in him, came from looking away from himself and to God.

As Christian writers, we don’t want to conflate the enjoyment of a good writing day with the hope that comes from the promises of God. Christian writers must remember that God’s lasting objective promises are far more important than our changing subjective feelings toward those same promises. Because Christ lived, died, rose, and promises to return, all our writing labor in the Lord can never be in vain (1 Cor. 15:58). That’s a promise true on the days we feel that it is true, and the promise remains true on the days we don’t feel that it is true. On the dark-cloud days that we hate writing and think we’re wasting our time following God, the sun still shines behind the somber sky.

For these reasons, we cannot determine our calling based solely on feelings. At the same time, our feelings do matter. Our aesthetic sensibilities and the joy God gives us as we read other authors, along with the joy we feel when we finally craft a perfect sentence, do matter. God is often pleased to use these to call us into a life of words and to sustain us in a life of words. It also seems responsible, wise, and obedient to revisit these greats every now and then to be flattened and jangled afresh.

People sometimes ask me why I left engineering to become a preacher and writer. They usually want a soundbite answer. I’m never sure how to say it briefly. Maybe someday I will figure out how. I’m sure many asked Abram why he left Ur and wanted a soundbite answer. The best way I know to say that God called me into writing is to say that it had something to do with vinegar and baking soda, corked and shaken. God’s call had then and has now something to do with the best of times, the epoch of belief, the season of light, the spring of hope.

 * Photo by Matthew Feeney on Unsplash

The Restoration of All Things: Cover, Title, and Table of Contents

About six years ago—almost to this exact week in October—something unexpected happened. I wrote an article for a website, and a publisher asked if I had any books I wanted to write. I for sure wanted to write books, but I couldn’t say one book idea burned in me beyond all others.

So I thought. I prayed. I consulted friends. And out came an idea for a book about the hope of the return of Christ, especially for those who are suffering. I won’t go into the details here about why that topic burned in a way others didn’t, but it did—and still does.

Well, that publisher initially showed enthusiasm but in the end didn’t want to sign the book. And that’s okay. It’s part of the process. By the way, I submitted the proposal the week Covid hit America, so it probably wasn’t the best timing for a new author, although I had no idea about the global disruption headed for us all. No one did but the Lord.

Every six months or so I would pull out the material for that book, see if I could make it better, and try again with another publisher. I got close a few times, but still no takers. Then, just last year, not one but two publishers wanted the book. Had I changed as an author? Had the publishing landscape changed? Had something else changed? Again, only the Lord knows. I’m thankful Baker Books picked up the book, has done a fantastic job, developing the content, and will release it on June 23, 2026.

Many of you have supported me over the years. You’ve read articles and other books, which has been wonderful. This next book, however, is being published by a traditional publisher, which is a first for me. I understand that doesn’t mean a lot to everyone, and for some, traditional publishing carries too much weight. But this is something I’m really excited about. If I were to use a sports analogy, it would be like playing college football at a small school and then getting drafted by a professional team.

Today I’d love to share the official title, cover, and table of contents with you.

This post isn’t about pre-orders or sales. That comes later. And I don’t actually feel greasy about marketing. Again, with so many of you encouraging me and wanting to help, it will be easy to post instructions on how to buy the book when the time comes.

For now, maybe you could just smile with me.

Title

The Restoration of All Things: How the Promise of Christ’s Return Brings Us Comfort for Today

Cover

Table of Contents

Introduction: This Train Is Bound for Glory
   1     Feasting for the Famished
   2     Rest for the Weary
   3     Bodies for the Broken
   4     Family for the Forsaken
   5     Justice for the Wronged
   6     Glorification for Strugglers
Conclusion: Loving His Appearing

Small Group Discussion Questions

* Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash

Persevering in Ministry and Publishing: A Podcast Interview

Every so often, I share a post on my blog about a recent podcast interview. This spring, my friends Josh Ott and Emily Gardner invited me to be on their show Church Chat. The three of us have known each other for the last twelve years because we are part of the same region in our church denomination, the Evangelical Free Church of America.

You can listen to the podcast episode here, “Persevering in Ministry and Publishing with Benjamin Vrbicek” (Apple, Spotify, and YouTube).

Their Church Chat podcast can be, admittedly, a little goofy. I actually like that about them. They started the interview with an extended game of “two truths and a lie.” This might give you the impression we never get to a more substantive conversation. But that would be wrong. We explored some of the hardest questions in ministry. For example, how do you keep going in life and ministry when you don’t think you can?

Many of my worst ministry challenges occurred in the first summer of Covid. Thankfully, nearly five years have passed since that difficult season. I did not realize the extent to which Josh, one of the co-hosts, had faced hardships in his church, which even led him to wrestle with his call to pastoral ministry. On one fateful Christmas Eve, Josh’s wife looked at him and said something like, “Why aren’t you getting ready?” Josh told his wife, “Because I’m not going.” He was supposed to preach at that service, by the way.

Josh did go to church and he did preach. But after that night, he took drastic steps over the next few months to pursue health.

If there is a common thread in each of our experiences of struggle and perseverance in ministry, it is the importance of churches having godly, volunteer pastor-elders. Were it not for the humility, kindness, and wisdom of the leaders at each of our churches, those seasons might have unfolded differently, and perhaps neither of us would be pastoring.

In the interview, I mention several ways my friend Mike Grenier helped me, a volunteer pastor at our church at the time. I did not get to mention it in the interview, but there were also several long phone calls with my dad during those seasons. He kept bringing up the ministry metaphor of an ox with too much weight on his shoulders. “The problem isn’t with the ox or the work of plowing,” he said. “It’s just there is way too much load on the kart.” The metaphor helped me and our leadership team reevaluate what a pastor should do amid all the work he could do.

In the interview, I also discuss writing and publishing, sharing my perspective on “starting small in publishing.” I affectionately, though typically only privately, refer to starting small as guerrilla warfare. The metaphor sorta works, sorta doesn’t. I’ll let you parse it out.

Before concluding this post, I would like to share a brief collection of other life and writing updates.

The last six weeks have been some of the most intense yet also meaningful times in recent years. My oldest daughter just graduated from high school; my wife and I completed another successful season of coaching track and field; three staffing roles changed at our church as we commissioned one associate pastor to take a new position elsewhere; I finished writing the first draft of my book; and in a few days, it’s our twentieth wedding anniversary. A lot of normal things occurred too, like cars visiting the mechanic, and another attempt by me to explore once again the chronic, mysterious pain I experience with food, this time with a new doctor.

Speaking of the book, I am incredibly grateful that after five years of hard work, I submitted my manuscript on the hope of Christ’s return. This will be my first traditionally published book. The manuscript is currently with the acquisition editor, and the initial feedback has been encouraging. I have already finished my part in supporting the marketing team, and they have begun developing the official title and cover. Sometime this winter, Baker Books will open the book for pre-order, and, Lord willing, you can have the book in the summer of 2026. Publishing has a long arc.

In the meantime, I am taking the month of June to reboot my website and email system. More on that later. I will also be giving away a short ebook that I’m calling Lord, Haste the Day: 49 Bible Passages to Fill You with Hope about the Return of Christ. During the research process, I had compiled a list of nearly one hundred passages related to the end times, and it was a blessing to spend a few months reading over them in my morning devotionals. I hope sharing the ebook will help others eagerly await his second coming (Heb. 9:28).

* Photo by John Nupp on Unsplash

Book Launch: Broken but Beautiful

People have been pointing out church-hurt for a long time. Over fifty years ago, Martyn Lloyd-Jones wrote, “With much of this criticism of the Church one has, of course, to agree. There is so much that is wrong with the Church—traditionalism, formality and lifelessness and so on—and it would be idle and utterly foolish to deny this” (Preaching and Preachers, 8). I suppose we could grab similar quotes from the Reformation era or any era in church history. We can even find similar sentiments in the New Testament itself. “But in the following instructions I do not commend you, because when you come together,” Paul wrote to the church in Corinth, “it is not for the better but for the worse” (1 Cor. 11:17). Indeed, over two and a half thousand years ago, God told his people, “I hate, I despise your feasts, and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies” (Amos 5:21).

Certainly, there is a lot of junk that happens in the local church. But please also remember that God still uses the church to bless the world in beautiful ways. He may discipline his church to make her more holy, but he loves his church. His sons and daughters are always his sons and daughters. God even calls the church his bride, dying to purchase her and make her radiant. And one day we will see her in all her splendor.

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I worked with Gospel-Centered Discipleship to bundle some of our favorite essays about the beauty of the bride of Christ and put them into a book called Broken but Beautiful. The book launches today!

We adapted the book’s title from the first article by Glenna Marshall. She learned in deeper ways the beauty of the church during the unexpected death of a church member and the way her church served together in the days that followed.

As I think back to my own life, I think of a time sixteen years ago when my oldest son was born. The birth did not go well. There was an evening and morning of hard labor, after which the umbilical cord wrapped around my son’s neck, and they did an emergency c-section. Mom and baby, in the end, were fine—praise God. But recovery from the trauma induced by a night of labor and the emergency surgery lasted weeks. Then postpartum depression bit like a rabid dog that wouldn’t let go. But before postpartum, right when we got home from the hospital, everyone got the flu, including everyone who came to stay with us and help. Yet this is the time, my wife and I often say, that we learned when the church was the church. So many people helped and cooked and cleaned and cared. They sat with my wife when I eventually had to go back to work. We no longer live in that same city, but we saw God’s blessings in that local church so strongly that a dozen years later we named our youngest son after that church.

In the providence of God, somehow you’re reading this email. If your heart is in a season of disappointment with the local church—maybe you’d even use the word hate to describe how you currently feel about the church—we hope these stories will minister to you.

I put the table of contents for the book down below, so you can see all the authors and the entries.

You can buy the book on Amazon’s website, here. If your church would like to purchase books at a significant bulk discount, when you buy twenty on the publisher’s website, they are only $5 each! You can do that here.

As an author with a small platform, it would mean a lot to me if you’d buy a copy and consider leaving a short Amazon review. Those reviews help a ton. Seriously. And the review only needs to be a sentence or two.

Amazon paperback link

GCD Bulk purchase link

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Table of Contents

        Preface | Benjamin Vrbicek     vii

1. She Is Broken, and She Is Beautiful | Glenna Marshall     1

2. Missing Church Is Missing Out | Timothy M. Shorey     7

3. How God Humbled Me through a Church I Didn’t Agree With | Lara d’Entremont     11

4. The Dearest Place on Earth | James Williams     17

5. The Unexpected Blessing of a Rural Church | Stephanie O’Donnell     21

6. The Local Church Helps Rid Me of Morbid Introspection | Chrys Jones   27

7. The Church Is Not a Meritocracy | Jessica Miskelly     33

8. A Family of Redemption for Children of Divorce | Chase Johnson     39

9. The Warmth of the Local Church for the Suffering | Brianna Lambert     45

10. The Singles Among Us Deserve a Better Church Culture | Denise Hardy     51

11. Love Your Church Anyway | Heidi Kellogg     57

12. For the Love of Liturgy | Erin Jones     63

13. God’s Good Design of the Local Church | James Williams     69

14. Finding Beauty in the Local Church in Our Age of Social Media | Cassie Pattillo     75

15. The Hands of Grace | Amber Thiessen     79

16. How the Church Shapes Us on Our Faith Journey | Rob Bentz     83

17. On the Other Side of the Church Split | Abigail Rehmert     89

18. Dear New Mother, Embrace the Body of Christ | Lara d’Entremont     95

19. The Gold Mine in the Local Church | Chrys Jones     101

20. The Local Church Is a Sandbox | Timarie Friesen     105

21. Unless the Seed Dies | Tom Sugimura     111

22. Redeeming Love Has Been My Theme and Shall Be Until I Die | Timothy M. Shorey     115

        Epilogue | Jeremy Writebol     119

         Notes     121
        Author Bios     123
        About Gospel-Centered Discipleship     127
        Resources from Gospel-Centered Discipleship     129

I Signed My First Traditional Book Contract (And Sort of a Second Book Contract)

Over the years I’ve written a lot of articles and a few books. Those books were either self-published or published by a small, independent Christian publisher. So this summer was a first for me. I just signed my first contract with a traditional publisher. I’m writing for Baker Books. It won’t come out until the summer of 2026, but I’m trying to find moments to work on the manuscript as much as possible.

The book explores the promise of the second coming of Christ, and how his return brings encouragement to believers, especially for those suffering. The working title is The Last Shall Be First: How the Return of Christ Makes Everything Sad Untrue. Here’s what we came up with for the summary:

Despite the confusion and controversy that often exists around the topic of the end times, the writers of Scripture believed that the promise of Christ’s return should comfort believers. With vivid imagery and passionate appeals, the biblical authors announced to Christians the happy ending of our story: justice for the wronged, family for the forsaken, new bodies for the broken, peace for the persecuted, feasting for the famished, and, best of all, faith in Christ becoming sight.

The First Shall Be Last explores seven aspects of Christ’s return, primarily from the amillennial perspective. But the book is not mainly about one specific view. Rather, pastor and author Benjamin Vrbicek encourages Christians to make the biggest and brightest truths about the return of Christ the biggest and brightest truths in our hearts. Every Christian, especially those suffering, needs the hope of the end. We need the good news that what we see now in part, we will soon see in full. When the trumpet sounds, the last shall be first, and, to borrow from Tolkien, everything sad will come untrue.

I started this project almost five years ago, and got seven rejections from publishers along the way. But as I’m getting back into the material, I’m slowly starting to remember why the topic matters so much to me and, I trust, all believers.

When I’ve worked on books in the past, the associated deadlines mainly were self-inflicted. I could hit the deadline or not and little consequence would follow either way. I did not expect the anxiety that would come with a real contract on a real book with a real publisher. Woof. I feel the pressure now.

I’ll share more about the books over the next few years. Please, if you know me and are so inclined, say a prayer for me. Pray that the words would come and that they would bless readers with the truth and hope that in Christ one day everything sad will come untrue.

As an aside, there were no pictures of me signing a contract on social media. Signing the contract was humorously anticlimactic. After months of working on the agreement (after years of working on the proposal), the actual contract took a literal four seconds to sign. It was through the Adobe electronic sign feature. It wasn’t even my signature. I just clicked a button and generic cursive showed up. Oh well. It’s probably better for my heart this way.

I also signed a book contract with Gospel-Centered Discipleship, the company I work part-time for as the managing editor. On this book, I’m not the writer but the editor. We’re publishing some of our best essays from the last few years about the local church. It’s called Broken but Beautiful: Reflections on the Blessings of the Local Church. This book will be released later in the fall. There’s so much bad press out there about the local church. I hope this book shines a light on how the true church still shines bright in the midst of all the junk.

Finally, let me just mention that I wish I wrote more essays on my blog. I still think of article ideas all the time and even make notes about what I would write if I had time. Unfortunately in this season of pastoring and coaching sports and sending children off to college next year and buying our first puppy, I mainly just drop monthly book writing and guest post and podcast updates in the blog. But I thank you for reading and rooting for me nonetheless. It means so much.

* Photo by Dominik Dancs on Unsplash

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

Exploring the Nuance of “The Tim Keller Rule” for Writers

[Author’s Note: I started writing these reflections nearly two years ago and only recently took them back out to complete them, entirely independent of knowing about Keller’s declining health. Then, like everyone else, I learned how sick he was and then that he so quickly passed away, and thus I paused on publishing this. In light of his death, I would have rather written a more overt tribute to him, sharing my deep appreciation for his ministry. But maybe—when rightly understood—this post can serve as a kind of tribute to Keller’s ministry, specifically his writing ministry. The way he lived his “rule” and avoided the pitfalls that came with fame can serve as an excellent model for every believer, no matter the size of their platform.]

*     *     *

Despite what seems to be the case, all authors write far more words that do not get published than they write words that go viral.

And that’s okay. In fact, it’s even good for us. God has a good purpose for Christian writers in what often feels like the frustrating slowness of our progress in the craft and the expansion of our platforms.

Consider what God says to the Israelites in Exodus 23 about the way he will cause them to inherit the Promised Land. “I will not drive them out from before you in one year,” God says, “lest the land become desolate and the wild beasts multiply against you.” Instead, God tells them, “Little by little I will drive them out from before you, until you have increased and possess the land” (Ex. 23:29–30).

This principle of slow-and-steady and providentially governed progress should temper a writer’s publishing angst, that anxious fretting many of us do about how much to publish and where to publish, who is reading us and how to get more people to read our work. This principle should also help us understand why books are often better written by authors without velvet fluff still on their antlers.

The young prophet Jeremiah had fire in his bones, but it would be years, even decades, before he understood what it meant to run with horses in the thicket of the Jordan (Jer. 20:9; 12:5). And consider young Elihu from the book of Job. Four times in just four verses the narrator tells us Elihu burned with anger. “Then Elihu the son of Barachel the Buzite, of the family of Ram, burned with anger. He burned with anger at Job because he justified himself rather than God. He burned with anger also at Job’s three friends because they had found no answer, although they had declared Job to be in the wrong. Now Elihu had waited to speak to Job because they were older than he. And when Elihu saw that there was no answer in the mouth of these three men, he burned with anger” (Job 32:2–5). Despite all the burning anger, we’re told he “had waited to speak to Job because they were older than he” (32:4).

Although one wonders if Elihu should have waited longer than he did to speak up, perhaps waiting another few dozen years for his youthful angst, we would hope, to meld into wisdom. As it is, his juvenile berating became canonized in the best-selling book of all time. “Folly is bound up in the heart of a child” (Prov 22:15).

These issues around when to write and how much to write lead me to consider what I’ve heard called “The Tim Keller Rule.” It’s a rule that haunts the conscience of many writers in the evangelical world, including mine. Do not publish a book until you are sixty years old, the rule goes. The government has rules about how old a person must be before they can work a job, drive a car, get married, enlist in the military, smoke tobacco, drink alcohol, and many other activities. Should Christian publishers have an age rule? Would we want it to be sixty?

A former understudy of Keller wrote a tribute to him in one of his books. “Tim waited until he was almost sixty years old to publish his first trade book,” he writes. “Humbly, he wanted to wait until he was old and wise enough to write the best possible book he could on any given subject. No doubt, his book writing pace since then has made up for lost time.” Keller’s understudy doesn’t state this so much as a rule but more as a description. The clear implication is that humble and wise authors should consider doing the same. One writer on Twitter recently referred to this as the Keller model rather than the rule.

Yet the word choice of publish in this tribute is key. Is sixty when Keller began writing? If Keller never wrote anything from high school to the age of early retirement, would his books be so insightful, so clear, and well-written? Could Keller have published a book every year from age sixty to seventy if he never wrote anything from his twenties through his fifties?

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To be clear, God’s blessing has rested upon Keller in ways and to degrees no one could manufacture—even Keller himself. The full credit for Keller’s tremendous writing output and exceptional quality belongs only to God. I praise God for the benefits his ministry has poured into my life and the life of our church.

When considering Keller’s output, however, we are also beholding the effects of compound interest. When you squirrel away a few dollars here and a few dollars there in mutual funds, the money not only increases by addition but by multiplication. Keller may not have published before he was sixty, but he certainly wrote.

In the introduction to Hidden Christmas he writes, “In this book I hope to make the truths of Christmas less hidden. We will look at some passages of the Bible that are famous because they are dusted off every Christmas” (4). The Christmas story is not only dusted off by parishioners but also by pastors, which is why in the acknowledgments of the book Keller notes, “The ideas in this book were forged not in writing but preaching. Each chapter represents at least 10 or so meditations and sermons on each biblical text, delivered in Christmas services across the decades” (143). Keller was sixty-six years old when Hidden Christmas was published, but the seeds of the book were planted and watered long before the food was harvested and packaged commercially.

In Keller’s book Center Church, we read similar words when he mentions that the book has roots in lectures he gave to an international audience nearly ten years before the book was published (385), which were ideas and lectures, we assume and he implies, that had been written and field-tested the previous decade at Redeemer Church and beyond.

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Perhaps some of the mystique about The Keller Rule comes from Keller himself. In an interview about the subject of young pastors writing books, Keller encouraged writing “essays and chapters, not books yet. Hone your craft through short pieces and occasional writing.” Then he warned, “But don’t tackle books yet. Writing a whole book takes an enormous amount of energy and time, especially the first one.”

In this way Keller encourages the “both-and” we find in Paul’s letter to Timothy. On the one hand, Paul instructs that someone in spiritual leadership “must not be a recent convert.” The command exists not because he won’t do the job well but because he probably will, and success may cause him to become “puffed up with conceit and fall into the condemnation of the devil” (1 Tim. 3:6). Yet, on the other hand, in the next chapter Paul tells Timothy, “Let no one despise you for your youth.” Timothy is instead to “set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity” (1 Tim. 4:12). If Timothy was to set an example “in speech” among his congregation, surely he should also set an example, albeit a youthful one, in his writing.

Thus, aspiring writers need to hear the helpful warning of The Keller Rule about publishing words. Young writers often need their publishing ambitions chastened. But at the same time, young writers must not fear writing words. Indeed, those called to write should write, even if they only plod along at the pace of a few pages here and a few essays there. The literary version of compound interest can only happen when you squirrel words away in the bank, making regular and faithful deposits.

Returning to the idea of “little by little” in Exodus 23, if you’re a young or beginning writer, you probably can’t handle all the success you think you want right now. You probably can’t handle all the criticism that comes along with that success. The “wild beasts” mentioned in Exodus 23 eat famous yet immature authors for breakfast. If you had written Gentle and Lowly, you might have become brutal and haughty.

So take heart. The writer who sows words slow and steady, generously and obediently, will also reap generously—whether in this life or the next. Just as no one gives a cup of cold water to a needy person in the name of Jesus without a permanent divine accounting, no one who writes words for God’s glory does so without God’s notice. Your labor in the Lord, Paul says, is not in vain.

* Photo by Brad Neathery on Unsplash

Reflections on Shepherds and Sheep: An Unexpected Cost

You often hear a writer tell you how many hours it took him to write his big article or how many years it took her to write her big book. I’ve written a few times about how much I love Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See, and it seems like in every interview I’ve heard with Doerr, he’s always asked about the ten years it took to write the novel. And I get it. Authors want readers to know how much effort we expended in writing the piece, how much heartache we endured and how much saltwater dripped on the keyboard. Sometimes readers like to know too.

Author Annie Dillard, however, questions whether authors should share the cost. “How many gifts do we open from which the writer neglected to remove the price tag?” she asks rhetorically. “Is it pertinent, is it courteous, for us to learn what it cost the writer?” (Dillard, The Writing Life, 7). She’s probably right. We all take the price tag off birthday presents before we give them lest what might have otherwise been an expensive, generous gift be seen as cheap. And yet still, from time to time, I feel the impulse to leave the tag, not so much as a humble brag—“Look how long this took”—but as catharsis.

Recently I wrote something that I won’t tell you what it cost, at least in terms of hours or months, thus sparing myself the impertinence, to use Dillard’s word. I will say, though, that I didn’t anticipate the emotional cost required to look certain realities in the eyes. Even I was caught off guard by the process, and more than a few times, I had the wind knocked out of me. Yesterday, Christianity Today posted the article. It’s about people leaving church and how pastors can respond. I’ll just share the opening few paragraphs with you, although I’d love for you to read the whole thing, “Two Hundred People Left Our Small Church.”

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About 200 people have left our small church. The number probably sits closer to 350 when counting their children. But they didn’t leave the way you might expect—no church split or splinter. They left slowly, with neither fanfare nor fireworks. Some, if not most, left without a goodbye. And they left not over seven weeks or seven months, but over the course of seven years.

I got to thinking about this when I came back from my summer sabbatical, because I was pleased to see that not only did our church still exist, but there were also a few dozen new people.

The new attendees shake my hand and introduce themselves. They smile at me as I preach. They participate in our membership class and ask about small groups and opportunities to serve. One couple invited my wife and me out for a date. Still, I struggle to open my heart to them the way a pastor should, fully and without reservation. And I wonder why.

Then it hit me. In seven years, our church—in terms of net attendance—has grown from around 150 to 350. But in the same amount of time, our church has lost as many as have stayed. The losses never occur rapidly, as though a levee burst, but more as a steady trickle or slow leak.

A few of our members died. One went to jail. One wrote me an eight-page letter of grievances I was instructed to share with the elders; another wrote a chapter-length blog post suggesting we’re not even a church. Some parishioners didn’t let the door hit them on the way out because they kicked it off the hinges and left us to pick up the shattered pieces.

These departures are by far the exceptions. Many of those who left told me neither why they left nor even that they had left. I often find out via back channels like social media and other impersonal means. And I don’t believe our church has an exceptionally large back door—I suspect we’re typical.

How does a pastor keep his heart from growing cynical when, over 350 weeks of pastoring the same church, I have lost an average of one person each week? And why are these congregants leaving our church anyway? What role might I play, even unintentionally, in sending sheep to what they perceive to be greener pastures?

I don’t know. But I recently spent a lot of time and effort to find out.

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You can read the rest at Christianity Today.

* Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash

11 Memoirs I Love but Can’t Necessarily Endorse

Lately my favorite genre of books, the genre I can’t seem to get enough of, is memoir. A memoir differs from a classic autobiography in aim and scope. The author of a memoir has more narrative focus than simply telling the details of one’s life, the details that begin where it all began and move toward where it’s at now.

In the introduction to the ten-year anniversary edition to Mary Karr’s best-selling memoir The Liar’s Club, she describes the way memoirs have taken up the mantle that used to belong to novels in telling the experience of people that don’t often have their story told. She believes readers find the “single, intensely personal voice” of memoirs compelling. I know that’s one of the reasons I love a good memoir. She also adds that people are drawn to memoirs because they deal with dysfunctional people and families in ways we often find reassuring. And note how Karr defines a dysfunctional family: “a dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.” Then she adds, “In other words, the boat I can feel so lonely in actually holds us all.”

Below I’ve put a few of the memoirs I have most enjoyed. I listed them alphabetically by the author’s last name. I hope they give you some reading ideas to consider this fall.

As you look at the list, please be aware that just because I put a book on the list, it does not mean I love every aspect of the book, or even most of the book, especially when it comes to foul language and non-Christian worldviews. Sometimes family life gets described with a form that matches dysfunction.

But, alas, I confess, I did love reading them anyway, even as I find them strategic reading. Here’s why: so much of my role as a pastor pushes me to spend more and more of my time, indeed nearly all of my time, with mature Christians. And so, one way I try to keep from becoming utterly insular is by reading broadly. I’ll stand by that practice even when I can’t stand by some of the specific content in these books. These authors represent the sort of cross-section that exists in our world and might, on a random Sunday that’s not random at all, be the sort of people who visit our church. I want to speak intelligently to them about the only hope I know: Jesus.

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Open: An Autobiography by Andre Agassi
One-sentence summary: A strikingly vulnerable story told by a man who seemed cocky but—big surprise—had a lot of inner demons.

I couldn’t imagine being this open about my struggles. And I believe the Christian message of the gospel, which tells me that I’m loved even when I was a sinner far from God, and therefore have nothing to hide. Still, to be this open would scare me. I love how Agassi tells us how and why he came to hate the sport that made him famous. Image, as you already know, isn’t everything, despite the camera advertising that used him to say otherwise. I only wish I understood the scoring system in tennis better, so I could have understood those parts of the book better. But if you can’t tell the difference between serving love and straight sets, don’t let that stop you from reading it.

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A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail by Bill Brycen
One-sentence summary: two guys who are not fit enough to do something really tough, try anyway—and have a lot of goofy struggles along the way.

Oh man, I laughed and laughed and laughed through this book. This summer I went on a long, four-day hike in the Adirondacks with my oldest daughter and some friends. In preparation for the hike, one of the guys going on the trip told me about this book. I’m glad he did. And I wish, as Brycen writes, I too had “eyes of chipped granite.”

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Four Seasons in Rome: On Twins, Insomnia, and the Biggest Funeral in the History of the World by Anthony Doerr
One-sentence summary: a literary writer is given a year to write and think and ponder, and what results is the weaving of a story about the ancient city of Rome with the themes of life and death and the struggle to make meaningful art, all while his own life is both ordinary and hard.  

My favorite novelist wrote this book, so he had me at hello. Also, if you’ve read All the Light We Cannot See, you’ll appreciate the backstory to some of the struggles that went into writing that novel, as a discussion of that book pops up here and there in this memoir. Some readers might find this memoir too self-indulgent, but I’m not one of them.

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Life & Letters: On Being a Writer, On Being a Christian by Bret Lott
One-sentence summary: a collection of essays that have the overtones of memoir, especially the last half of the book, which links together the death of a father and the love of his son.

I recently read this book and another nonfiction book by Bret Lott about writing (Before We Get Started: A Practical Memoir of the Writer’s Life). I’m not sure why I waited so long to read these two books. I love the plain and conversational tone of the writing that slowly unfolds to reveal just how thoughtful and un-plain the writing is. Lott is a Christian who doesn’t always write to Christian audiences, which makes him a good man to learn from. This book gets a full endorsement.

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Greenlights by Matthew McConaughey
One-sentence summary: a Hollywood A-list celebrity, who only sort of fits into Hollywood’s culture, writes about his Texas upbringing and his expansive acting career, all while punctuating the memoir with new-agey-pop-self-help gobbledygook—and doing so with a lot of goofy gusto, I might add. All right, all right, all right.

When I texted a friend about this book, he told me that he had heard it was a “hoot.” Boy, is it ever. I’m a fan of The McConaissance, at least in so much as it produced a movie like Interstellar—but for the record, this is for sure not a book I endorse. My favorite part came when he described his self-appointed physical training to act the role of a dragon slayer.

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12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
One-sentence summary: terrible, unspeakable evils happened to an educated African American slave.

It was so hard to read this book. We read it in our church book club a few years ago. In the movie adaptation, I remember a good many scenes where the cameras stayed focused for an almost too-intense amount of time, as if to say, “Don’t look away. Keep staring at this evil.” I wouldn’t say the author does this as much, but aspects of the book are sort of like that too. And, in my opinion, we are better for staring despite our desire to look away.  

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A Promised Land by Barak Obama
One-sentence summary: the most powerful man in the world tells the story of his presidency and how, “despite all the pomp and power,” the presidency is just an ordinary job.

I found this book absolutely fascinating. During the early years of his presidency, so many iconic moments in modern history took place—the economic recovery after 2008, the BP oil spill, and the killing of Osama bin Laden, just to name a few. But if I’m honest, I had my head down and pointed at my feet during his presidency, working hard to raise a family, earn a graduate degree, and love a church, and, therefore, I missed so much of what happened more broadly in US politics during his eight years in office. To give you a “for instance” to illustrate my point, I remember on an early Tuesday morning in November standing in the dark for hours waiting to vote in President Obama’s first presidential election while I tried to study a book about Hebrew grammar because I had a graduate-level Hebrew exam that week. And not only did this book narrate a period of US history I know little about, it often does so from a political perspective I don’t typically share, which is so helpful for having one’s own views sharpened as opposed to having one’s own views merely pampered. This book is only volume 1 of 2, so I’m excited to read the next volume, which will follow his second term in office.

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Becoming by Michelle Obama
One-sentence summary: the wife of the most powerful man in the world tells the story of what it’s like to embrace that identity while also seeking to pursue her own—oh, and at the same time, raise two lovely daughters before a watching world.

Michelle Obama’s book came before her husband’s, so I read it first, but as I later read his book, I found myself thinking over and over again that her book makes a wonderful complement to her husband’s book, offering a more domestic look at their very public careers. The book covers her whole life, from her birth and childhood in Chicago, through her years at Princeton and Harvard Law school, and then back to Chicago again, and then to DC and back to Chicago. I only had a small complaint. I didn’t love how, at times, her words seemed to have a slight agenda toward propaganda; although I can’t fault her too much for that because in the moments the book comes across this way, her words are often in the service of praising her husband. How can that be so wrong?

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Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death by Russ Ramsey
One-sentence summary: a Christian pastor gets a random infection from a trip to the dentist, and in a very short time, he has to have massive heart surgery, which upends all of life and takes a few years to recover from the trauma.

When I read this book, I went out and bought five more copies to give away to those who are suffering at our church. I heard back from several of those people how much the book put into honest language their pain while pointing them to the hope of the gospel. This book gets a full endorsement.

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Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
One-sentence summary: a poor kid from a poverty-stricken part of the country rises out of that mess (and it is a mess) and becomes an Ivy League lawyer while also navigating truckloads of family dysfunction.

An interesting part of this story, which I only noticed during my second reading, is the way different “versions of Christianity” show up in the background. By a version of Christianity, I mainly mean a folksy version and a more fundamental, Pentecostal version. And it seemed to me, especially on the second reading, that Vance actually wrestled with a true version of Christianity mingled with all the rest. The recent movie will give you a sense of his story but not this part.

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Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover
One-sentence summary: a woman grew up in a pseudo-Mormon cult but found a way to get away and become educated.

Perhaps my favorite part of this book is the way the author leaves out editorializing and instead focuses on the strict narrative; she trusts her powerful writing and her powerful story and the thoughtfulness of her readers to pick up what she’s throwing down.

What about you? What are some of your favorite memoirs? Let me know in the comments.

* Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

Shepherd & Sheep: The Preface from My New Collection of Essays

I recently returned to church after a summer sabbatical. My family and I used the time to rest and play. I also used the time to work on several writing projects. It was a surprise for my church, but I gathered up my best writing about the local church and collected it in one place, a book called Shepherd and Sheep: Essays on Loving and Leading in a Local Church.

If you like, you can grab the book on Amazon. We gave away 150 copies last Sunday at church. Below is the preface to the book and the table of contents.

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Preface

Of all the apps on my phone, my favorite is Strava. It’s the fitness tracker app I’ve used to log all my workouts for the last ten years. Every trip to the gym, every mile run on a road or a trail, and every mile ridden on a street or a stationary bike are all stored in my fitness history. With all that information, Strava creates what they call a “heatmap.” Overlaid on a map of the world, Strava uses a system of colored lines with various thicknesses to show the areas an athlete has traveled most. The heatmap resembles a diagram of arteries and veins. My heatmap shows thick lines up the back of Blue Mountain Parkway in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, a climb I’ve ridden well over one hundred times. It’s a 1.59-mile climb to the top, with an average gradient of 8.4%, making it a Category 3 climb, although that probably only means something to cyclists. My quickest time was six years ago, which required just under eleven minutes of enjoyable suffering. I rarely check the leaderboard, but of the nearly two thousand attempts to summit the climb, that attempt is ranked forty-fifth. Not too bad.

A certain satisfaction comes not only from looking at individual excursions but also from seeing the aggregate of all the runs and all the rides in one place. Analyzing my heatmap, I notice the routines, those places and pathways I return to again and again. Some people might rather call these routines “ruts.” But the difference of word choice between routines and ruts is more than the difference between “you say to-may-toe, and I say to-mah-toe.” Ruts signify unthinking drudgery, a continuous grind from which we cannot pop loose. Routines signify, I like to think, the places my heart, and thus my feet, gravitate toward without much thinking. Routines signify the places we love to travel, even when we know doing so might involve eleven minutes of suffering. Or to say it in biblical language, where our routines are, there our treasure is also.

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This summer my church graciously offered me a sabbatical after seven years together. The sabbatical plan had been in place for a long time, but with all the unrest in the world and in local churches, it seemed like following through with the sabbatical this summer might be unwise. Sometime in early winter, however, the Lord began to give our church a fresh supply of stability. So, when the time came, my church sent me away, and I left. I left to rest and read and write and exercise and date my wife and play with my children for fifteen weeks.

In the early weeks of my sabbatical, I happened to look over some of the essays I’d written while at our church. There are over three hundred on my blog and another seventy-five published elsewhere. Like analyzing my Strava heatmap, I began to notice routines, those themes I tend to return to again and again. I hadn’t realized how often I alluded to The Chronicles of Narnia or how influential Zack Eswine’s book The Imperfect Pastor has been to me. (Well, maybe I did know that one already.) As I looked over all the words, the largest cluster seemed to revolve around life in a local church, the relationship between pastors and parishioners, shepherds and sheep. That makes sense, of course; pastoring is, after all, my day job.

But pastoring a local church is far more than a job to me. The local church signifies the place my heart loves to be, even though I know being here will often involve more than eleven minutes of suffering. So, as a gift to our church and for the joy of collecting the best of the essays in one place, I put together this book, my writing heatmap, if you will. Perhaps a half dozen of these articles were first published on my website, but most of them appeared elsewhere, places such as Christianity Today, The Gospel Coalition, 9Marks, For The Church, Gospel-Centered Discipleship, and Desiring God. If you’re interested, you can see the note at the end of the book for the details of where each entry was published.

I subtitled this collection Essays on Loving and Leading in a Local Church because I like to think the two go together: loving and leading, if not in my actual shepherding, at least as an aspiration. But I gave it the title Shepherd & Sheep as a way to remember that every shepherd is first and foremost a sheep in the fold of the Good Shepherd. As the apostle Peter shares, each local shepherd is an under shepherd of the chief Shepherd (1 Pet. 5:4). And praise God that the chief Shepherd loves the sheep he leads and leads the sheep he loves. Loving and leading go together with him.

May the congregational lives of local churches, the routines of local shepherds and sheep—our heatmaps—be to the praise of the glory of the Chief Shepherd’s grace.

Benjamin Vrbicek
Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
Summer 2021

Table of Contents

               Preface     ix

1             Bending the Covid Bow of Bronze     1
2            The Day That Darrin Died     10
3            “Pastor, Why Aren’t You Preaching about What’s Happening?”      13
4            Redeeming Pastoral Ambition      22
5            Spring Loaded Camming Devices and The Expository Sermon      27
6            When My Church Was Washed with Butter      32
7            Ministry Morning, Noon, and Night      37
8            Was I Betraying My Church by Interviewing Elsewhere?      44
9            The Greatest Enemy of the Church      48
10          Pastor, Strive to Learn Their Names      52
11           Pastors Need Healthy Boundaries      56
12          Do Not Despise a Gentle Nudge      60
13          Don’t Let Sexual Shame Move You from Christ’s Mission      66
14          The Truth Is Always Positive      71
15          Light for Those Who Sit in Darkness      76
16          Two Ways Every Christian Can Be Pastoral      80
17          On Pastoral Prayer      84
18          The Wrath of God Should Come to Our Minds More Often      91
19          When Ministry Success Becomes an Idol      97
20         How Much Does a Pastor Work?      102
21          Congregations of Bruised Reeds      110
22         Come to Me All Who Have Covid Weariness      114
23         Sometimes God Just Closes Doors      119
24         Dear Twitter, I’m Leaving You for My Wife      123
25         My Heart Is Full      128

               Publication Note      133
              About the Author      137

Writers’ Coaching Corner: A New Feature for GCD

“Books don’t change people, paragraphs do—sometimes sentences.”

This famous quote from author and long-time pastor John Piper highlights the transformative potential of prose. Piper added, “One sentence or paragraph may lodge itself so powerfully in our mind that its effect is enormous when all else is forgotten.”

But what makes one paragraph so transformative and so unforgettable? The answer is two-fold: the supernatural power of God and good writing. Writers can’t control the former, but we can practice the latter.

Back in January of this year, I took the part-time role of managing editor for the Gospel-Centered Discipleship (GCD) website. I’ve loved it. I get to oversee the publication of our articles and the team of staff writers and editors, help with our book publishing, and mentor fellow writers.

To that end of mentoring writers, I started a monthly feature where I look closely at one paragraph from a GCD article in the previous month to highlight some aspect of what makes for good writing. I talk about what makes the writing in the article work so well and how we, as fellow writers, can incorporate more of that writerly goodness into our craft.

If this interests you, I put a few of the videos below. You can get them all on our website, under the tab “Writers’ Coaching Corner.”

I’ve already made the video for next month, where I discuss one of my favorite writing ideas: climbing up and down the ladder of abstraction. It’s more helpful than it sounds. Trust me. I’ll post it on the GCD website on Monday, September 6, 2021. 

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AUGUST 2021:
LIMIT THE USE OF BE-VERBS

This month I use Brianna Lambert’s article titled “God’s Word Isn’t Your Gas Station” to talk about the principle that good writing limits the use of be-verbs (is, am, are, was, were, be, being, been).

I also mention Russ Ramsey’s memoir Struck: One Christian’s Reflections on Encountering Death and Helen Sword’s The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose.

JULY 2021:
TAILOR PROSE TO A PARTICULAR AUDIENCE

This month I use Jen Oshman’s article, a letter written to her daughter who recently graduated from high school. The article is titled, “From Mom and Dad to Our Grad.” This article illustrates the principle that good writing tailors prose to a particular audience.

I also mention Ivan Mesa’s Before You Lose Your Faith, Dane Ortlund’s Gentle and Lowly, the Gospel-Centered Disciple Writers’ Cohort, and Roy Peter Clark’s How to Write Short: Word Craft for Fast Times.

JUNE 2021:
LEVERAGE THE POWER OF ALLUSION

This month I use David McLemore’s recent article about guilt and grief over our sin, “In the Darkness, Jesus Is My Light,” to talk about the principle that good writing leverages the power of allusion.

I also mention Russel Moore’s recent newsletter “Atheists, Anger, & Alcohol” (Moore to the Point, May 17, 2021) and Douglas Wilson’s book Wordsmithy: Hot Tips for the Writing Life.

MAY 2021:
EXTRUDE LIFE THROUGH TRUTH

This month I use Lauren Bowerman’s recent article about her struggles with infertility, “How Infertility Revealed My Idolatry” to talk about the principle that good writing extrudes life through truth.

I also mention Timothy Keller’s article “Growing My Faith in the Face of Death” and John Piper’s book Seeing Beauty and Saying Beautifully: The Power of Poetic Effort in the Work of George Herbert, George Whitefield, and C. S. Lewis.

* Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

A Big Change to My Blog

I don’t want to bury the lede on this one, as journalists say. So, here’s the big change: I need to publish less often on my blog.

Let me explain.

In January I took the part-time role of Managing Editor for Gospel-Centered Discipleship. I now oversee all the content we publish on our website, as well as the nine staff writers and three editors.

If you don’t know much about Gospel-Centered Discipleship (GCD), let me just say how much I love their passion for publishing biblical, gospel-saturated content. I also love GCD’s emphasis on developing Christian writers. They don’t just write about the gospel; they coach others to write well about the gospel. In the last ten years, the Lord has caused these two passions—love for writing about the gospel and love for thinking about writing about the gospel—to become central to my calling. I’m excited to join their team.

To state what I hope will be obvious, I still work full-time as the lead pastor of Community Evangelical Free Church in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. No matter what happens with my writing, pastoral ministry in a local church will always be, I suspect, home base. I spent two months talking about taking the managing editor role with the fellow pastor-elders at our church, and not only do I have their permission, I have their blessing and encouragement.

A downside to this change will mean that I cannot write as often on this blog. I only have so much free time, and all the side projects tend to add up: blogging at Fan and Flame, writing guest posts for other websites, managing the GCD website, writing longer book projects, and doing freelance editing and book design. Something has to give. For now, my blog drew the short straw. That’s a bummer. I mean, I did just publish a book about blogging.

And yet, this change is also a welcomed change to my heart. I am excited to think less about me, if that makes sense. Even when I do my best to blog for God’s glory, I feel a low-grade pressure to perform and have articles hit big. What I want to do, I do not do, as Paul said. And what I do not want to struggle with, I do struggle with. Blogging less often on my website, while editing articles for others, will force me to think about me less often, which will be good for my soul.

Also, I never would have guessed how much I enjoy, and perhaps am gifted at, coaching other writers. I don’t feel like I’ve had much success as a writer, but to those on the outside of my inner circle— those who don’t see all the rejections or how painfully slow the process of writing is and how slowly my platform grows and how slowly relationships with websites and publishers develop—think I have had success. This has resulted in an increasingly steady stream of other writers asking me for help: Benjamin, can you edit this blog post before I submit it? Can you look at my book proposal? Would you read and comment on my book manuscript before I give it to the publisher? Benjamin, can we jump on a Zoom call so I can ask you questions about writing? Yes, of course; I’ll find time for that, I say.

Maybe I’m a people pleaser, and so maybe I say yes too often. But I’m also beginning to realize it also pleases me to help others improve their writing. I really do like tinkering with words.

If you’re still reading, you probably know me or care about me and my writing, so thank you. To you, I’ll mention one more factor in the change. This year is my seventh year at my church, and I have a summer sabbatical coming. I won’t be working full-time this June, July, and August, and I would have slowed my blogging anyway.

During part of this sabbatical, I hope to take an online 8-week graduate class. This class will be toward the degree of a master’s in fine arts (MFA) in creative non-fiction. The title “creative non-fiction” (also known as “narrative non-fiction”) explores traditional elements of fiction (e.g., plot, characterization, tension, and foreshadowing) and employs them in non-fiction. I believe this degree has large overlap with my preaching and other ministry responsibilities. And I’ve been dreaming about this for ten years; I just don’t talk about it much, if ever. Taking one course this summer will test the waters to see if pursuing the full degree makes sense—that is, whether the benefits outweigh the many logistical and financial headaches.

Thank you for reading my blog. I will still post something new, Lord willing, once a month. It’s a great pleasure to serve the Lord and others with words.

* Photo by Jean-Baptiste D on Unsplash

Why I Write: Thoughts on Joy and Obedience

Our motivations often have more layers than we realize. But if we set aside the sinful, self-serving motives lurking around the edges of a Christian’s heart, I’d say one of my primary motivations for writing is joy. I really do enjoy tinkering with words that point people to God. I’ve heard a famous Christian author say that for him, writing is like eating ice cream, not a “have to” but a “get to.” I feel the same, although it wasn’t always this way.

The Backstory

In college I studied Mechanical Engineering for three reasons: first, my father was an engineer, so it felt familiar; second, I excelled at math and science; and third—and this might be the key reason why I chose engineering—I hated to read and write. Hated it. Perhaps the feeling isn’t so uncommon. Tony Reinke writes in Lit! that most people view reading “like trying to drink down a huge vitamin” (p. 15). With few exceptions, that’s what reading and writing were to me, the yuk of drinking a tall, chalky glass of Flintstones.

For the Joy of It

When I began following Christ in college, all that changed. As I read and studied Christianity—informally on my own and then later in seminary—new joys and passions and hopes bubbled up within me, as though some chemical reaction was being cooked over a Bunsen burner. Through listening to good preaching, I felt God was calling me to preach. The call to preach seemed to pounce on me, irrevocably so, while listening to other men preach and feeling my mind and affections doused in a kind of spiritual kerosene so that I just knew I wanted to, in fact had to, be involved in doing this for others.

During the early days of this feeling, if I could have hit pause during a sermon by any one of the many gifted preachers I was listening to in those days, I think I would have described the experience this way:

What God is doing right now, through that guy, on that stage, behind that pulpit, as he explains that passage and the glory of God and the beauty of the gospel, with those words and those gestures, and that tone, and with all of that love and passion and urgency such that my heart is prodded and my mind is riveted—well, someday I just have to be involved in sharing that good news with others.

This is what I mean when I say that my calling to preach came not only through opportunities to preach but also, even predominantly, through having it done to me.

The experience has been the same with my call to write. In his insightful book about the craft of writing, Stephen King put it this way: “Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing—of being flattened, in fact—is part of every writer’s necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.” (On Writing, p. 146). Through reading good writing, I felt God calling me to write. The reaction felt explosive, if only in my heart—or to use King’s words, flattening.

Yet, the transition from an engineer to a preacher-writer came with many frustrations. In seminary I struggled more than others with the demands to read and write. However, after lots of practice, much of it forced upon me by seminary and pastoral ministry, I can honestly say my frustration with drinking down vitamins grew into love. I had acquired the taste.

For the Obedience of It

In addition to joy, my other primary motivation for writing is obedience. I’ve joked before that I do not have a writing “boss.” All my projects and deadlines are self-inflicted. But I do hope that I treat writing the way the lay-elders of our church treat their pastoring: serving the church is something they enjoy but also something they feel called by God to do. In other words, we do have a boss. Our pastoring, and I trust my writing, is done at the invitation and the command of God.

These two motivations, joy and obedience, mingle together in the name of my blog: Fan and Flame. It’s an allusion to 2 Timothy 1:6 where Paul told Timothy to “fan into flame the gift of God.” I take the command to mean that the young pastor must do whatever is necessary to keep the fire burning. If only embers remain, well then, you get on your hands and knees, put your nose in the kindling, and blow. Never mind the smoke searing your eyes—you keep the fire alive. Indeed, toil to make it grow.

For the Pursuit of Accessible, Riveting Scholarship

Over the years, I’ve settled on a few short phrases to capture what I’m trying to do when I write: I write accessible, riveting scholarship to fan into flame joy in God. People do not normally associate scholarship with accessible and riveting, but that is the cluster I aim for. By scholarship I don’t mean the use of big words but the best insights about a given topic such that the writing has an awareness of what others have said and are saying; by accessible I mean avoiding technical, insider language and the effort to make the complex simple; and by riveting I mean striving for command of the craft that holds attention, for the kind of writing that engages the head and heart, the kind of writing I like to read.

It feels goofy to write out my purpose statement for someone else to see. Thus far, I’ve kept it hidden, like a compass in my pocket, only pulling it out occasionally to double-check my trajectory. But the phrasing has brought needed focus to my writing even if I never produce anything worthy of the label scholarship, accessible, or riveting. It’s a “shoot for the stars to hit the moon” sort of thing.

My book projects always target a particular audience, but I don’t have a specific age or gender in mind when I write more generally on my blog except to say I hope to reach the types of readers who might be in my church regularly on Sunday mornings.

People ask me why an engineer would ever become a preacher and writer. They typically want a sound bite answer. I’m not sure how to give them that. Maybe someday I will figure out how. For now, I suppose that I could say that it had something to do with vinegar and baking soda, corked and shaken.

* This summer I enrolled in the Gospel-Centered Discipleship Writing Cohort, a six-month coaching group. Our first assignment was to write our personal writing mission statement, as well as 800 words of explanation. My 800 words (plus a couple hundred extra) are above, and here’s my personal mission statement: I write accessible, riveting scholarship to fan into flame joy in God. The exercise stretched me. If you’ve ever had to do something similar for writing or pastoring or education or whatever, I’d love to hear about the experience, what you learned, and if there are enduring takeaways from the effort.  

** Photo by Sebastian Pociecha on Unsplash