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

Is Blogging Dead?: A Few Dozen Christian Bloggers Say No

In a series of quick, mindless thumb swipes to the top of my Twitter feed, my eyes notice a tweet of someone I respect—someone who thinks deeply about blogging and journalism and reaching people for Christ via the internet.

His tweet declares that blogs have been killed.

I take a deep breath and sit zombie-like on my couch.

I stare out the window for a bit, contemplating why the book about blogging I’ve spent the last two years working on wouldn’t also die as collateral damage. Who needs a book about blogging if blogging is dead? Though the first draft of the book is already written, it sure would save my coauthor and me a lot of time and money to cut our losses.

Collin Hansen is the editorial director of The Gospel Coalition, and for several years he co-led the now-disbanded group called “Band of Bloggers.” In other words, he knows more than a little about the topic of blogging.

Hansen’s tweet identified what, in his opinion, killed blogging: “Social media killed blogs,” he writes. “Can’t find them any longer, since folks don’t browse sites any longer.” His comment sat in a thread discussing the current fad of writers using e-newsletters rather than true blogs.

As much as I respect Hansen, I’d suggest we not order the autopsy report yet. To tweak the words often ascribed to Mark Twain, the reports of the death of blogs have been greatly exaggerated. I agree that today’s blogger cannot ascend to the levels of influence reached almost exclusively by those who got into the game ten years ago, if not twenty. But I think we’d be wrong to say social media has killed blogs, just as we’d be wrong to say the car killed the bicycle. For exercise and for pleasure and for social interaction, people still ride—just as people will blog. Think how many Twitter handles still have a link to the person’s blog? Lots, I tell you, lots. Admittedly, when I click those links I’m often disappointed by the result: the last post dates from more than a year ago and the post before that is often even further back—hence why we wrote this book. Tim Challies highlights a potential incentive to commit or recommit to blogging as others bail. “With so many people opting out,” he writes, “there is lots of room for aspiring writers to work their way in.”

Samuel James is more pessimistic. He writes,

Blogging is dead, right? At least among the folks in a position to say so, this seems to be the consensus. Many of blogging’s most important early practitioners have either abandoned it . . . or else transformed their writing spaces into storefronts that offer “promoted” content in exchange for patronage. The thinking goes like this: Before Mark Zuckerberg and Tweet threads, blogging was a viable way of sharing ideas online. Now, though, social media has streamlined and mobilized both content and community. Reading a blog when you could be reading what your friends are Tweeting about is like attending a lecture completely alone. It’s boring and lonely for you, and a waste of time for the lecturer.

The full post by James suggests more optimism than that quote belies. For example, after noting many strengths of blogging in our cultural moment, his concluding paragraph states, “Blogging still matters, because it’s still the medium that most ably combines the best aspects of online writing.”

Twitter doesn’t do nuance well, so as I think back over Collin Hansen’s statement about the death of blogging, perhaps he only meant that blogs don’t have the popularity they used to have or that many obstacles are stacked against their success, as James points out and all of us would likely concede.

Regardless, John Beeson and I are still blogging regularly. And so are hundreds of thousands of others. If you’re reading this ebook, we want you to keep blogging or consider starting a blog of your own if you don’t have one yet. Bloggers writing for the glory of God have not saturated the market, not even close. Author Tony Reinke spoke about this in an interview on the Home Row podcast.

Don’t be intimidated by all the books. Everybody is publishing it seems. [But] we have this promise from the Lord in Habakkuk. It says, “The earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as the waters cover the sea” (2:14). Just think about that. Think about that overwhelming tsunami of the knowledge of God. We are far from that saturation point. . . . There is so much work to be done.[1]

I agree with Reinke. We have work to do, books and blog posts to write, and the glory of God to spread.

But don’t just take our word for it. We asked a few dozen other bloggers to give us their hot take on the future of blogging, because offering hot takes is all we bloggers do. Right? We hope you’ll be encouraged. Blogging may have changed, but it’s certainly not dead.

Is Blogging Dead?

It seems unlikely that blogging will ever be as popular as it was in the late 1990s, but people continue to want to read blog-like content. The form it takes may be different (people, for example, seem to want to turn platforms that were not designed for blogging, such as Instagram, into blogs), but the blog-like intention behind the content persists.
Abby Farson Pratt, abbyfp.com

Although it’s easy to think that blogging has already had its heyday, the demand for long-form content, while tempered by market forces, will always be a factor. Search engines like Google assign more weight to long-form content. While those less serious about writing turn to social media to express themselves, more opportunity now exists in the blogging arena for those committed to persevering in their craft and doing the hard work of building an audience over time.
Alex Kocman, alexkocman.com

Bloggers are in a unique position to inform people that they wouldn’t be able to reach otherwise, and they have the benefit of being able to speak on any topic. If blogs are being used correctly, to build people up in their faith and inform believers for God’s glory, then I believe they will always have a place.
Alistair Chalmers, achalmersblog.com

In my opinion, blogging is not dead. Although the word “blogging” might sound outdated, just call it an “article,” or a “writing,” or even an “essay,” and voila! You’re back to blogging.
Alisa Childers, alisachilders.com

I think that blogging has shifted. Where we used to sign up to follow blogs, we now follow accounts—Instagram, Twitter, Facebook. With the inundation of information, I wonder if we’ve become lazy—wanting our social media to vet our posts for us and to make it easier and quicker to decide what we will spend time reading. I don’t think blogging has disappeared. There are new blogs every day. I think the way that people view and interact with blogs has shifted. I think it affects the reader and the writer at the same time, and it’s a phenomenon that new writers and blog owners will have to deal with. In order to get followings, you will feel the push to promote, promote, promote. That being said, I do wonder as Facebook, Twitter, and others all come under fire for their filtering, if more and more people will start to take control over what content they want to see. To be honest, and perhaps this is more cynical, but I see the majority of people complaining but then continuing on with what is easiest.
Brianna Lambert, lookingtotheharvest.com

Not at all! Social media has its place, and I know microblogging is on the rise on those platforms, but I think they serve different purposes. First, there’s the issue of space—you simply cannot flesh out a nuanced idea in the narrow confines of social media in the same way as a longer blog post. Second, your reach on social media has become so dependent upon algorithms. We see what the platforms want us to see, and we don’t have control over that. Blogging allows us to curate our own sources and see every post by visiting specific sites or using an RSS reader. Blogging occupies a crucial space between social media and books, and we’d be poorer without it.
Cassie Watson, casswatson.com

I think a website is still essential, and including a blog is a helpful way of demonstrating commitment and credibility. But a blog no longer seems to be enough. Podcasts and YouTube are becoming more important platforms because they possess greater attention.
Chase Replogle, chasereplogle.com

Blogging is still an incredibly important means of communication, especially in the Christian space. Its day is not over, even if it looks a bit different.
Chris Martin, chrismartin.blog

Blogging has a future, though like many mediums in this age, it may need to find new iterations. Even in the short time blogging has already experienced, we’ve seen a transformation of style and presentation—some that have been helpful and others less so.
Chris Thomas, ploughmansrest.com

Blogging is dead in terms of the early blogs that primarily curate info available elsewhere on the internet. Blogs that did that well are still alive and well but they own the market. Those who own that lane do enough research and reflection to also give a lot of insights into any number of topics. Blogging isn’t dead in terms of writers who are able to give thoughtful insights and perspectives on important issues. The newer brand of blogging isn’t for people who merely want to air their opinions but for those who possess the time, skill, and energy to produce something unique and helpful. There’s always a space for committed authors who want to help others. But like most things, it takes hard work and anyone wanting a fastlane to “success” will likely drop out long before they get enough traction to make a lasting contribution.
Dan DeWitt, theolatte.com

Yes and no. Yes in the sense that the newness and buzz of blogging probably will never be what it once was. I also say no because I don’t think blogging will die anytime soon. As others have pointed out, the name “blogging” might change. But the format of writing words in article form to post on the internet to promote edification isn’t going away soon, so I think blogging has a bright future.
David Qaoud, gospelrelevance.com

Blogging as a thing “everybody does” is gone, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Writers who want to test a message, have unedited freedom in voice and style, hone their craft, and develop a body of work will keep plodding. Although not always the most efficient way of getting a piece to the masses, those who stick around will hopefully make blogging about the value of truthful words and vibrant stories.
Emily Jensen & Laura Wifler, risenmotherhood.com

Our world increasingly seems to value forms of communication that are instantaneous, combative, and designed to trigger emotions. Against this trend, many are recognizing just how important long-form mediums are for creating light, not just heat. Blogging is a kind of hybrid medium—faster than books, longer than Twitter. My hope is that Christians will continue to engage the world of blogging as we try to carve out spaces for reflection and reasoned dialogue.
Gavin Ortlund, gavinortlund.com

I work with young writers every week, and I firmly believe blogging is not dead. How blogs are curated and shared has shifted and evolved over the years, but blogs’ power and purpose have not. Blogging is still a medium that changes lives and contributes to the kingdom, one post at a time.
Jaquelle Ferris, jaquellecrowe.com

I’m late to the game and can’t say for sure. It does seem like things like YouTube are taking over. But, I still read others’ blogs, and other people still read mine, so I think there’s still a small space for it in the world and in ministry.
Jen Oshman, jenoshman.com

The original kind of blogging is done and gone. Few remain. More collective groups are writing better content with editors, and that is far superior in my opinion.
Jeremy Writebol, jwritebol.net

Yes and no. Blogging has certainly peaked because, as many people discovered, it’s easy to start a blog but hard to maintain interest in writing for one on a regular basis. But blogging is still essential because the low barrier to entry allows undiscovered talent to flourish.
Joe Carter, thegospelcoalition.org/profile/joe-carter

Blogging is definitely dead!!! (Actually, it is a pet peeve of mine to see the headline formula, “Is ___________ dead?” The subject in question never actually dies; it just changes. Unless you’re talking about VHS or Laserdisc players, then they’re dead alright.) Blogging isn’t dead, but it has changed due to podcasts, YouTube, and Twitter. A certain type of blogging has had its day. But there is still room for thoughtful and well-written blogging. 
Kevin Halloran, kevinhalloran.net

I don’t believe so. These days, Twitter and Facebook have reduced our attention spans to only be capable of digesting small, bite-sized pieces of information before moving on to the next thing, many times without critically reflecting upon the tweet or post we’ve just read. Blogging provides a great platform for more rigorously interacting with and explaining ideas in a way that is still open to community and peer feedback without as much distraction. I hope that our society, as time goes on, will become disenchanted with shallow information grazing, and come to appreciate this medium more and more. This will be more likely if the blogosphere is already filled with quality, Christ-centered content once the rest of the world comes back here.
Kris Sinclair, krissinclair.com

Nah. Especially since social media is stupid and people are becoming more suspicious of its integrity. I think more people will transition from social media to blogs and email communication.
Kristen Wetherell, kristenwetherell.com

I think the world of blogging has certainly changed. But, I don’t think that the medium is going anywhere. I do think that it looks different, and maybe the day of the mega-blog is passing us by. Bloggers are going to have to be satisfied with smaller audiences, with more of a niche following, because there is so much out there that distinguishing yourself as a big blog that everyone checks constantly is getting more and more impossible. This is especially true of Christian blogs because, let’s face it, the Christian message is getting less and less appealing as our culture steps further away from Jesus. I write things that people tell me they agree with but are afraid to share because of the inevitable backlash from their friends and family. In that way, Christian bloggers are certainly operating in the land of Jesus’s words about what the gospel does: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person’s enemies will be those of his own household” (Matt 10:34–36).
Melissa Edgington, yourmomhasablog.com

Blogging is not done yet. It has a few and new competitors along the way. As long as the passion is there, we don’t have to throw in the towel yet. We just need to find new and exciting ways to be heard.
Nitoy Gonzales, delightinggrace.wordpress.com

No, because it will continue to play a role in supporting the mission of the local church. It may begin to look different, e.g., smaller circles of influence, more local writing, etc. But if we see the role of blogging as falling in line with furthering the mission of the church and building up the saints for the work of ministry, then it will continue to have purpose because it falls in line with God’s mission.
Ryan Williams, amicalled.com

Blogging isn’t going to go away, but the influence and reach of individual bloggers will probably never be what it was ten years ago. There’s so much content out there right now, and ways to curate that content through algorithms, that only people with specific kinds of day jobs can afford to “build” a blogging profile.
Samuel James, letterandliturgy.com

Blogging is not dead because Jesus is not dead. Christians have always looked for ways to share the gospel and to share what they are learning about how the gospel shapes our lives. As long as we have the internet and the opportunity to post on the internet, Christian bloggers will write about this best of news. It is why I have blogged for over nine years, and why I plan to be blogging nine years from now.
Tim Counts, hemustbecomegreater.com

No. It’s just transformed for some into the micro-blogging of Twitter and Facebook. It’s still a kind of blog, just smaller and easier to digest. Long-form blogging isn’t dead. When TV was invented, people thought movie theaters would die out. They didn’t.
Tom Terry, tomthinking.com

No. It’s true that the season of early blogging, in which upstart bloggers could build a platform by quality writing on a large variety of subjects, has come to an end. For a new blog to gain traction today, one needs either an already-established platform or excellent insights that focus on a narrower sliver of topics. But blogging itself—which is really just one form of writing articles, similar to newspaper columns from a hundred years ago from good writers—is still and will remain a relevant form of communication. Social media has grown in importance for blogging, as most readers interact with writers by following social media accounts and not blogs. But this doesn’t mean that blogging has died, only that the entry point to these articles has shifted.
Trevin Wax, thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/trevin-wax

* Photo by Goran Ivos on Unsplash

** Is Blogging Dead? is an excerpt from an appendix in the book Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World by Benjamin Vrbicek and John Beeson.

Please Join Our Book-Launch Team: Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World

Bloggers around the world publish millions of posts each day, many written by faithful Christians who want to honor God with their words but struggle to know how. Christian bloggers need guides to lead them through the basics of setting up a blog—everything from affiliates and algorithms to widgets and WordPress. They need a mentor to help them become a godly landlord of their internet real estate.

My friend John Beeson and I wrote the book Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World to help bloggers do these very things. In the book, we explain where the spiritual stamina will come from to serve a small readership faithfully and how to steward attention in a way that honors God in a world that seems to only celebrate chasing profit and pageviews.

Tim Challies, the godfather of evangelical blogging—or the blog-father as he is sometimes called—is writing the foreword to the book. The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.

For the last week or so, we’ve been asking friends who had heard about the book if they’d consider joining the launch team. So far nearly fifty people have joined. John and I are super happy. But we’d still like your help too.

Starting today, we’re inviting others to join the launch team (here). [update: link removed]

Just to be clear: you do NOT have to be a blogger to join the launch team. Maybe you like to share interesting ideas on Facebook, or maybe you work in marketing or graphic design. We think you’d enjoy our book, and we’d love to have you on the launch team. But perhaps none of that is true of you. Perhaps you just happen to like the work I do on this blog or John does on his blog, and you’d like to support us. That’s great too. We’d love to have you on the team.

For those willing to serve on the launch team, we will send you a digital version of the book in early October to give you time to read it before its November 3 launch.

If you join, here is what we hope you’d commit to do:

1. Once the book launches, post an honest review on Amazon (and Goodreads, if you have an account) within the first week of the launch;

2. Help us catch any small errors in the book (i.e., not a full-edit of the book);

3. The day before the book launches we’d ask you to purchase the Kindle version of the book on Amazon at the reduced price of $0.99. Buying the book gives a “Verified purchase” tag affixed to your Amazon review. This helps to protect your review from being removed as fraudulent. Any review helps, but Verified Reviews boost the book in the Amazon store.

4. When the book launches share the book on your social media accounts.

That’s it. Pretty simple.

If you would like to join, please fill out this quick Google questionnaire (link). [update: link removed]

Thank you,
Benjamin

Hitting It Big as a Blogger?

We give the prefix mega to a church with over two thousand regular attendees. Perhaps it would be helpful and objective to consider the epithet megablog as one with two thousand regular readers. I dunno.

But the question of how we measure success as online writers causes me to excavate what’s buried in my own heart, as well as evaluate what we might consider subjective and objective metrics of success. How do you define hitting it big?

J.A. Medders and Chase Replogle both interviewed pastor and author Scott Sauls on their writing podcasts (Home Row and Pastor Writer, respectively). In these interviews, Sauls spoke of publishers who courted him to write a book, but he also spoke of the resistance he felt for years toward this pursuit. I don’t know if the courting happened because of his blogging, his pastoring, his networking, or all of these together. In my anecdote about Sauls, there are no metrics to quantify “big,” but to me this should count as hitting it big. This is not to discount the work he eventually had to do to write proposals and complete manuscripts, but most authors have to court publishers, not the other way around.

I suppose someone from the outside could look at the websites that have published my work and feel that I have made it big—at least with respect to relationships with editors at popular evangelical websites. But every relationship with an editor did not come through my blog, even though at first I suppose having the blog (and a local church pastorate) established a measure of legitimacy. My point is that, to my knowledge, no editors have ever looked at my blog saying, “Man, we need some posts from that guy.”

Objective metrics can be helpful because I fear the dangers of a sliding scale. The fear of thinking to hit it big always means something more than where you currently are, something always just out of reach and around the corner, something like rowing toward Gatsby’s green light. An author hasn’t hit it big until he’s as well-known as, say, Keller. This is silly . . . and sinful. I’m in an online group for Christian writers, and we recently discussed blogging struggles. The most successful blogger among us commented, “One thing I can attest to is that if ‘bigger’ is your goal, nothing will ever be big enough. . . because ‘bigger’ isn’t really a measure of having more readers than you do now, but having more readers than the other guy.” This is the sliding scale I fear and the one that will bleed your joy and devour your contentment.

In that same discussion I told a friend that I had not “hit it big blogging,” and he asked what I meant by that. I guess what I mean is that after blogging weekly for over five and a half years, I have just over three hundred email subscribers. My open rate on emails is around 40 percent, which floats just above industry standards for religious emails (per MailChimp), but it does mean that only about one hundred people open each email I send. I suspect that far less than this go on to read the email they opened. My “click rate” within each email hovers around 1–2 percent, which is tiny. And almost no one except me ever shares my blog posts on social media, and I only share each post once at most. By the way, allow me to break the fourth wall for a moment to interject to say that I’m not crying or upset and hopefully not ranting; I’m just disclosing what’s behind the curtain.

At the end of the year, a number of bloggers shared on social media their blog traffic from 2019. A few friends of mine had tremendous years, which I loved and rejoiced over when I saw the numbers. My friend Chris, who asked me to define hitting it big, had web traffic numbers twice as big as my best year, which was twice as big as all my other years. That’s objective, not subjective. And I’m not complaining. I’m simply saying that over the last year when I wrote more guest posts than ever and appeared on a few podcasts and published several longer projects, my blog subscribers stopped growing. Sure, I occasionally get new subscribers, but every email I send loses subscribers too, often several. All this happens while my friend John Beeson and I work on a book about blogging. A guy writing a book about blogging should be able to grow one.

If we could measure the number of people who read my posts—not measuring “page views” and those who only skimmed a paragraph or two but measuring those who actually read an entire post—I think the number of people reading most of my posts could be counted on two hands, or maybe two hands and two feet. I’d hardly say having seventeen people read each post qualifies as big readership. And over the last six months my blog might even be shrinking. Adding more subheadings, lists, and hot-takes would get more readers to skim my posts, yet I’ll often find myself intentionally writing posts without headings, lists, and hot-takes just to reward readers who read, like putting a candy bar in the bottom of my kids’ laundry baskets to reward them for staying the course until the job is done. (I don’t do that, by the way.)

Perhaps the shrinking of my readers has to do, in part, with my writing and blogging skills. I don’t want to deflect ownership. But my shrinking readership also reflects changes in culture and Internet algorithms. A large number of shares on Facebook, for example, does not happen today except for a few bloggers. Facebook algorithms want you to stay scrolling and liking and reading Facebook, not clicking away. It’s the same with Google. It used to be that when you searched a question, you were given links to go browse. Of course Google still returns links, but more often than not, the top links are simply excerpts that show searchers the answers to their questions. So, if you crush the SEO on a post (which I never worry about) and Google ranks your post near the top or even at the top of all posts, you still might not get many click-overs because searchers only want the bite-sized answer, and Google feeds it to them. Besides all this, the idea that lead magnets generate hundreds of email subscribers has lost the novelty it once had. Who thinks, “What I need is an inbox filled with more subscription emails”?

Blogging also must compete with other platforms for attention. In Tony Reinke’s book Competing Spectacles, he describes attention as a zero-sum commodity. “At some point we must close all our screens and fall asleep” (p. 57). Reinke quotes the CEO of Microsoft who noted, “We are moving from a world where computing power was scarce to a place where it now is almost limitless, and where the true scarce commodity is increasingly human attention” (p. 57). This certainly affects bloggers and blogging. The streaming services of Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime Video gobble up the precious resource of attention leaving individual online authors and their blogs to compete for the table scraps of attention with large conglomerate blogs, Christian news ministries, podcasts, YouTube channels, and the microblogging of twitter threads and Instagram posts. A friend once told me that when it comes to playing outdoor sports (e.g., skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing, kayaking, etc.), you have to pick one or at most two because they’re too expensive and time-consuming. The same could be said of excelling at a craft and cultivating an audience. It’s a rare person who can excel across all the platforms available to the dedicated amateur.

For all these reasons—the changing Facebook and Google algorithms, the cultural aversion to trading one’s email address for subscriptions, and the crowded market of ideas vying for attention—the blogging landscape has changed, and so should our expectations for growth. Comparing the success of average bloggers today with the success of average bloggers just five and certainly ten years ago is like comparing baseball stats of today with the stats during the steroid era, which often get flagged with an asterisk.

We Christian bloggers have a strange relationship with metrics. We love them and hate them. We need “page views” to validate our labors and we loathe the magnetism statistics have over us. It’s not unlike the pastor who laments the Monday morning deluge of emails while at the same time knowing each inbox ping supplies a spurt of dopamine reassuring him of his job security and importance: people need me—look how they email. Deep down most Christian bloggers do want to write for the sake of God and his glory, for the sake of truth, for the sake of serving readers with our words. But I also know that for me, the mottos of “art for God’s sake” and “art for ego’s sake“ slosh about in the same heart. 

Professor and author John Koessler recently wrote, “What if, like Emily Dickinson, we die without seeing the bulk of what we have written published?” It’s a good question. Today bloggers can publish whatever we want as fast as we want, but most of us know what it means to self-publish posts long labored over only to hear crickets, which means there are more similarities to Dickinson and her mid-nineteenth century writing in obscurity than we might expect. Koessler continues, “The romantic in me says that it doesn’t matter. I am a writer. Therefore, I must write. But it is often the pragmatist who sits at the keyboard. I am afraid I am wasting my time. I worry that no one is listening.” While Koessler worries about no one listening, I often have the stats to prove no one was. So why keep blogging?

My reflections here about how we measure success as a blogger are too long-winded and probably say more about me and my existential blogging angst than the topic, so please forgive me. But the point I’m trying to meander toward is seeing the goodness of what Laura Lundgren calls being a “village poet.” A village poet views success as faithfully serving a small number of readers with our words, not as a resignation to the state of affairs but as a goal. “When I first arrived,” Lundgren writes, “the internet felt wide open with possibility.” In a world that expects and rewards all things done fast and famously, the biggest challenge for Christian writers might be to find joy in being faithful with the little things. Lundgren goes on to say, “My writing has not turned into a career. It’s mostly a hobby and a privilege. As a village poet I recognize that my writing is only one aspect of a larger ministry. Writing gives me a chance to order my thoughts about Scripture, but the ultimate goal is not to write well about these things but to live them out in obedience and humility.”

I think she gets it. I wish my heart did too.

* Photo by Carlos Muza on Unsplash

Blogging for God’s Glory: A Big Big Fridge

I like sharing excerpts from writing projects that are still far from completion. My friend John Beeson and I are working on a book called Blogging for God’s Glory in a Clickbait World: A Christian’s Guide. John is a pastor at New Life Bible Fellowship in Tucson, Arizona and a fellow blogger. This is how we begin the book.

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“Daddy, I painted this for you,” says my daughter Izzy.

Closing the door behind me and setting my work bag on the table, I bend over to look at her paper. She’s covered the paper with splotches of primary colors in the shape of people. The paper is still wrinkly from paint liberally applied. She places the painting in my hand.

“That’s wonderful,” I say while trying to figure out which way is up and which is down. I’ve learned from experience not to ask, What is this? Instead I say, “Tell me about this picture, sweetie.”

“It’s a doggie in our backyard, and all of our family is eating pickles,” she says, or whatever the picture was that particular day.

“Oh, I see. Can we hang this on the fridge?”

Izzy smiles wide. Her two front teeth are missing.

And we do. Along with all the others, we hang this one on the front of our fridge.

People tend to mark the stages of life. We save the paystub from our first paychecks, mount diplomas on walls, celebrate a marriage and a first mortgage. I’m in that stage of life where my fridge is covered in artwork from my children. They hand me watercolor paintings when I leave for work. They hand me colored pencil drawings when I come home from work. They come to work to hand me colored macaroni glued to construction paper. It’s wonderful. I don’t want it to end.

What I love most is the innocence of their gifts. My little Izzy doesn’t have a clue there is such a place as The British Museum where there hang works of Rembrandt and Rubens. Izzy doesn’t know anything about the Louvre in Paris that displays DaVinci’s Mona Lisa for 10 million visitors each year. All Izzy knows is our refrigerator, the two sides of the fridge and the front side of the fridge, which I guess we could call our three art galleries. The front of our fridge, or the main gallery if you will, receives nearly ten visits a day, or maybe one hundred visits in the summer when our children enjoy vacation and standing in front of an open fridge. But no one in our family visits the fridge necessarily to see her artwork. That’s the child-like innocence Izzy has when we mount her paintings. If an adult were to possess this kind of ignorance of the great works of art, especially an adult given to producing her own art, we’d called it something other than innocence; her ignorance would take on the pejorative, culpable sense of the word. In a child, however, the ignorance is admirable.

The purity of her gifts strikes me too. “Daddy, I painted this for you,” she says. Izzy paints not for fame or money or from the overflow of competition with her siblings, but for you, she says. When I say purity, I mean this kind of singlemindedness, the kind of joy captivated by and treasures only the smile of her father. No mixed motives, no duplicity. Only pure single-minded devotion.

I’m not saying children are innocent and pure and full of rainbows and bubble gum. I believe in original sin because I read of it in the Bible and also because I see it in the mirror and in the eyes of every one of my young children when—if their little arms were strong enough—might kill me rather than not get their way. Children are not pure and innocent in an absolute sense. As those downstream from our father Adam, we are sinners not because we sin, but we sin because we are sinners. As David writes, “In sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5).

I think about my children’s artwork often when I blog. Whether you think that makes me childish in the worst sense or the best, I’ll let you decide. But I like to think of God printing out my blog posts and hanging them on some heavenly fridge, which I’m sure is huge and made of stainless steel and always has an ice dispenser that works. I like to think of God stooping over to smile and say, “Tell me about this one, Benjamin.” I like to think God has a big big house with lots and lots of room and a big big fridge where he can host my blog.

Again, I hope these sentiments don’t betray my foolishness or ignorance or even my arrogance. I know my blog posts are only feeble and flimsy collections of words, while J.I. Packer’s book Knowing God has gravitas. I know that though the internet keeps a record of all my blog posts, should the Lord tarry, Augustine’s Confessions will still be read in ad 3,020 and my posts will be long forgotten. I know that as I blog about some suffering that feels weighty to me, Corrie ten Boom’s holocaust survival story makes my problems look like they are, light and momentary. From jails Bunyan and Bonhoeffer wrote masterpieces. And I, from my dining room table, have the gall to expect my Internet-published words should hang in the heavenly gallery? . . .

* Photo by Naomi Hébert on Unsplash

On Writing: Tips and Routines

While I write a lot, I don’t typically write much about writing. In five years of writing a weekly blog post I’ve written about writing less than five times. I figure writing about writing is best saved for the elite, the authors we all know and love.

In the genre of Christian non-fiction, I could listen to Kevin DeYoung and Jared C. Wilson talk tradecraft all day. I’ve never actually heard DeYoung do that; I’m just saying I’d love to do that because he’s so good with words and theology. You never have to read sentences from DeYoung twice . . . unless you want to, which I often do. Jared Wilson has done several engaging interviews about writing (Home Row podcast interviews 1 and 2, and The Forum interview at Midwestern Seminary).

I’d also love to hear novelist Anthony Doerr talk about writing. He authored my all-time favorite novel, All the Light We Cannot See. In the novel, Doerr primarily wrote with present tense verbs rather than the standard historical past tense, which gives such immediacy to the book. Doerr’s website has several links to interviews.

Again, writing about writing—I think—is best saved for the best writers. But every so often a friend will reach out and ask about my writing routines. If you stay at something long enough, people tend to wonder why and how. Chase Replogle was even kind enough to have me on his podcast the Pastor Writer for that purpose. And a few weeks ago a friend asked me a number of questions by email. I don’t want to presume that my answers to his questions will be as interesting to you as Kevin DeYoung’s answers would be to me. But if you’re just beginning to take your writing seriously, perhaps these thoughts will encourage you to do that very thing.

What is your routine for writing? Is it every day, a specific day?

I’ve tried to write one blog post a week for the last five years, though I’ve never made it to 52. Most years I make it to the mid-40s. The first year I didn’t give as much time to blogging, but for the last four years I’ve spent about ten hours each week writing. Somewhere along the way I began to feel compelled to work on the craft as part of my calling, so I made the decision to treat writing like a part-time job—one I really enjoy.

I do most of my writing at our kitchen table every day except Sunday before our kids get up, so typically from 5:30–7 am. Because I don’t work at the church on Fridays, during the school year I often get another hour to write while my younger kids nap and the older ones are at school. For me, plodding along in small doses has been better than marathon, binge writing, which is something I’d never have time for anyway.

This last year, my writing schedule has had a lot of bumps, as my youngest son decided he wants to get up before 5:30. It’s helped me remember that my part-time “job” has no actual boss and very few deadlines not self-inflicted. I try not to begrudge it when the schedule shifts or is swallowed altogether. Except sometimes I do begrudge it, which I hate about myself. I’d like to be more open-handed and tender-hearted than I am.

Do you set specific goals? If so, what do they look like?

As far as writing goals for completing projects, I hear authors talk about hitting word-count goals or a certain number of pages. I just shoot for time-on-task.

If you’re asking about other goals, like style and writing voice, I guess I have an answer for that, but it seems really, really goofy to share with someone else. It’s more of a private mission statement than a public one. But here it goes: I aim to bring clarity to the Christian message of hope with accessible, riveting scholarship. Again, it feels super goofy to write out my purpose statement, but it has brought focus even if I never produce anything worthy of the label accessible, scholarship, or riveting. It’s a shoot for the stars and you hit the moon sort of thing.

What motivates you?

I often find out after the fact that my motivations are more layered than I realize. But if I set aside the sinful motivations that lurk around the edges of my heart, I’d say the main two motivations for writing are joy and obedience. I really do enjoy tinkering with words that point people to God. I’ve heard Douglas Wilson say that for him, writing isn’t “have to” but “get to.” I feel the same.

I also feel a component of obedience related to writing. I joked about not having a writing boss, but I’d like to think I treat writing the way the lay-elders of our church treat their pastoring: serving the church as something they enjoy but also something they feel called by God to do.

How does your writing schedule fit in with your pastoral duties?

I’m not sure I do a good job with this and hope things can change. I tend to think there is a lot of overlap between the kind of writing I do and my pastoral duties at church. Most of my posts are really just devotionals of one kind or another. And all of the longer writing projects are pastoral—at least I hope they are. A few months ago one of the elders commented about how my preaching has grown because of all the writing, which was nice to hear. But for now, I try to keep church and writing separate.

Because I try to publish a new blog post each Tuesday at 2pm, I often need to steal 30 minutes of “church time” for “blog time” to powder the nose of the post before it goes out in public. But since pastors rarely work less than full-time, I know I’m not really stealing. When I first started blogging I worried people in our church would complain that I sat around and wrote all day, so I have probably been more paranoid than necessary.

What are your top 3–5 books that you’ve read on writing?

The most influential book to my writing has been Helen Sword’s The Writer’s Diet: A Guide to Fit Prose. It’s super short but super helpful. My honorable mentions include all of the writing books by Roy Peter Clark: Writing Tools, How to Write Short, Help! For Writers, and The Glamour of Grammar.

This will expand the list beyond five, but also excellent are On Writing by Stephen King, On Writing Well by William Zinsser, The Sense of Style by Stephen Pinker, Spunk and Bite by Arthur Plotnik, and the classic The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White.

In addition to books, a few podcasts have been life-giving to me: Home Row hosted by J.A. Medders and the Pastor Writer hosted by Chase Replogle. Jonathon Rogers sends a weekly email called The Habit that I enjoy too.

Beyond Microsoft Word, do you use any specific tools or software to help?

As for writing tools, I’ve never gotten into the writing programs Scrivener or Ulysses, though I hear some writers really like them. I just stay with Microsoft Word. I’ve found Grammarly very helpful, which is an add-on to Word. Grammarly does a deeper dive into the content to find potential mistakes than the spell-check that comes with Word. I started using Grammarly 3 years ago because it embarrassed me to put my sermon manuscripts online. My co-pastor (who recently left) is an excellent writer and probably had no more than two typos a year in his sermons. My sermons have two per page. But Grammarly helped a lot. I also use an electronic reader to listen to everything I write before I publish. The electronic reader helps me hear typos I might not have seen. I wrote a bit about self-editing here.

The other tool is related to Helen Sword’s book called The Writer’s Diet Test. It’s an online analyzer of your prose. You almost have to have read the book first to make sense of it, but I’ve found it more than a little helpful.

Any other thoughts or advice?

Glad you asked, but I feel like it would be pretty arrogant of me to offer writing advice. I took like two classes at a community college on the subject. The only advice I might be able to give is that if you want to write guest posts for websites, I’d start small with places you think will say yes, perhaps for a website where you know someone. That’s helped me a lot. Oh, here’s one more. If you work for a church, have conversations about your writing with the other leaders, specifically how what you write and when you write is related to your work.

* Photo by Calum MacAulay on Unsplash

Blogging for God’s Glory: Audio from My Radio Interview

When I talk about blogging for God’s glory, I don’t mean to say, “Look at my website, and you’ll know how it’s done.” I don’t mean that. I’m certain that no angels dance when they open up my URL on their smartphones.

Those are a few of the ideas I shared in a recent 30-minute interview for Pilgrim Radio Network. In the interview I also share how I became a writer, which is something I never imagined would happen. If you get this post on the day it releases (Friday, March 30, 2018), then you can livestream the interview at 12:30 pm and 9:30 pm Pacific Standard Time. For everyone else, the audio is below.

The backstory to the interview is funny—at least to me.

About 18 months ago I wrote down a series of questions to help a friend as he launched his blog. A year later, I took those questions and wrote them into a post. I was hoping they might help others but feared only five people would read it. After I submitted the article to two different places and heard “no” from each, For The Church was kind enough to publish it. (I also posted a follow up on the technical aspects of blogging on my own site, which I’m sure only five people did read.)

Anyway, Tim Challies ended up sharing the post on his blog, which gets, shall we say, a little more traffic than mine—about 100 times more web traffic to be exact. From there, Bill Feltner, the host of “His People” on Pilgrim Radio, saw the post and asked for the interview.

I hope you both enjoy and find it helpful as you pursue whatever it is that God has specifically called you to do for his glory.

* Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash.

Blogging for God’s Glory: Technical Questions to Consider

Last week, For The Church was kind to publish an article I wrote called “Blogging for God’s Glory.” In it, I encourage Christians to care about the quality of our art, not simply because it reflects on us, but more importantly, because it reflects our God. I shared 35 questions to consider as we bloggers ply our trade. I discussed things such as:

Purpose & Audience: Why am I blogging, and who am I trying to reach?
Commitment: How much time and effort will I give to blogging?
Networking: How will I connect with readers and other like-minded bloggers?
Money & Growth: How much money will I invest in blogging and what might be the returns?

Near the end of the article I wrote, “There are a dozen technical, behind-the-scenes details that you’ll also want to consider, but let’s leave them for another day.” Well, today felt like a good day to cover some of these technical questions.

I realize this post will not give “warm-fuzzies” to you about the gospel. It doesn’t for me either. I also realize many people who read my blog don’t have their own blog. But for any like me who have floundered for a season not knowing the difference between Wordpress.com and Wordpress.org (and what does URL mean, and a bunch of other techie things), I hope this post helps you as much as it could have helped me three years ago.

Technical: What behind-the-scenes details do I need to know?

1. Am I capable of handling technical tasks such as setting up the blog, formatting posts, and creating forms to capture email addresses? If not, who can help me?
    
2. Which categories will go in my blog header, such as an about page, a publications page, and a contact page?
    
3. Will my blog contain only written posts, or will I include video and audio posts? If I include audio and video, do I have the equipment and the technical expertise to pull off these other forms?
    
4. Is the name of my blog the same as my website address, commonly called a URL? Have I purchased a URL yet?
    
5. Of the many different blogging platforms, will I use Wordpress, Squarespace, Blogger, Medium, or something else?
    
6. If I use Wordpress, the most popular blogging platform, do I know the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org, and what might be the pros and cons of using each? (It’s been said that Wordpress.com is like renting a house and WordPress.org is like owning a house.)
    
7. If I use Wordpress.org, am I comfortable keeping my “plug-ins” up to date? (Plug-ins are added features you can incorporate into your blog to customize it.)
    
8. Will I email readers using the email service included by some blog platforms, or will I use an email service provider, such as MailChimp, Emma, or Constant Contacts?
    
9. If necessary, am I able to use HTML, the web coding language, to finetune the look of my blog?
    
10. Do I understand the term blog hosting, which describes who stores the content uploaded to the blog? Who will host my blog?
     
11. Will I set up my blog to capture email addresses, often called a lead magnet? If so, can I offer to give an ebook, short story, or infographic in exchange for contact information?
     
12. How will I store these email addresses, and how will the storage system relate to my blog hosting platform?
     
13. Will I check how my blog appears through several different internet browsers, such as Chrome, Explorer, Safari, and Firefox?
     
14. Does my blog templet work seamlessly with mobile devices, tablets, and desktop computers?
     
15. Will I first write my blog posts with a word processing software like Microsoft Word, or will I write my posts directly on the blog? If I write in Microsoft Word, do I know how to transfer posts onto the blog?

* Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash.

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RELATED POSTS

You Might Expect Things Like This or Maybe This

I’m into www.fanandflame.com a few months now, and it’s probably time to surface something I have had under the surface, namely, the types of posts you might hope to expect on this blog. The list will evolve, but for now…

Reflections on the Bible, culture, and pastoral ministry. This is my expressed trifold theme. It will bleed into all the other categories.

Book reviews. Lately, I’ve been reading a bunch of books. And for a few of them, I’ll give short reviews—reviews in fewer words than the book has pages.

Writing. Look for musings on the process and joy of writing, and for insights and reflections about the craft. Words are gifts; let’s use them well.

Sermon snippets. Frequently, the best sermon thoughts come on Sunday afternoon—the afternoon AFTER the sermon! Bummer. Occasionally, I’ll post one of the main points or an interesting paragraph, re-purposed with face lift.

Ooohhh, I like this quote. Here’s a quote I stumbled upon, and why I like it. Perhaps now we can appreciate it together. Put it on your fridge or bathroom mirror; memorize it or tattoo it on your shoulder. You’re welcome.

The re-post. Yes, it is someone else’s thoughts (excerpted only; with links for the full article), but if I do this, it’s because I found the post helpful and think you might too. Also, I’ll try to add a few comments of my own to move the ball down the field.

And finally…

Poetry. I don’t think Shakespeare is worried that I’m coming for his title, but I will do my best.

Did I miss anything? Are there other posts you want to see?

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The Last Reps of the Last Set of Bench-Press, and a Reason I Blog

I used to be good at bench-press; I did it often enough. Now, those days are mostly gone. But one thing I learned from weightlifting was that there is a huge difference between doing just 2 sets of 10 repetitions, and doing 3 sets of 10 reps—even if on the last set you can only get just 6, 7, 8, or 9 reps.

A lot of work happens in just 3 reps when those reps are your last 3. Something painful and wonderful and productive happens near, or at, our limit.

Doing 1 set everyday—1 easy-effort set, without pain and grunting and the shredding of muscle fibers—doesn’t lead to strength. But doing several sets, and digging deep on the last one, even if only done once a week, does lead to strength.

In other words, those last 3 reps are valuable in a way that the first 10 reps are not, because the last 10% of effort produces more results than the previous 90%. This is true to such an extent that during the attempt to complete the last set, in a way, the last set is really completing you.

This is a reason I blog—not the reason but a reason.

For several years, I’ve been collecting random thoughts in random Microsoft Word documents—fly paper placed randomly throughout the house. If you get an idea in the middle of the night, well then, write it down; scratch a few notes on the notepad beside the bed. If you think of something juicy while riding your bike, pull over and use the smartphone.

These are helpful practices. I know this. If I don’t start here, it can never move beyond there. But really, these are the first reps in the first set. They come relatively easy.

Writing blog posts, however, pushes me—like the last 3 reps, in the last set of bench-press, pushed me. Blogging forces me to exert effort and trim the fat. It forces me to think about my audience and to eschew lazy sentences. No lollygagging, no passive fly paper. My ‘spotters’ yell, “Come on, Vrbicek; push it!  Finish the set!”

When I blog, I’m forced to commit to an idea in a greater way than I would have otherwise. Writing for “publication,” albeit publication with a lowercase ‘p,’ gives me knowledge of my limits; my writing muscles get fatigued, and sometimes, the weights thud on my chest, and fatigue gives way to failure.

But it’s okay. Something painful and wonderful and productive happens near, or at, the precipice of (current) ability. After a protein shake and 2 days of recovery, I’ll be the stronger for it.

In other words, the hearty effort to complete 1 blog post at a time, is completing me.

But you might be thinking, “So, Benjamin, what if I don’t blog and I don’t bench?”

To you I’d say, probably there is something in your life where the last 10% matters more than the first 10%, or maybe even the entire previous 90%. Perhaps it’s a hobby or something in your vocation, or an aspect of building a relationship with someone. What is that “something” for you?

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