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.

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.

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[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? 

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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.

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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