The singular title became plural, and three similarly restless hearts enlisted to join the fray. After about seven years of writing and editing on my own, Jenny, Rob, and Dave joined me and have made a fine crew. Their work, both in the great posts I get to publish for you each week and in the behind-the-scenes editing and collaborating and group messaging, has helped to grow the reach of our reflections, and I'm grateful for the wider ways that we are gaining to connect to others.
There is always the lurking temptation to pander or for me to turn our post titles into click-bait or to otherwise succumb to cheaper ways to drive traffic. The ways our technology can quantify pageviews et al are immense (and worthwhile as limited tools), but that can never and will never be the reason I (or my teammates) keep writing and sharing. I write because I love to write. I write about theology and ministry and spirituality because it's what cries out most strongly from within me. I share it with others because it's how I was wired by my Creator -- even as a little kid and an aspiring journalist, I would memorize temperatures, schedules, and sports standings from the morning newspaper and share them with classmates, teachers, and my family as my desire to report was already strong. My hook question as I engaged people with the news: "Wanna know?!"
On a related note, thank you to everyone who likes, shares, and comments our stuff to keep the spiritual ball rolling. Those engagements are more than just statistics to me. They're small markers that your social media time and capital, which makes up an increasingly large share of our days, is going toward dialogue with our work. And I don't take your clicks and reads for granted. Please keep those bits of feedback going and give it to me straight as you marinade over what you find here and share it with others. To get a full helping of goodness, Like our Facebook Page and/or follow me on Twitter (you can also keep up by following Jenny and Rob).
by Dan Masterton
As I plug our likes and follows (and affirm that I won't quit my day job and become a marketer or salesman), I also want to reiterate that my primary goal is to infuse your feeds with good, faith-based content. While we all need to get a decent helping of our friends' recent photos and some funny GIFs and videos, I think our social media consumption benefits from including some more thought-provoking content as well. That way our itch for social updates and humor, which can otherwise devolve into gossip and black holes of time-wasting, gets a healthy complement of things that make us think (see this archived post for more recommendations).
So, in that vein, I once again have the privilege of growing this blog's crew and bringing new writers into the fold. We'll follow up with that news on Thursday, when I formally introduce new team members, and our new friends will join our writing rotation, offering a new piece about once a month, in addition to the 2-3 times I will still be posting. Come on back in a few days to meet the new folks!
In the meantime, I thought it fitting to share this great quote, which has been the banner of this blog since its inception. Pulled from a great work of theology that my college professor had my class reading at the time, Origen gives us some solid marching orders as we navigate the seas of vanity and superficiality to try to write and share humbly, richly, and authentically:
The spoken word, even if it is true in itself and very persuasive, is not sufficient to affect a human soul unless some power is also given by God to the speaker and grace is added to what is said. It is only by God's gift that this power is possessed by those whose preaching is successful.
--Origen, Contra Celsum, 6.2
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