I’ve
decided to start blogging again. I'm surprised. Let me tell you how this happened.
Last
week I attended an excellent preaching conference at St Andrew Lutheran Church
in Eden Prairie. Some Lutherans are moving towards doing sermon series and away
from relying on the lectionary in their preaching. They organized a short
two-day preaching conference on doing series. I’ve been doing sermon series for
at least ten years, so I appreciated feeling some solidarity in constructing sermon
series from my main-line friends.
One
of the benefits of this conference was listening to Lillian Daniel speak. She is
the pastor of First Congregational Church in Dubuque, Iowa. I’m usually good at
controlling my compulsions, but I’m especially weak when it comes to purchasing
books while I’m at a conference. Pastors
know what I mean. We attend a conference AND get inspired by the speakers AND we
are attracted to the books that are being sold AND we have a credit card AND we
find ourselves walking away from the book table looking like we've had too much to drink. (We aren't walking in a straight line as we're juggling armloads of books that are about to fall from our arms.) We get back to our office AND put these compulsive purchases on our book
shelves. Years later we look at the book AND wonder what led us to purchase
them. Can I get an Amen?
As
I approached the book table at the conference the logic in my brain was flashing,
“danger, danger, danger” But my compulsions won. I bought three of Daniel’s
books. To prove a point I am almost embarrassed to make, I then went on-line
and purchased one of her books that was sold out. AND to illustrate that I’m not that far away
from sitting on a metal chair in a church basement telling others in the
circle, “my name is Paul Moore and I’m addicted to buying books,” late last
week I opened the mail box and saw I had received a package from Amazon. “Did I
purchase a book,” I wondered. I opened the package. “Doink.” It was the book—the
one I had to have 48 hours earlier and had forgotten 48 hours later that I had
purchased.
I
am happy to reveal that I’ve read half of Daniel’s book entitled, “Tired of
Apologizing For a Church I Don’t Belong To.” I can’t guarantee that I’ll read
all of her books, but I know they will make it onto my book shelves. My hope right now is I won't pull them out in five years and wonder why I purchased them.
As
I listened to Daniel speak at the conference the idea came to me that I would
like to do more writing. A book(s)—perhaps. When I started as the Organizing
Pastor of Chain of Lakes I felt a strong urging to write about the journey of
starting a church. And though I was encouraged by some friends at the time,
that project got lost in the weight of work.
Now that Chain of Lakes is chartered as a
church, the pressures are different. The
weight still feels extraordinary, but it’s different. So maybe (maybe?) I can pull out that project
again.
It’s
not that I stopped writing. Currently I write sermons and devotions and scripts
for videos. I even did a video series from scratch on the gospel of Mark last
Lent. I wrote 500 blogs until I stopped
when I felt my voice had become too narrow.
Writing
a book seems too much, but … As I was listening to Lillian Daniel and thinking
about writing about the journey of starting a new church, the next step that
seemed doable was re-starting my blog. So here I go.
I
don’t know how long or where this blog-writing go. This morning I read a
beautiful Facebook post by Anne Lamott. She paraphrased an idea from EL
Doctorow about writing. She wrote that “writing
is like driving at night with the headlights on—we can only see a little ways
in front of you, but you can make the whole journey that way.”
With
humility I want to share my voice and ideas with the wider world. I know I have
ideas—sometimes I wish my brain would just stop. I don’t know if these ideas
can be helpful; the only way to find out is by sharing them. So here I go again
on the journey of blogging. I don’t know where this journey of blogging will
lead me, but I’m ready to take another drive.
