Blogging

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.