A big chunk of effort in migrating the blog was going through each post to review and clean up content. On the technical side, I started by using a conversion tool that took the Wordpress data dump and transformed it into Markdown files. It was good as far as it went. But it was only so good. I ended up touching every post back to 2004, tagging, cleaning up formatting, improving links when possible, removing them when they were super-dead, etc. It took a while. But it gave me the opportunity to review my own progression of thought and growth in a way I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to, and that made it well worth it. Today I want to review some impressions this review left on me.

Post Content and Strategy

Man, back in the early years I posted a lot. Almost every day for a while, or at least multiple times a week. I started this blog a solid two years before Twitter went live or Facebook became available for non-students, and I used it for a lot of mundane life updates that would eventually move over to FB and Twitter. Once I started engaging on those platforms (and particularly Twitter), my blog posting tailed off to something closer to its current state - roughly one post per week at most.

One thing hasn’t changed so much: I post a lot about books I’m reading. I have written year-in-review blog posts since 2007. My books tag has 165 posts. At times I tried to post about every single book I read; now I’m doing that in short form over on my books site and only summarizing and sharing highlights here. Still reading lots of Christian thought and theology, too. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Evolution of thought

I grew up in a very conservative, nay, fundamentalist Christian household. Those lessons stuck with me long into adulthood. To steal a hopefully-not-too-outdated term from the youths, wow, a lot of my old content is cringe. To be gentle with myself: I was doing my best to fit in and emulate the examples of good Christian people that I saw and read. And boy, I was good at it. The evangelical-ese just dripped from my tongue. I was super-earnest (good, I guess) and super-presumptuous that I had it figured out (not so good).

I was not always an LGBTQIA-affirming person. I didn’t write anything super-offensive even in my non-affirming days, but I was very clearly non-affirming. You can see cracks starting to form in that wall back as early as 2007 when I pondered whether the church should be fighting same-sex marriage. In 2008 I was reading a bunch of Andrew Sullivan, and was more convinced that same-sex civil marriage should be OK. By 2014 I was fully uncertain what I thought about trans issues, but was sure that we shouldn’t be breaking bruised reeds. I was at heart fully affirming sometime before the COVID era, but I’m sad it took until 2022 for me to publicly post about it.

My journey through and eventually out of evangelicalism was clearly also a search for heroes I could latch onto. Sadly, my posting chronicles how one by one they have fallen. John Piper (eek). Mark Driscoll. Matt Chandler. More recently, and less notably, but still: John G. Stackhouse. I listened to them, quoted them, looked up to them… and then watched them fall by the wayside. Their less-famous acolytes championed so many others that also went off the rails: Mahaney, MacDonald, Mohler. Maybe this accelerated my departure from evangelicalism as much as anything.

I still have a long way to go to undo the tangled mess of my childhood fundamentalism, but I’m happy to see progress. We’ll see what another 20 years bring.

Random thoughts and Surprises

  1. If you’d asked me who was most influential in my theological evolution by default I’d say N. T. Wright. But if you look back through 20 years of blog posts, another name rises to the surface: Richard Beck. I guess if you need a complement to an Anglican bishop, a Texan Church of Christ psychology professor is a good fit. My nerd self has a ton of respect for the fact that Beck has been blogging on Blogspot since God only knows when and only recently added a Substack since nobody except me uses RSS any more.
  2. There is one song whose lyrics I quoted probably more than all other songs combined: Rich Mullins' “Land of My Sojourn”. Amusingly enough, I don’t have those lyrics memorized. I quoted them first as early as 2005 and as recently as 2017 and I’m sure I’ll pull them out again before long.
  3. There have been friends along the way who are, amazingly, still there and still influential, many of whom I have met in-person rarely or never. We owe Geof (RIP) for being the community leader and glue who brought us together, and I’m not sure any of us will appropriately uphold his legacy. I risk disappointing many by naming any, but two must be named here. Kari (whom I have never met in person but someday simply must), a children’s- librarian-turned-ordained-Baptist-minister who gave me an example of what a Christian feminist looks like, and who always had a timely encouraging word even when I was much more stubborn and conservative than I am now. And then there’s Dan. Have we really only met up that once? Dan is my Canadian brother-from-another-mother, homeschool kid, pianist, sometime worship leader, programmer, armchair theologian, and, most importantly, the inventor of the bullet points format that I adopted. Before we met in person I thought there’s no way this guy could really be this awesome in person. Then we met and I found out I was wrong. One of these days, my friend, we’ll meet again.

Wrapping up

I’ll write a proper 20-year anniversary post when October 2024 comes. In the mean time, I’m glad I had the chance for this retrospective.

Life, man.