About This Blog
My first experience with blogging was through the website and blog of the church I was attending at the time, but I pretty quickly hit the limits of what I was comfortable posting over there. Because of the way that search engines work, whatever weird posts I had up there could result in someone finding the church website for the first time. At the very least, this could cause visitors to have an odd first impression of what the church’s priorities are.
Consequently, I started writing this blog in December of 2007. Nothing against the church website (it’s a great forum), but I feel like I can say more of what I want to over as it’s not officially associated with Sojourn. I remain skeptical that discussions of political theory – which show up here from time to time – should be something that’s officially associated with any church. In any case, I’m not going to that church anymore, either.
I’m writing from the perspective of someone that’s been raised within the conservative American evangelical tradition. It’s not a perfect tradition, as is obvious to nearly everyone, and because it’s what I was raised in, I have a tendency to offer quite a bit of criticism. Hopefully this is constructive criticism, and not just sitting back chucking rocks. I’m more interested in getting back to the practices and theology of the early church rather than preserving the current evangelical culture that I honestly don’t identify with all that much. Admittedly, I’m still trying to figure out what this looks like.
Quite a bit of the motivation for writing this is to clarify my own thinking in the areas where discussions seem to revolve around the intersection of theology and culture, and people are throwing words like “postmodernism” into the mix.
That is to say – while most people write something because they have stuff figured out, I am not one of those people. I’m writing this because I’m still thinking through all this stuff and am hoping that the results will be more coherent if I do it with the critiques of other people: community and an awareness of church history are the only things that protect me from heresy. (Well, that, and my pastor that comments on these posts, and lets me know when I’m off base.) In any case, I’m still trying to figure most of this out, here.
You’re welcome to help.