What is surprising to me is not that we have the ability to process so many ideas each day, but that we do so little with all of those ideas each day.

When was the last time you had a great idea and did nothing with it?

For me it was yesterday. I had the idea of calling up a friend who has recently gotten divorced to encourage him and pray for him. I never made the phone call. The idea fell away as the immediacy of other pressing moments became higher priorities.

Philippians 4:8 says:

Finally, brothers and sisters, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

Ideas typically come in the form of thoughts. Here Paul is encouraging our “thought life” to be centered around things that matter.

Because of all this I think my decision to start blogging consistently back in September of 2007 truly changed my life. Here’s how…

Space to Process

Blogging forced me to dive into at least one idea almost every day. Rather than allowing life to fly by, processing and writing through one idea I got into the habit of creating space to process ideas rather than letting them float away in time and space.

For ideas to really make a difference in our lives we need the space to process them. For me, I always (well, not always, but that’s the goal) jot down any idea I have into Evernote either on my phone or computer.

Rarely do I have time and space in the moment to process through each idea as it comes, but by jotting down the full extent of each idea I can come back to it. Only about 50% of my ideas ever resonate with me when I come back to them, but that still leaves half of my ideas as something I can build on and begin to process through.

Forming Concrete Ideas For Life to Flow Into

I’m blown away but how unintentionally I can float through life. Interactions with people, watching television, reading books—I hardly ever think critically about what is going on underneath the surface.

What if we took the ideas going on inside our minds and began to let them influence how we live?

Blogging allowed me to not only process through ideas, but also to form them around written words that my life could then flow into. Processing through ideas is one thing, forming ideas into something of substance gives life a launching point. Ideas at this point are no longer just things stuck in our minds but they are written down for all to see.

For me, blogging was not just about getting readers, or about finding “my voice” as many say, blogging changed how I lived because I had been implicated by how God was forming ideas in my mind and then speaking them into the written word.

What practices have you used to implement ideas into your life?

I bragged to Rose about how good it was. Surely, I thought, this would gets lots of traffic. By the end of the day it hadn’t made much headway. Sure it had a few hits, but nothing substantial, nothing even close to what I had I hopes for.

And then almost the second after having that thought I had another thought.

Where does my satisfaction in life come from? Why am I even disappointed in numbers or hits?

I’ll never get enough followers on Twitter, friends on Facebook, or hits on this blog to ever come close to fulfilling myself day after day, moment by moment. It is simply not possible. The moment I am comfortable with a certain level of achievement then I start to place higher demands on my capability. At the end of this rat race is the empty life of a worn out man seeking to make much of himself for the sake of himself.

None of it will ever be enough to meet the high demands of my low self-esteem.

Maybe the point of it all isn’t about self-esteem, but instead maybe it’s about self-emptying for the sake of Jesus.

Have you learned this lesson the hard way?

I’d love to hear from other readers of this blog and other writers in general. While this blog isn’t the biggest one out there I do receive several hundred hits each day and have a devoted number of subscribers. For some writers this will be a great chance to be read by lots of new eyes.

A few simple guidelines:

• Topics to write on:
• Theology and its relation to church ministry and life.
• Church ministry in general.
• Books.
• Holiness (after all, I’m writing a book on the subject).
• Spiritual formation.
• Your own awesome idea.
• Posts should be no longer than 700 words (I can make exceptions but this is a good rule of thumb).
• Posts should not have been posted in other spaces first. I’m looking for unique and original content.
• In rare cases the writer must be willing to work with me on simple edits.

I’m really looking forward to sharing this space with other people and broadening our perspective on life and faith.

Please submit individual posts or short proposals to either my email (tybraun @ gmail dot com) or use the contact tab up above. If you have questions contact me using either one of those ways as well.

Happy New Year friends.

Certainly writing a book isn’t something everyone would want to do, but…

If you were given the opportunity to write one book, what would you write about?

1. Being that Catalyst is going on in Atlanta this week, it seems fitting to highlight a post from the Catalyst leader, Brad Lomenick. Brad understands my generation and how to help others understand us very well. He wrote a great post titled “20 Points on Leading Millennials.” Don’t miss it.

“10. Give them opportunities early with major responsibility. They don’t want to wait their turn. Want to make a difference now. And will find an outlet for influence and responsibility somewhere else if you don’t give it to them. Empower them early and often.”

“14. Deeply desire mentoring, learning and discipleship. Many older leaders think millenials aren’t interested in generational wisdom transfer. Not true at all. Younger leaders are hungry for mentoring and discipleship, so build it into your organizational environment.”

—

2. Ann Voskamp is simply an incredible writer. If you haven’t heard anything about her most recent book, you live under a rock or just don’t read very often. I think she nails the struggle most Christians have on a daily basis in her post about brokenness and fragmentation. Absolutely spot on:

“We don’t need to change activities from monetary work to missionary work to be devout. That very construct is false. All Christians are in full-time ministry. So we can stop tearing our lives into the categories of worldly and spiritual. We can put away the scissors of selfish ambitions and self-seeking comfort and self interests. If our lives feel fragmented, it’s because we are tearing up God’s one-piece fabric.”

—

3. I’m so happy someone had the stones to write a post about this. One of the difficult things of blog writing is that people don’t take time to read long posts that don’t have bullet points. On top of this, Google can categorize a post more easily for SEO that includes lists or bullets. This promotes the idea that good blog writing has to be about “the top 5 things” or “how to fix your life in 3 easy steps.” To me, all this promotes bad reading and bad writing. So I loved this post that calls the whole thing into question:

“One of the reasons I wanted to become a writer is that I was fascinated by a journalist’s ability to shape public opinion. Yet, the more information I have about who actually reads my words, the further removed I feel from the field of journalism. Sometimes my writerly self takes a back seat to my other personality, the one that’s obsessed with getting strangers to like me for something I wrote. As a slave to data, my success as a writer now hinges on how often I get Stumbled Upon, Voted Up, Promoted, Ffffound, Dugg, RTed, and Liked.”

Have a good weekend friends.

Oh and definitely follow Paul on Twitter if you aren’t.

A few changes to notice:

1. It looks different. Ha, just kidding, that’s fairly obvious. If it doesn’t look different to you, do a hard refresh of your page (Control+R or Control+F5 on a PC, Command+R or Shift+Command+R on a Mac).
2. There’s an “Archives” tab on the right side so if you want to look back at posts from years ago quickly, now there’s an easy way to do that.
3. If you prefer to read blogs via email, over on the “Subscription” tab, there’s a quick an easy way to sign up.
4. Comments are now run by Disqus. There’s a big debate within the blogging world of whether to stick with WordPress comments or try Disqus. We’re making the leap here. If you prefer to just put your name and email to leave a comment, nothing changes for you. For those of you who like to get email notifications for comment replies and other features, signing up for a Disqus account is the way to go. You can also connect your blog comment with your Twitter/Facebook/Google profile if you prefer.
5. And probably my favorite part is that there’s now a section featuring the work of The Mentoring Project and Paul’s work as well. It’s on the right-hand sidebar.

If you notice things that seem off as you navigate around today and in the coming weeks, please let me know.

How do you like the new look?

As someone firmly entrenched in this world of social media, I constantly battle over the need or desire to share. Sharing of my life, my news, my opinion. (Trust me, the irony of writing a blog post sharing my opinion about opinion sharing is not lost on me)

Often times I do feel an urge (I hope this comes from God at least most of the time) to share something about my life or even my opinion on something. Other times though, I keep my life and my opinion to myself to avoid over-sharing and making my opinion more about me than creating a helpful and edifying dialogue.

I have friends who disagree with this. They would say, especially as someone desiring to become a pastor, my opinion should always be shared. People have complained to me that too often I don’t share my opinion on this blog, to instead focus on something much more lame, a “conversation.”

One of my favorites blogs is written by John Dyer. He writes about once a week. He uses Twitter very sporadically. He goes largely unnoticed (because to get noticed, you typically have to talk and be controversial a lot), even though his depth of understanding on technology and faith is as deep as anyone. John recently had this to say surrounding the whole Love Wins drama (read the whole article in CT here):

What few of us realize is that when we press those “Publish,” “Post,” “Comment,” and “Send” buttons, we are making the shift away from merely “believing” truth and stepping into the arena of publishing that belief. In doing so we are effectively assuming a position of leadership and teaching that prior to 2004 was not available to us.

Yet Facebook and Twitter do not encourage this kind of self-restraint. In fact, they encourage an opposing value system. Social media relentlessly asks us to publish our personal opinions on anything and everything that happens. There is no time for reflection in prayer, no place for discussion with other flesh and blood image bearers, and no incentive to remain silent.

In times of controversy, one of the worst things to do is share a personal opinion in a public forum that allows for little relational connection. This is effectively what has happened with Love Wins, and it happens around us all the time. Sometimes I blog to be able to form an opinion, sometimes I don’t blog my opinion so I can have a conversation about it with people outside of the social media world.

1st Thessalonians 4:11-12

Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.

It seems the need to share our lives and our opinions on these social networks has made living out these verses a little more difficult.

Let’s process this before we hit send next time.

I have yet to read the article and I have no plans to in the future. And while I did link to the article so you can read it, I wouldn’t recommend you read it despite it probably having some very legitimate things to say.

Why am I so against reading it?

I have a major problem with sensationalism. So much of a problem with it that believe we should put an end to it. I’m not naive enough to think I have that kind of power, but I don’t think it has any place in society.

Social media hasn’t helped any of this, because everyone is given advice on how to get more followers on Twitter, how to get more people to read your blog posts, and most of the advice says the exact same thing…make yourself look/sound interesting, or in other words, sensationalize who you are and what you are talking about as if people won’t notice the fraud of it all.

We see this in church all the time as well. I don’t use Twitter or Facebook most of the time while I’m at church for this very reason. I’d hate to turn an experience I had with my church family into the greatest thing to ever happen at a church.

But this is how we begin to describe our experiences or how we begin to title our news articles in this instance. They’re always the best ever, or some other over-the-top way to describe something so more people will take notice.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love creativity and using human languages to convey a point is something that takes creativity. I just don’t want to be roped into reading something by someone being overly provocative.

My two main issues with sensationalism…

1. It devalues the human ability to decipher what is truly worthy of our attention and energy.
2. It subtly teaches us that God does not show up in the ordinary moments of life and we need to push for extreme experiences to find God.

Agree/Disagree?

This semester I took my first preaching course in seminary.

Taking the course was a big step for me, in a weird way. I’m in front of people all the time. Sometimes leading smaller groups, other times leading thousands. But the thought of getting up and speaking for a long period of time is so intimidating to me, mostly because I’ve never done it. I could have put off the class for another year, but I knew it was something I needed to get better at, so I signed up anyway.

Through my course reading and lectures I slowly started to see a lot of similarities between blogging and preaching. Sure, most blog posts are about 300 words and most sermons are closer to 30 minutes, but the principles of good sermon preparation and good blogging are closely tied.

In reality, blogging over the past 3.5 years has taught me as much about preaching as the course did. Here’s 4 ways blogging taught me to the preach (let me also say, I don’t really think I’m a preacher, considering I’ve only given one sermon, just that the principles I learned in class I also learned through blogging):

1. The importance of being succinct. Raise your hand if you’ve ever fallen asleep listening to a long, drawn out diatribe by a pastor on a Sunday morning? Well I never have (my dad would have killed me if I fell asleep listening to him) But I’ve always heard that the most effective blog posts are around 300 words. There is no space for fluff or a bunch of side points. Attention spans continue to get shorter and shorter and the importance of making your point throughout and quickly is paramount.
2. People most often learn best when a sermon (or blog) has one main point or overarching theme. In my course reading, Haddon Robinson emphasizes what he calls the “big idea.” I’ve listened to hundreds of messages that do a great job of presenting and developing several main thoughts within one message. Instead of walking away with a firm grasp on the message, I often forget it within an hour. While, certainly a message with one main thought isn’t immune to being forgotten by the listener, it will only help listeners if the message hones in on a “big idea” and spends its entire time developing the idea.
3. Illustrations take a point from being abstract to concrete. Good bloggers are excellent at using illustrations to make a point. Whether it be using a picture or video or story, often the best blogs don’t make their point on its own, they use an illustration to help it land in real life. Robinson says, “an audience does not respond to abstract ideas, nor have many people ever been moved to faith by reading an outline of Romans…” Illustrations make an abstract point more concrete.
4. The art of a consistent process that works for you. The most intimidating part of preaching was the process of putting a message together. I had no idea where to begin. My class helped me understand a process that works well and being a good preacher is being consistent with following that process. When I started blogging I didn’t make goals about getting readers or becoming a better writer, more than anything I wanted to be consistent with it. Whatever “success” I’ve had blogging is due mostly to being consistent.

How has blogging helped you develop a different skill?

I’ve always believed that the church should be and can be at the forefront of creative culture. And so much of creative culture is being birthed within the social areas of the internet. Sadly, most churches have ignored this and are missing incredible opportunities to reach people inside and outside of the church in a relational way.

But don’t listen to me, listen to Darren Rowse, from Problogger.net. He knows much more than me about social media. He has multiple blogs and a following (between Twitter and his blogs) of over 250,000 people.

Here are his thoughts on how the church and social media:

Come here to watch, if you can’t see the video.

Great thoughts from Darren. Here were my favorite lines:

• “People are now using the web for social reasons than they are for anything else, including porn.”
• “People who are coming online are looking to connect, interact, have their say, meet other people, and produce content. Churches are beginning to embrace that type of approach on their websites. That is exciting to me.”
• “Churches are missing out on something if they only use the social web to build ourselves up.”
• “The web is a wonderful opportunity for the mission of the church.”
• “Churches are in the business of community, they should be leading the way in the space of online community.”

Any thoughts on how the church can integrate into the social side of the web?

(HT: Andrew Jones)