Back to the beginning

Okay, so I've been a little obsessed with this project of archiving the entire corpus of my work with the United Methodist Reporter. But it has been fun, allowing me to go over old columns and book reviews that I wrote years ago and re-reading them so I could write little annotations when I add them to the blog's archive.

I couldn't locate my very first two columns on the Reporter's website, so I inquired with the good folks at UMR Communications and - voila! - they got both of them up in a jiffy. My second column was called, "Single with cheese: Are we listening?", and it looked at the nature of singles ministry in the church today. Most of the concepts of singles ministry that I have encountered are fairly outdated (and in fact, the term itself seems old-fashioned). So I wrote the column to suggest that we should view singles as they are rather than according to yesterday's labels. That's an important thing to note, and I think it impacts on the way we go about evangelism. (Not everybody lives in a family of four behind a white picket fence, after all).

It was this column that launched my writing for the Reporter - an initial offering entitled, "Get ready, Church: Here come Gen X'ers." As I went back and re-read it four years later, I was surprised at how many themes I mention in this first column that have remained consistent topics for me in the years since. The sense that 'now' is the time for Gen X'ers to step forward and lead, the sense of rootlessness and uncertainty that faces us in the postmodern world, and the challenges that the economy and technology pose, are all present there in the first column. Also present is an indication of my high ecclesiology - that is, my belief that the church, as the body of Christ, is the one place where we can really find a home. I believe that now as strongly as I ever have.

At any rate, those first two columns have been added to the blog archive now, and you can find them by clicking on the 'UM Reporter Columns' tab in the left-hand sidebar, clicking on the drop-down window to choosethe year, and selecting '2005.' We're still dealing with a couple of weird occasional glitches on the archive pages, but most everything is posted now.