Here an update, there an update...

... everywhere an update.

That's what I've been trying to do little by little on the blog, anyway. I sometimes fall behind with archiving my United Methodist Reporter columns. But I got caught up on that tonight, so you can scroll through all of them up to the most recent one by clicking on the "UM Reporter Columns" tab in the left-hand sidebar (or by just clicking here). The columns are archived chronologically, with the most recent one at the top. You can also use the drop down menu to look at different years going back to 2005.

I've also been trying to enhance the blog a little bit by attaching topic labels to the end of each post. That's something I just never did before, for some reason. But it is a nice feature to include, since I tend to write about recurring topics again and again. So for instance, if you find a post with the label, "Young Adults," you can click on it and get a page with all the posts I've written pertaining to young adults in some form or fashion. Or if you see a post with the label, "UMC," you can click on it to see what I've written about the United Methodist Church. It's a bit of a tedious process to go back and add the labels after neglecting that feature for three years, but so far I've got about 1/3 of the posts labeled. This is my 315th post (in a little under three years of blogging), and I hope to have every post labeled within the next couple of weeks.

While I'm on the subject of blog housekeeping, let me say that I'm always open to ways to enhance this site either through content or presentation. So feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an e-mail. I'm limited by both time and money as to what I can do, of course. But I am always eager to get feedback from readers about what works and doesn't work.

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.

More blog updates

I've taken a part of the Thanksgiving holiday to finish updating the Archives of Gen-X Rising. Now when you click on the 'UM Reporter Columns' in the left-hand sidebar, you'll find archived columns stretching back through 2005, which covers almost everything I've written in the United Methodist Reporter.

There are a few glitches that I will try to iron out in the coming days. One very strange one is that my archive section doesn't seem to want to post anything from late December in any year from 2005 to 2007. Not sure why that is happening, but it only cuts out about 3 or 4 total columns. Also, the Reporter's website does not appear to have my first two Gen-X Rising columns online, which were entitled, "Get Ready, Church: Here Come Gen Xers" and "Single with cheese: Are we listening?" I'd like to get those up eventually, because they really serve as the introduction to what I've been trying to do with the column since its inception.

Last month, this blog went over 21,000 unique monthly visitors for the first time. Thanks for reading! I hope to continue to provide the kind of content that will make my readers want to come back regularly. The past two-and-a-half years have been a lot of fun, and I appreciate the feedback you all have given me on the site and its content.

In the mean time, enjoy perusing through the archived Reporter columns. My dual focus as a columnist has always been on a) Writing about issues that concern Gen Xers and Milennials in the church, and b) Writing about theology and ministry from the perspective of a Gen X pastor. I hope I have been able to do both consistently.

Peace +
Andrew

Getting up to speed

After the hacking incident on my site a week ago, we had to wipe all my auxiliary pages clean. But it also gave me the chance to update those pages, which I needed to do anyway. I'm getting up to speed on that, so you can now see accurate information both in my 'About Andrew' page and my 'Contact' page.

What I am really excited about are some changes we have made to the 'UM Reporter Columns' and 'CDQ Columns' pages. These are the pages we originally set up so I could archive all the column work that I've done for the United Methodist Reporter and the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. In the recovery of the site over the past few days, my webmaster has changed those pages so that I can sort the articles by year. If you visit them now, you'll see that you can choose a year from which to view articles, instead of just having all of them listed on one page. That allows you to scroll through the titles and descriptions of each article in chronological order.

Since there are fewer articles for the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly, I went ahead and did those first. I'm working on the columns for the UM Reporter, and so far I've got all of them posted for 2008. I'll try to have the ones from the years 2005 through 2007 added in the coming days. Enjoy the archive!

I've been hacked!

Yesterday morning I was alerted to a hacking incident on this site that was pretty serious. The administrator function of the site had been broken into, which basically allowed anyone to make changes to various pages on Gen-X Rising. Predictably, someone started putting links to very nasty websites on my 'About Andrew' and 'UM Reporter Columns' page.

My webmaster was able to determine that the problem was with our web hosting company (not Blogger). We made some changes to tighten up security and cleaned out all the trash.

If you were navigating around the site over the past couple of days and came across any of this stuff, I sincerely apologize. And for the person who first alerted me to it, I want to say thank you. Fellow bloggers, let my experience serve as a warning to you. I rarely visit pages on Gen-X Rising like the 'About Andrew' page, so if no one had alerted me, my site could have been infected for days on end.

For right now, the pages that the options on the left-hand sidebar link to have been cleaned out. I'll be re-adding information to them over the coming days. The one piece of good news is that this is allowing me to do some updating to the 'UM Reporter Columns' and 'CDQ Columns' pages that I've wanted to do for some time - basically, inputting all the columns I've written, sorted by year.

If other bloggers have experience with hacking incidents and could offer helpful preventative advice to the readers of this site and myself, feel free to share.

Changes for Gen-X Rising

I had some major problems with Blogger over the past few days, keeping me from posting since last Friday. That's a real bummer, 'cause a post I tried to put up early in the week detailed a major new development in my life: a new appointment as the pastor of Mt. Carmel UMC in Henderson, NC. The post is up now though, and you can view it here.

At least fixing my Blogger issues gave me a chance to start making some changes to the blog. (Well, my web guru Scott Kent is actually making the changes, since I have the technology IQ of a housecat. And a not very bright housecat, at that.) You'll notice them by looking around on the blog, but I'll list them anyway:

-- Subscription Service: The little RSS widget below my picture in the top right-hand corner of the frontpage. I know some of you subscribe to the blog through various different readers, but I wanted to make reading Gen-X Rising super-easy for those who don't. So clicking on the "Subscribe" hotlink will take you to Feedburner, which allows you to customize how you keep up with genxrising.com using the reader of your choice.

-- Inclusion in the Christian Century's CC blogs network: Right under the RSS widget you'll see a CC blogs widget. My blog has been highlighted in the "Related Blogs" section of Theolog, the blog of the Christian Century, for sometime now. Gordon Atkinson, author of the Real Live Preacher blog and the administrator of the Century's CC blogs network, has offered to include me as a part of the network. So clicking on the CC blogs widget will take you to the Century's blog network, and soon my blog will be a part of it.

-- Expanding the archive on the left-hand sidebar: You may have noticed the two tabs on the left-hand sidebar titled, "UM Reporter Columns" and "CDQ Columns". I added those pages into the blog a few months ago, with the intention of creating an annotated listing of all the column work I've done for both the United Methodist Reporter and the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly. I've started that work, and you can access online versions of some of those columns by clicking on one of the two tabs. But what I want to do to expand that part of the blog is to sub-divide the column tabs by year, so that you can go directly to the columns I wrote for a given publication in a given year. To do that, I'm going to have a drop-down tab that will give you options of what year to choose. That development is in the works and should be finished by early next week.

-- Maintaining an ad-free blog: This isn't actually a new development in the blog. It's just the maintenance of a personal policy I have employed since launching genxrising.com almost two years ago. I understand why people add advertising to their blogs, and I have heard that (depending on traffic) it can earn enough money to pay for a lot of the costs of regularly maintaining a blog. But I've always thought there were problems with allowing advertising from outside companies. The two primary ones I see are clutter issues in your sidebars and the danger of ad content that is out of step with the message you are trying to convey in your blog. So I made a decision a long time ago to keep my site wholly devoted to content relevant to what I'm trying to do through genxrising.com. So that means that all you'll ever get is my writing and links to other sites in the general area of the Christian blogosphere.

Staying open to grace

My blogging has slowed down a little bit. That is mainly due to the time of the semester that we have reached, when it seems like you need a few extra hours in the day just to get everything done. I'll try to keep up a pace of 1-2 posts per week, but please forgive me if I slack off here and there.

On a good note, there are going to be some upgrades to the blog in the next few days. Nothing big, but I am adding some extra content that will help fill out what I am trying to do with the blog in general - i.e., combine articles I write in other publications with original writing here in an effort to address relevant issues confronting Gen X'ers in the church. I'll highlight those changes to the blog when they are finished.

I do want to briefly highlight my latest column in the Covenant Discipleship Quarterly, which is on staying open to new avenues of grace. In it, I tell the story of joining a new CD group last fall (which, by the way, has been a tremendous blessing). When the five of us started writing our covenant after much prayer and conversation, we discovered that we had some pretty different ideas about specific acts of discipleship to include. But instead of watering the covenant down and just going with generalized statements, we decided to contribute something of everybody in the group. That means that I am now being held accountable for acts of discipleship I might not have chosen for myself. But at the same time, I am being opened to new avenues of grace I wouldn't have known, either!

Because of our sinfulness, I take it as a given that, when we have the chance to choose for ourselves, we often choose badly. In that sense, having my brothers in the CD group choose for me is not just going out on faith - it is accepting that they might know better for me than I know for myself. Such, I believe, is the true nature of Christian community.

Time enough, but none to spare

I think the past few days of my life have been as busy as any I've ever had. I had to grade a bunch of final exams at the beginning of last week as a part of my T.A. duties, finished a paper on Wednesday, took a Latin final exam on Thursday, and flew to Dallas early Friday morning for a John Wesley Fellows conference. I'm back in Durham now, but I've got a lot more paper writing to do over the break. Thus, my blogging may be a little spotty over the next few weeks. I'll post when I can, but it may be more like weekly instead of two times per week.

Hope everyone is having a happy Advent. Peace +

Happy (late) Birthday to Gen X Rising

The 1-year birthday of this blog, Gen-X Rising, happened earlier this week on September 9. It was that day last year that I published my very first post. As I wrote then, I began the blog after some readers of my column in the United Methodist Reporter suggested that I should branch out and expand my writing into the blogosphere.

I have to say that it has been a thoroughly enjoyable year of blogging. Writing the blog in addition to my column has allowed me to get in touch with many more Gen X'ers and Millennials, all of whom care deeply about their discipleship and the future of the church. I've read several times recently that blogging as a literary form has reached its 'peak' and begun to decline. But I have also found that the community of those who continue to write and read blogs regularly has remained steady and continues to add to the supremely important theological conversation about how to understand the Christian faith in our day. Indeed, Gen X Rising has seen its monthly number of 'unique hits' increase from under 8000 to over 11,000 since January of this year.

I don't see myself slowing down on the blogging front anytime soon. I started with a goal of posting twice a week, and - interestingly enough - this is the 105th post since I began a year ago. That works out to exactly twice-weekly posts over a 52+ week period. I hope to continue on that pace.

The real congratulations goes not to the blog but to the readers and reader comments that have sustained me over the course of the past year. If no one was reading at all, it would be hard to sustain the energy needed to stay on top of blogging regularly. So thank you, readers. I appreciate you taking the time to stop by. And keep those comments coming!