A time for every purpose under heaven

I've lived my entire life below the Mason-Dixon line, so I'm not used to a great deal of winter weather. In the towns and cities where I've lived - in Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina - you can usually expect autumn weather to extend to the end of November, with spring picking up sometime in mid-February. The "cold" months of December and January rarely see temperatures in the 30s lasting more than 2 or 3 days in a row.

That changed last weekend. We got about 7.5 inches of snow in Durham, and it is sticking around. Readers from more northern climes might read that sentence with a yawn, but Southern blood tends to be of a thinner sort. The pictures attached to this post are of our house and neighborhood on Saturday morning. It has felt bitterly cold.

It's nice, in a way, to see evidence of that elusive fourth season of the calendar year. It's a reminder that, as Ecclesiastes speaks about so eloquently, "For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven" (3:1).

This blog is right at 3 1/2 years old. The writing that I began on it at the same time my wife and I moved to Durham has been profoundly enjoyable, and it has put me in touch with people from all over who I would never have known about otherwise.

But in blogging, too, there are seasons and times. And right now I'm entering a season where I need to turn my attention to some other tasks that will keep me from being able to post as much. I'm not going to shut the blog down, and I may pop up from time to time over the coming months. I do need to back away from writing in this medium as often, as a way of prioritizing my time. So keep me in your reader if you subscribe that way, or just drop by every now and again. I'll let you know when I can start posting again more regularly.

---------------------------

Note: If you've been following my posts on Haiti, then you ought to take a look at this excellent story in the New York Times that gives some historical perspective on Haiti's struggles.

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

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!

Gen-X Rising Blog Debut

Hello, cyberworld! This is my first official post on this blog, so let me offer a little background...

For the past couple of years, I've been writing a column for The United Methodist Reporter, called "Gen X Rising." It looks at issues concerning the church and the Christian faith from the perspective of a Gen-X'er. Along the way, a couple of people suggested that I should expand my writing into the blogosphere (specifically into that happy corner of cyberspace known as the Methoblog community). I've wanted to do that for sometime, but it took awhile to get going.

I am a United Methodist pastor who has been serving appointments in campus ministry and the local church for the past five years. I left my appointment in June to return to school, and I've really missed the preaching and teaching I did on a weekly basis. So starting the blog just makes sense. I'm not planning on preaching in my posts : ), but I will be sharing my views on issues that I think are important to people of faith in Generation X. Because I'm a Methodist pastor, a lot of this will probably center on the UMC. But I won't limit what I write to Methodist topics.

I'll continue writing my column for the Reporter as well. Here's my most recent column online. If you have any comments or suggestions about the blog or my column, feel free to post a comment or e-mail me (andrew@mandatum.org).

Enjoy the blog!