Why I Write
Preaching, clear thinking and the desire to write something useful.
I didn’t begin ministry with a plan to become an author.
I began by preaching.
Week after week, preaching forces you to engage with Scripture. You read. You study. You ask questions. You try to understand what a passage meant to the people who first heard it and what it means for us now.
Then comes the harder part. You have to explain it.
Not simply to people who have studied theology, but to the person sitting in church who has had a difficult week, the new Christian who doesn’t know all the language yet, the person who has followed Jesus for fifty years, and sometimes the person who isn’t quite sure why they are there at all.
That process has shaped the way I write.
Some Things Are More Complicated Than They Need to Be
Theology matters deeply to me. So does biblical scholarship. But we can sometimes make Christian truth sound so complicated that ordinary people assume it belongs to someone else. I don’t think it does.
Some of the most profound truths of the Christian faith can be expressed clearly without making them simplistic. There is a difference between simple and shallow. That distinction is important to me.
Jesus was capable of speaking about enormously profound things through a seed, a coin, a lamp, a field or a story about two sons. People could understand him. They did not always like what they understood, and they certainly did not always agree with him, but his teaching connected truth with life.
For me that is something worth aspiring to.
Writing Makes Me Think
There is another reason I write. Writing exposes what I don’t understand.
It is possible to carry an idea around in your head and feel as though it makes perfect sense. Then you try to put it into a paragraph and discover the holes.
What exactly do I mean? Is that really what the biblical text says? Have I assumed something that isn’t actually there? Could I say this more clearly?
Writing slows my thinking down enough to make me examine it. That can occasionally be frustrating, but it is also one of the things I enjoy most about the process. I often understand something better after I have tried to explain it to someone else.
There is something quite exposing about a blank page. It does not allow you to hide quite as easily behind a vague idea.
Eventually you have to decide what you actually think.
I Want Writing to Be Useful
I don’t particularly want to write books that people admire and then leave sitting on a shelf. I would rather write something that is underlined, something that ends up with notes in the margins, something that someone talks about in a small group or uses to prepare a sermon, something that helps a person take one more step in following Jesus.
That is part of the thinking behind the Simple Faith material I have been developing: bite-sized lessons for lifelong discipleship.
Clear. Practical. Biblically grounded.
Something an ordinary Christian can pick up and use.
Because discipleship is not primarily about how much Christian information we accumulate. It is about being formed into people who increasingly look like Jesus.
Sometimes the Writing Begins With a Sermon
A lot of what you will read on this site will probably begin there.
I preach a passage. A question emerges. An idea begins to develop. Sometimes thirty minutes on a Sunday morning is enough. Sometimes it isn’t.
Those are often the ideas I want to keep exploring here. Not because I think I have finished working them out, but because the process of exploring them may be useful to someone else as well.
That is probably the simplest explanation of why I write.
I am still learning. Writing helps me learn. And if something I discover along the way helps someone else follow Jesus more faithfully, then it has been worth putting into words.