Resetting the joint #67

There are many reasons my blogging dropped off a cliff from about 2021. It’s probably worth canvassing a few of them as I begin dipping my toes back in the water of expressing my thoughts publicly.

I’m aware there’s a thread of ‘meta’ posts through my archives recalibrating or articulating what I’m trying to do with this corner of the web, and that nobody reads these — probably — but they’re important for me because when future someone asks “why”, I can say “well, I explained why…”

This, hopefully, isn’t simply an exercise in introspective gazing at my own belly-button — but rather, some useful framing of ‘why now’ for a re-entry into potential stirring of various pots.

First, I’ve been pretty cynical about ‘Thought Leadership’ for a while; especially thought leadership unmoored from accountability structures — and, in 2021, I became differently accountable to my employer. For the previous era, I had been on staff in a large ministry team (maxing out at 25+ employees) in a large church, where I had been encouraged to ‘thought lead’, since 2021 (really 2020) I have been the sole employee of a small church community accountable to my elders and my regional body (the Presbytery). At some point in the past (ok, it was 2021), when I wrote a post critical of the hard Christian right in Australia and the increasingly violent rhetoric they were using — a complaint was made about me to the Presbytery by a member of the Christian right (who also accused me of defamation and threatened to take me to court); it was not upheld — but I recognise that the relational context in which I operate is different, and I don’t want to waste my time, or the time of those I am accountable to, with needless Kafkaesque processes where the bureaucracy is the punishment and people enjoy complaining.

Second, the unhinged ‘thought leadership’ through Covid; disconnected from actual expertise, where every man (typically men) and his blog crowded out expert perspective with ‘opinion’ made me reluctant to add ‘noise’; the whole game of ‘bot-farmed’ outrage driving polarisation and the way humans get caught up into sides, plus the advent of generative AI and the way the stochastic parrots of ‘large language’ slop production holding up a mirror to reveal most cultural commentators are utterly predictable and bring one or two hammers to every single phenomenological nail made me reluctant to just be another hammer, indistinguishable — especially because of my em dash use — from EutychusGPT and/or Russian troll farms. Plus, there’s real pressure, if you’re going to be a ‘thought leader’ to comment on ‘every’ issue — both to stay current, and to avoid accusations of cherry picking your outrage or whataboutism or whatever; and I simply do not want to play that game. You don’t need my opinions about, well, anything, really. Especially if I just say what you already think. Touch grass. Invite your neighbours for a beer on your street. Read a book.

Third, I’d rather be a ‘Bible guy’ than a ‘cultural commentator guy’ — I deliberately shifted to posting sermons for this reason; to the extent that I have cultivated any expertise worth hearing, I would like it to be more geared towards what is good, true and beautiful, generative, and unpacking the timelessness of God’s word rather than being timely reactive ephemera about events thrown out of proportion by recency bias where we don’t have sufficient context to say anything particularly useful anyway (hence the hammers we bring). Also, I put heaps of work into my sermons and they’re — I think — likely to be of more value than random thoughts about whatever else I might talk about as a hobby.

Fourth, and this is related to point one and three — I’m paid to be a Bible teacher and pastor in a local community, by my local community — to the extent that I think ‘intellectual property’ is anything other than a construct of neo-liberal capitalism; my ‘work’ belongs to that community, and should probably serve it — getting dragged into the ‘global conversation’ and away from a context where I am known, and loved, and my words are interpreted in the context of actual relationship is a fool’s game and I don’t really want to be a fool — or need that attention or complexity in my life. If I’m going to speak publicly, that comes at a cost (or potential cost) to me, and actually costs my community the money they pay me (as well as the reputational cost of being connected to my words). I don’t ever want to make money from my online presence or ‘commercialise’ myself or be a “brand” chasing likes to grow a platform — that gives me the ick. Since kicking off my blog and self-hosting, this has cost me money (quite a bit over time), but this is part of a commitment to a degree of purity and control (and to no ads).

Fifth, since 2022, the Presbyterian Church of Queensland has been in receivership because of our management of an aged care entity. I’ve thrown myself into denominational work via our structures, and also found myself — for the last little while — managing a second Presbyterian congregation through a vacancy. Time and head space for writing has been limited; we’ve also renovated our house (a long project with two moves (out and in), albeit to next door), and my kids are getting older. The time involved in writing, and in entering the conversation that responsible writing and a commitment to discourse produces is not nothing.

Sixth, I stopped writing publicly because all my best writing is grounded in real experiences as a pastor — the best public Christianity is pastoral and evangelistic — which is to say it applies the Gospel to political or cultural situations. I couldn’t figure out how to write about my experiences anymore. On one hand, some of my ‘public’ advocacy around pastoral issues (like how the church engages with the LGBTIQA+ community) was driven by real pastoral concern and, in some ways, was to give a voice to those who are voiceless in words they could send to those in their lives, while on the other, the people I’m pastoring don’t need their issues extrapolated into a public square where they become combatants in a culture war. I can’t tell, on balance, whether there was a net positive for my beloved community — though I also am aware that when you try to do this advocacy thing it may provide benefits further afield (and people still tell me things I’ve said have been helpful).

Further though, when the Rise and Fall of Mars Hill dropped in 2021, I was having, what I’ve come to realise (thanks therapy) a ‘trauma response’ to the events described in the show — I still haven’t quite figured out a way to talk about this that honours the good intentions and systemic nature of the people and ‘machine’ that harmed me (while I have worked out a bit of how to take responsibility for my role in creating and perpetuating the machine).

I’ve been trying to process my experiences of a certain model of church — one I see replicated in various systems, that I’ve best come to understand and describe as ‘machine church’. In 2019, as our church was spinning off from our mother ship and the mothership was undergoing something of a restructure, I was beginning to articulate my theological differences to that model for the sake of my own community as we worked through our future. With Paul Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine dropping last year, I’ve decided that maybe I have a few things I want to say as catharsis and perhaps as a contribution to a conversation about the shape of the church in Australia in a machine world. So. I’m going to reluctantly re-enter the fray on this basis, first, with a series of posts engaging with Kingsnorth, articulating some of my story and experiences, and perhaps humbly offering a way forward. Also, I should acknowledge — I actually really enjoy the writing part of blogging and have missed some of the discipline of crafting my thoughts about things in words.

Enough context setting. Stay tuned for part one of my reflections on Machine Church to drop next.