Life Update
Also, changes to this newsletter, celebrating six years of The Funnies, and more.
Hey there! I’m back from my month away from this newsletter in July. Truth be told, I spent a good bit of time in July writing for this newsletter—I was just writing some essays that you may not read for a while!
Taking the month of July off when I’m in a writing rhythm is always nice, just as a means of reset, setting aside some time to plan and write without the self-imposed pressure of needing to have something to send every Tuesday.
Plenty of updates to share with you today. So let’s get going. First up, some changes to this newsletter.
Changes to This Newsletter
I launched this newsletter in the spring of 2020, just over six years ago. Rarely am I ever doing something before it is “cool,” but I suppose I can claim that I was here on Substack long before it was cool. Substack is really exploding these days!
When I started on Substack six years ago, most of my writing was available for paid subscribers only—the ability to have paid subscribers was one of the hallmark features of Substack, after all. About a year or so into that experiment, I think, I removed the paywall on everything and it hasn’t ever returned.
Until now.
As of today, I have turned paid subscriptions on again for the first time in years. Here’s the plan: all of my actual long-form(ish) writing—mostly delivered on Tuesdays—will remain free. No one who’s been reading should really lose anything.
What I’m doing instead is adding more content for people and gating it behind the paid subscription tier. This will primarily come in the form of a new Thursday newsletter called “BTW.”
Here’s an explanation:
Free subscribers get:
Everything they’ve been getting (posts on Tuesdays)
Paid subscribers get:
Posts on Tuesdays (obviously)
2-4 Thursday posts per month, which will be:
Podcast episodes, usually riffing on a Tuesday post or something I’ve been watching/reading
Recommendations of things to listen to, watch, or read
Experimental writing and off-the-wall weirdo kinda stuff
Access to the full content archive
Access to a Discord server to hang out and chat with me or others
Really, by re-introducing the paid subscription option, I want to provide a way for people to financially support the newsletter and get some perks as a thank-you for it. That’s what is going on here. I’m not interested in putting my normal writing behind a paywall right now. But I’d love to provide patrons with some bonus material.
If you’d like to become a paid subscriber, I am grateful, and you can do so here.
Note: if you have been a paid subscriber to this newsletter previously, you aren’t anymore. I’ve removed all paid subscribers, as they likely don’t even remember they were paid subscribers. :)
New Job!
Back in the spring, I left my role at Moody Global Media and joined the team at Rooted Network. I believe I have mentioned this job change in passing at some point, but I haven’t shared about it in any detail until now.
I serve as the content development and marketing director at Rooted Network, which is a ministry of Mariners Church that resources and supports local churches in their discipleship strategy and ministry efforts. I joined the team back in March, and it has been a joy. I am grateful to be led again by Eric Geiger and Earl Roberson, as I once was at Lifeway, and I am excited that I get to spend my days exercising my creative gifts in ways I just really wasn’t in my previous role. I have loved getting to join forces with some former Lifeway colleagues and serve the local church again with them.
Part of my work has been getting Rooted Network going here on Substack. We will be sharing two or three articles about discipleship and local church ministries each week in our Making Disciples newsletter.
Check it out or pass it along to a friend in ministry if it looks helpful to you!
Six Years of The Funnies
Just a couple of weeks ago, we celebrated roughly six years and 300 editions of The Funnies over at thefunnies.substack.com.
The Funnies all started because I was publishing a weekly roundup of articles on social media, the internet, and other topics, and each of those newsletters included “The Funny Part” at the bottom every Tuesday. Eventually I did some sleuthing and found out that The Funny Part was the most popular portion of my meticulously-researched social media roundup newsletter.
So I just decided to spin that off into its own thing, delivering on Saturday mornings at 6am CT, called The Funnies. It’s like if the funny pages of the newspapers1 were full of internet jokes and memes instead of comic strips.
The Funnies has significantly more subscribers than this newsletter does, and so it’s likely you heard of that one before you came across this one.
Keeping The Funnies going is no small task—believe it or not, it can be difficult to corral and keep track of all of those tweets and such—but it’s one of my favorite creative projects ever. In fact, keeping The Funnies going is one of the only reasons I still lurk on Twitter at all—that’s where all the funny people are!
It’s just so much fun to gather around humor and light-heartedness with strangers on the internet when it can often feel so much easier to be bleak and cynical.
I never would have guessed we’d make it to 300 editions of The Funnies, but I’m so glad we have. It’s so cool to have that feeling of consistently doing a single project for so long. There are no plans to stop, either! Here’s to 300 more, at least!
If you haven’t subscribed to The Funnies, somehow, you can do so here.
Church Ministry Changes
Susie and I have had the privilege of leading a community group at our local church for the last seven years or so. This spring we informed our group that we were stepping back from community group leadership. There are a handful of reasons for this, but a significant part of our decision is, frankly, that I just wanted a season to be a part of a group without leading a group. Leading a small group is wonderful, but there is certainly a special kind of burden that comes with it. Set aside hosting and coordinating all the logistics, to be “on” one night a week for seven years straight, ready to lead an intentional—sometimes intense!—spiritual discussion with a dozen-or-so people is exhausting. I think that I was beginning to get a bit burnt out, to be honest. So we are joining another community group in our church this month and are looking forward to learning from other leaders in this season. I am sure we will lead a community group again sometime in the future.
Another reason I wanted to step back from leading a community group is because I wanted to find other ways to serve in the local church that may not be possible if we’re also leading a community group. Our church has a year-long, “seminary lite” sort of program that meets throughout the school year on Sunday evenings, and I am planning to be one of the rotating instructors for that course this upcoming school year. I haven’t routinely taught since leaving my student ministry position a number of years ago, so I’m excited to be a part of that program.
Summer Activities
It has been such a busy summer for our family. We knew that it was going to be busy going into it, but man it has really blown past our expectations!
We kicked off the summer with a week-long trip to Disney World that we had been planning for the better part of a year. That was a blast. Both girls, Maggie (6) and Daisy (2.5) had a great time, and somehow managed to keep going late into the night each day of our trip without ever taking naps—they caffeinate the air down there, or something. Daisy’s favorite part was taking the Skyliner from our hotel to various places. Maggie’s favorite part was Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, or “The Ride Formerly Known as Splash Mountain.” She rode on it twice and would have gone many more times if permitted.
After our trip to Disney World came a couple different VBS weeks, multiple stints of family visiting our place, an Ed Sheeran concert for Susie, Maggie, and me, and then the Fourth of July. After the Fourth, we made our way up to Indiana for our annual tour of the northern half of the state, visiting as much family as we can along the way.
Finally, things began to wind down the second half of July and we started to set our feet for beginning of the school year coming up here in the next week or so. We have had so much fun as a family this summer, but I think all of us are looking forward to some more standard rhythms as we begin the school year. I may write more about that soon.
Thank You!
If I can summarize how I feel in this season, it is that I feel refreshed. Of course a father of two little, energetic girls can only ever feel so refreshed—hah—but I feel about as refreshed as can be expected in this busy, exciting season of life.
I’m writing more than I have in years, and only a small fraction of that writing finds its way to this newsletter. I’m reading so many good books that are inspiring and educating me in fresh ways. Though my daughters tire me, they’re just so much fun to be around. God is good, and he has been so kind to provide this season for me.
Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading. I am grateful to share this online space with you, and I am hopeful that everything to come in this newsletter is an encouragement to you in one way or another.
-Chris
Look it up, Zoomers.