Blogging Through a Gospel

Lately, I have been making an effort to study the Gospels; specifically, to piece together the different accounts and to reconstruct (1) an authentic portrait of Jesus as the disciples would have seen Him, and (2) a socio-historical picture of the first community of Jewish disciples as they found themselves irresistably drawn to their Divine Rabbi. It's an awesome study that means I have to read each Gospel twice in different ways: the first time I have to ignore the writers' voices and just piece together the facts; the second time I am almost exclusively focusing on the perspective and mindset of the Gospel penmen. I love it. The problem with this is that most of the things I want to write require a huge amount of research and should probably be reserved (at first) for an academic paper instead of a blog post.

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Blog Topics Are Like Feelings
Once in a while, though, I find something really practical that I feel like I need to write about. It isn't some over-arching social view of the world of the 1st century disciples; it's usually just a line from one of Jesus' teachings that I think we can work through together. The truth is that, for a blogger, I am horrible at picking topics for posts. Seth is way better at that than I am. My real strength, I feel, is in just working through and applying Scripture. Here's my way of explaining it: for me, blogging topics are like feelings; if Kendra were to ask me "how do you feel?", I wouldn't quite know how to answer her. But if Kendra asked me "how do you feel about government spending?" I could probably go on for a couple of hours. (And it would be a fun conversation, except I'm the only one who's interested in that sort of thing.) In the same way, if I were supposed to blog about some random topic, I wouldn't know what to do. But as soon as a passage of scripture is brought up I could start writing about all sorts of topics related to the text. I'm an expositional blogger.

New Blogging Series
What I'm trying to say is that I have decided to start a series of blog posts, and these posts may go on for a few years. Starting in 7 days, I will be posting weekly on the Gospel of Mark, going through the text slowly and writing about what I find in there. The first few posts will be pretty bare due to my lack of resources (I am in the wilderness, after all), but I hope to collaborate: to my fellow bloggers, Seth, Nic, Ryan, Dave, Greg, and Laura (those who contribute to this site and those who are just readers of it), I invite you to join me and to offer feedback, correction, and insight as we learn from Mark together. To all others, who simply read The Voice anonymously, I would love to see you guys post comments, to discuss, and to enrich this discussion of who Jesus is and what, by grace, He has called us to be. I'll still post other things from time to time, but I believe this to be more beneficial than trying to rack my brain for topic ideas all the time.

Grace and peace!