The Unexpected Blessings of Writing

Unity of the Spirit

All right. Good evening, everyone.

I’m going to say a little bit and then I’m going to read from Ephesians chapter 4, if you want to open up there in the meantime. But I thought I’d start with this.

Conrad Mbewe holds a PhD from the University of Pretoria. He has been in pastoral ministry for almost four decades, most recently at Kabwata Baptist Church, Lusaka, Zambia. He is the founding chancellor of the African Christian University and has authored as many as 13 books, as well as contributing to many others. He is also a sought-after speaker, attending conferences not only across our continent but the world. I also learned just now that he’s been a newspaper columnist for almost three decades, and has edited a journal that he started for two.

I am a blogger and an editor, and perhaps that’s why I’m only getting 30 minutes, where Conrad got an hour. But even though you’ve never heard of me, it’s been a pleasure to meet some of you, and it’s a pleasure to be with you here tonight. And I pray that I might teach you something about writing to equip you more in the service of God’s people.

And so, with that in mind, let’s read Ephesians chapter 4, the first 16 verses:

“I therefore”, writes Paul, “a prisoner for the Lord,I urge you to walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called: with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, eager to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

There is one body and one Spirit—just as you were called to one hope that belongs to your call—one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all, through all, and in all.

But grace was given to each one of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift. Therefore it says: ‘When he ascended on high, he led a host of captives, and he gave gifts to men.’ In saying, ‘He ascended,’ what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower regions, the earth? He who descended is the one who also ascended far above all the heavens, that he might fill all things.

And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ—until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to mature manhood, to the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.

So that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves, and carried about by every wind of doctrine—by human cunning, by craftiness in deceitful schemes. Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ; from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped—when each part is working properly—makes the body grow, so that it builds itself up in love.” (Ephesians 4:1-16)

Let’s pray.

Father, I thank you for this opportunity—for tonight and for everyone who’s here. And we do pray that you might be at work, not only now and here by your Word and by your Spirit, but as we go from here. And perhaps especially we pray, in light of what we’re doing tonight, that we might see how writing and how theology takes up its part in the building up of your body: to mature manhood, to stability and wholeness, where each part is doing its part and the whole is strengthened by the work of the littler parts.

So we thank you. We thank you that even here, in this passage, we read of your grace, and that that grace extends to the gifts that you give us, with which we might serve others. So we pray now, and you do that for us, in Jesus’ name.

The Unexpected Blessings of Writing

I’ve never really been one for titles—for talks, for sermons. I think it always upsets the person who does our social media. I’m always like, “Preaching on Psalm 2,” and he says, “What’s the title?” and I’m like, “Psalm 2.”

But if I had a title for tonight, it would be, The Unexpected Blessings of Writing. The Unexpected Blessings of Writing. And you’ll see two of those in a second, and then we’ll fall to a bit of instruction around how we might develop as writers. And so this talk really has two parts.

But I want you to listen to this quote. And while I read it, I want you to see if you can figure out who said it. All right, you ready?

“Here, my dear Marcelinus, is the fulfillment of my promise: a book in which I have taken upon myself the task of defending the glorious City of God against those who prefer their own gods to the founder of that city. And I treat this city both as it exists in our world in time—a stranger among the ungodly and those who live by faith—and also as that city stands in the security of its everlasting rest.”

Who wrote that?

I mean, is it because it says City of God in it? I was like, “I don’t know, but maybe I should try and put the Latin in.” So, the book down here, but yeah—that’s… those are the opening lines. That’s the preface to Book One of The City of God. Now you all can pick that up, but can you tell me why Augustine wrote The City of God?

Maybe not as easy a question. Why did he write it? Obviously, as he says here, it is in the fulfillment of a promise to a patron, Marcelinus, who tasked him with the writing of a book—although this came many years after that commission. Why does he write The City of God? You can shout out if you want.

Yeah. So Rome has long been in decline and has recently been sacked. And what happens where Augustine is in Carthage is that skeptics come and they start to pronounce against Augustine, against the church—that really, the city has fallen because of the Christians.

And this is something that’s been taken up by historians such as Edward Gibbon and others.

But Augustine sets out to defend the City of God. And he does it—as he says there—in two ways: to defend it as it stands in the world (okay, distinct from Rome actually—so he is distinguishing the City of God from what many people call the “eternal city,” okay, Rome), and at the same time he is reminding believers that the City of God rests and is secure eternally with God.

Peter Brown is Augustine’s most famous biographer, and he says this: he says that,

“The book is written in many ways about the sack of Rome, challenging the people in Carthage who had come to critique Augustine, and it is, in many ways, a deliberate confrontation with the paganism of 4th-century Rome. The City of God, however, (Brown goes on to write) is obviously not a tract for the times. It is a careful, premiered working out of an old man with a clear vision—a vision of this city.”

Now, I’ll start with Augustine’s City of God, not because we’re going to get into it (although that would be a lot of fun), but to point out, as we get going, that Augustine’s City of God was written in a very particular time, in a very peculiar historical situation, to a particular people, by a man who grew up in a very different place to us, belonged to a very different culture to us, and who had to answer very different challenges to the Christian faith than we do today.

And yet—and yet—most of us know Augustine, and most of us know the… Now, obviously, I’m not here to tell you that you’re all going to become like St. Augustine, okay, and write this seminal work.

But I start with that to encourage you that though we write—and this is really what The Gospel Coalition in Africa is about: about writing where we are, for the people in front of us (and Conrad spoke a lot about that)—we are never certain, and in fact we can never know, how that work that we are doing—that writing, whether it’s an article, a longer-form article, a book, a chapter in a book—we never know how God might use that to bless and to serve His church.

Augustine’s City of God has been some of the theological material that has shaped the church now for 1600 years. Those of you who love the Reformation would know that, second to the Bible, Calvin quotes from Augustine. Augustine has been shaping the church for many, many years. And yet Augustine wrote a book to what he thought was a very particular situation and time.

I had the opportunity to speak about Byang Kato, a Nigerian theologian, earlier this week. And as I was preparing for that, I came across just a quote by him, and he said this: “Augustine of Hippo has had more lasting influence on Christian theology than any other person since the Apostle Paul.”

And yet Augustine lived, as I’ve already said, in a very different place and time and culture, and faced very different challenges.

I recently asked some of our regular Gospel Coalition Africa contributors why they write because I’m wanting to compile a kind of editorial piece to encourage other writers. And Timothy Babatunde—he’s a Nigerian—he said this to me: he said, “I came to understand Christianity through the early church fathers and men like St. Augustine. As Augustine in faith sought understanding about God and about himself, Timothy said, he too understood God and himself.

Augustine’s work has been a sustained source of blessing for the church despite its very peculiar setting and purpose, and continues to generate theological discussion and even faith today.

And so I start with that to remind you that there are many unexpected blessings to writing. There are many unexpected fruits to our labors as we go about this work. And I’m going to briefly tease out two, and then get, hopefully, to a bit of instruction about how we might cultivate this habit.

Discipline has come up a bit in that first session, and so we’re going to think about that. And I will keep an eye on the clock.

There are two ways, I think—or two unintended blessings—and you may be more or less aware of one or both of these. The first one is, well, the one I’ve just highlighted: that writing contributes to theological conversation. And the second, which we’ll get to in a moment, is that writing contributes to your own theological development.

So: writing for theological conversation as a blessing and benefit to others.We see this in Augustine. We see this in so many other Christian theologians throughout the ages. It’s the first thing.

And secondly, writing is a wonderful way to develop our own personal theology and understanding.

Writing for Theological Conversation

So, firstly—um, sorry, you’ll notice that I quote quite a lot of people, that’s typically how I do things—one of my favorite Christian writers, he writes regularly at First Things magazine, Peter Leithart, he says this. He says, “Practically, a written work must wander off to be read by everyone and everywhere. At least this is our hope.” And this, he argues, is a good thing.

When you write something, you don’t always know where that writing is going to end up. Leithart goes on to say, “You have no control.” He likens writing—and we were talking about this earlier, so sorry, some people—it’s a bit like rearing a child. He says, you are tender with it and affectionate, you care for it, but always you are preparing this child to send them out into the big wide world. That’s the aim and purpose of parenthood.

I think— yeah it is, hey? Right? We can agree on this. We want them to go eventually. We love them, but we want them to go. But you want them to be prepared for the world and for what they might do and achieve out there.

And that illustration really speaks to the labor of writing. And also the aim: that as we work hard at writing, as we seek to read and to think and to write and to argue and to gain clarity, to challenge those who would oppose the faith, to engage with issues and questions— we are writing, we are preparing a piece, a written work, again, whatever form it is, from a big book to a small paragraph—so that we might send it out into the world, to let it wander off. And we do so not always knowing what it is that it will go on to achieve and accomplish.

Peter Leithart goes on to say this. He says that the written text and the task of writing is, in some ways, incomplete until someone has read it. Yeah. He says, “Only when a text is read and discussed and commented on does the text come into its own. The text cannot be without others. The text must find its place and do its work in the world, and it must do that with readers.”

And again, we aren’t always sure how that will happen. He talks about the ways in which texts are taken up and misused or abused. And we can think of many examples of that throughout history—how writers have been misappropriated.

And yet as we go about our task as Christian writers, we do it with prayer and the hope that God might use those efforts and those labors, often in ways that we will never know or see. And that’s okay. And that’s all right.

Leithart goes on to say, “Written texts are wondrous.” He says, “Once you’ve written them, the text thinks it’s all grown up.” To return to that illustration, he says, “It grows up and it moves out of your house and then you don’t have any control where it goes, or whose hands it will fall into, what kinds of readers will take it up, what kind of neighborhood it might move into. And yet all you can do is prepare the text and send it out.”

And this is the first point: that we don’t always know, and yet we write prayerfully that there will be these unintended, often unlooked-for blessings of our writing. We see that in Augustine. I’ve seen that in my own, and I’m sure those of you who’ve written could testify to that as well.

Writing for Personal Theological Development

The second unintended blessing—and then we’re going to get on to some, some discipline matters—is how writing contributes to our own theological development.

And this is the last time I mention Augustine, I promise. And I think it’s the last time I quote, like, a theologian. But he wrote a book towards the end of his life called The Retractions, where he went over a lot of what he had done in his life, in particular his writing and his teaching, and it was kind of a review of his own work and a chance to, kind of, comment on it one last time, and to maybe review some of the things that he said.

And there’s a great quote in The Retractions where Augustine says this. He says, “I’m the sort of person who writes because he has made progress.” Okay? So he says, “I’m the sort of person who writes because he’s made progress.”

So as he moves along in his faith, he is writing. And he says as well, “I’m the sort of person who makes progress by writing.”

And again, I think all of us who have written, or at least attempted to write and to keep some kind of discipline going, would have seen this: that writing is a chance often to refine and to review and to reconsider what it is we think and we believe. Perhaps not in the sense of taking it all apart, but in the sense of looking to refine it and to tighten it up, to reconsider perhaps what we thought a few years ago in light of the progress that we have made in our own faith, and to ask how I might rephrase that today, how I might have said it better.

Often, younger writers look back on their early writing and can see how their tone was off, that their mood was wrong, and that their intentions perhaps were skewed. And yet writing affords us a great opportunity to refine ourselves, our own beliefs and theology, because writing forces you to get clarity, to be able to distill what it is that you are trying to say.

Conrad mentioned, you know, the 700 words that just goes round and round and doesn’t really say anything. It’s when you sit down to go, “Look, I want to really write a paper about…”—you guys are Baptists—“say about why we don’t baptize children, okay?”

And then you go away and you read, okay, and you, um, you come back and you start to write it, and you’re two, three paragraphs deep and you come across something that you hadn’t thought about before, and you go, “Well, I don’t know how to… I don’t know how to put this.”

And so you have to go away, perhaps read some more, think some more, pray some more, come back. “Now I can write that paragraph.” And through that process you find—and writers find this, and many writers will speak about it—that they are themselves enhanced in their thinking, not only in their writing, and often even in their ability to communicate.

I mentioned asking some of the TGC contributors why they write, and more than one of them said to me that writing helps them teach and preach, because writing forces them to be clear. And when you stand up in front of others and you want to expound the Word, you want to exhort God’s people, you can’t go round and round and not really know what it is that you are trying to say—what it is you are exhorting them to do, or what it is that you are expositing in the text.

And so writing is a great way to refine us. And I want to say that this is true not only in the sense of our theology but also in the sense of our own personal experience of the Lord.

Eleanor Kwizera is a Ugandan writer with The Gospel Coalition. She also works for us a few mornings a week, and when I asked her why she writes, she said this. She said, “I usually write when I am in the thickets of my Christian walk, when my vision has become clouded and when things aren’t making sense. I write because it helps me to acknowledge where I am, and it helps me to ponder on the facts rather than simply on how I am feeling.”

She says, “I write to reinforce my convictions about who God is, about what God has said. And once my convictions,” Eleanor goes on to say, “are in place, I always find that my emotions align soon after.”

Writing is a great way not only to refine our theology but also to process our faith—our experience of the Lord and where it is that He is leading us.

And so that is the second, I think, or for some of us, deliberate intention for writing. And so those two points taken together: writing is a way in which we can bless and benefit others, often in ways we won’t see. And secondly, writing is a way in which we ourselves can develop as thinkers, as theologians, as teachers, and as preachers. And on those two things alone, I think writing is a worthwhile endeavor.

If you think back to the Ephesians passage—in Ephesians 4, where Paul speaks about the teachers whom He gives to the church, the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds, the teachers—verse 12: with the purpose of equipping the saints for the work of ministry, for the work of service, so that they too might bless and teach in their own ways and build up the church. We can do that by writing.

General Principles of Writing

And so, very quickly then, if we still have time, I want to talk briefly about the discipline of writing and hopefully try and help you a bit here with this. Now, I’ve given a few variations of this talk, and, um, I’ll share a kind of summary of it so that you can have a look at that.

But one of the broader categories when it comes to writing is what I’ve termed kind of general principles. So Conrad alluded to technique. I would call those the kind of nuts and bolts of writing, and that’s really worth spending some time on. And it’d be good, at a later stage, to do that, and we’d love to—we’re very happy to explore how we’re going to do that.

But I think there’s a step that you can take back, and these are habits to help you develop as a writer before you get up close to the text that you are writing.

And I’ve got just five for you. And—and you can write them down, and then I’m going to just say a little bit about each, and then I think we’re going to get Conrad back up here and—and do some more questions.

So the five principles are that you need to read, you need to engage with what you read, you need to write—okay, that one, just put it in there—you need to share what you write, and then you need to listen to the feedback. Okay? So read, engage, write, share, and listen. Okay, those are the five things.

Firstly, there’s a lot of things that you can read about writing. There’s a lot of tools, a lot of resources, and they’re all great. And at TGC Africa, we’ve tried to compile some of those. You know, people like Tim Challies have done tremendous work in serving the church in thinking about how to write—the nuts and bolts. And I’d encourage you to find those, to use those.

But there is more to it than just reading those guides. And that is: if you want to write well, you have to read widely. Okay? If you want to write well, you have to read widely. And Conrad’s already mentioned this for us.

And this doesn’t mean just read stuff all the time. Like, you know, you get home after work and you’re tired and you scroll Instagram for half an hour, and you’re like, “I read the captions. Does that count?” It doesn’t count. Most people aren’t writing good captions. Sorry.

But it’s to read good stuff. And again, here I don’t mean you need to read only theologians. In fact, theologians often aren’t the best writers. I mean just reading good writing—and to read widely, to expose yourself (and again, this is what we heard just now) to good writing in the various ways in which it is done. And you learn as you do this, both, consciously and unconsciously.

You would all know that, you know, people talk about things being easier to catch than to learn. And I think writing, in some ways, is like that. If you spend a long time reading one person, that person will start to come through in how you speak.

Maybe the most famous example of this recently is Timothy Keller. You know, we all know Timothy Keller. And through him we all know C. S. Lewis, right? Because he spent years and years reading C. S. Lewis.

Now, you must read good writers and good works if you want to develop as a writer yourself.

One of my favorite authors is an American—her name is Marilynne Robinson—and she runs workshops, writing workshops in Iowa. And she often exhorts her people to say that good writing exists in a whole bunch of forms, genres, and places. And we need to go out and find those and to learn from them.

And so: develop a broad diet when it comes to reading—fiction, essays, short stories, long-form articles, history, philosophy (if that’s not too dirty a word). There are able and inimitable writers in all of those places, across the board. And by digesting good writing in its many forms, you yourself will become a better writer.

Secondly, write by engagement. This is something that I often encourage people who are starting out in writing or who want to develop in the beginning, and actually, I find that I still do it, you know, all these years later. And that is to engage with what you are reading.

It’s one of the easiest ways to write: to read something, to pull out a few sentences from it, and to riff off of it, or to engage with it, to critique it, to expound it, to develop it some more, to ask what points could have been added to it, or how it might have been better argued. These are all the ways in which you can use your reading now in a conscious way to develop as a writer.

To handle text, okay, to handle good text. In the world of ministry, we call this exposition. But the church doesn’t have the monopoly on exposition, right? You can do this with all sorts of texts and in all sorts of places.

And it’s a great practice to get into because you’ll find, as you do this, that writing comes quite quickly. It’s very easy to write a paragraph off of a sentence when you have a good one to engage with.

My systematics lecturer, funny enough of all people—his name was Dr. Ben Dean (if he’s watching here, thanks, Ben)—encouraged us not to start by writing original pieces but to work hard in the beginning by summarizing the work of others. And not just summarizing them, but by trying to understand their arguments, how they make their arguments, where their arguments are weak, where their arguments are strong, to perhaps practice describing their writing.

This is a way in which we can handle text deliberately. What does it do? How does it make you feel? What is the texture of the writing like? These are all things, and this again speaks to Conrad’s great sentence about the art of writing. Art is not simple propositional fact, point, point—that’s really boring. You can write like that, but people probably won’t read it.

You want to handle good writing. You want to paraphrase points, perhaps paraphrase whole paragraphs, and critically engage with them. Riff off of other writers. Now of course, this point is dependent on the first. You can’t be doing this if you aren’t reading. And if you are reading, well, then you’re already one step closer to it.

This was probably a few months ago now. I was having a conversation after church with one of the members of our congregation. We were talking about what we had been writing recently, and he said to me, “Look, I read your blog post this week, and I’m starting to feel like every second or third blog post that you write has a quote from Fight Club in it.”

I didn’t know how to take that. I mean, I took it as a compliment because I think Fight Club’s a great book—a decent film, but a great book. And while he was exaggerating (it’s more like every four or five blog posts that I do that), what he had identified in my writing was that I was actively trying to engage with other voices: what I can learn from them, how they present truth in a way perhaps better than I might have, how they illustrate something that I’m struggling to illustrate.

Even simply as what you might call a cultural authority in this age,

Write by engaging with other good writers, this is a great way to develop. A great discipline to put into place.

So, you read. Secondly, you engage with what you are reading. And thirdly—and perhaps most obviously—you have to write. Okay? You have to write.

Most of you here won’t have the luxury of writing as part of your work. This is just how it is. And so, when I say “write,” please don’t hear me saying: you know, the three-hour uninterrupted block, where you woke up late, wandered through to the kitchen in your slippers, coffee is brewing, you sit down—like in a movie scene—you stretch out, laptop in front, and then you just start going. This obviously isn’t how many of us get to writing.

We’ve been sold this vision by movies. You always see it: Hollywood loves making films about struggling writers. They always go to a small town, they find a coffee shop, they sit there and write.

And I’m like, “Oh man, I wish I could just go and sit there and write.” But then they also inevitably fall in love with someone in that small town, and then there are all those other complications. So, that’s maybe not a vision for us.

Most of us won’t have the luxury of uninterrupted, long blocks of writing. And this means that to write, we need to develop the habitual discipline of writing. This can be done in small blocks, and this can be done in big blocks. It depends on you, on your time, and also on your makeup.

Some people do need to carve out a longer block. Yet some people can sit down for ten minutes, punch out a paragraph, go away and do something else, think about it while they’re off doing something else, and then come back and write more. We’re all made differently, and that’s okay. We all have different demands on our schedules, and that is inevitable.

But as we develop the practice of habitual and routine writing in smaller blocks, what you will see is the accumulative effect of writing.

So, I’m going to mention my systematics lecturer again. He said to us in my honours year—I remember —“If you write 200 words a day, which is only two paragraphs, it sounds like a lot until you remember that a sentence is anywhere between fifteen and thirty words. So, you’re talking about less than ten sentences. If you write 200 words a day and you do that for a week, you can have 1,200 words by the end of the week.”

And it’s 1,200 because I’m sure you’re all observing the Sabbath on Sunday. So, you don’t write on Sunday—it’s only Monday to Saturday. That’s a joke. It goes down better with Presbyterians because we’re pretty hardcore when it comes to the Sabbath.

But if you write just 200 words a day, you can end up with around—let’s round it down to—1,000 a week. That’s an article. Okay, that’s an article, a decent article. If you take that to a month, you’ve got a long-form essay. You have 4,000 words. Okay? If you aggregate that over the year, now you’re starting to talk about a book actually. Okay? And that’s simply through the discipline of writing 200 words a day, which I think for any of us who would aspire to be writers is realistic.

Okay, it’s going to take a while to get into the habit of it and to get going. There’s days when you sit down and you don’t write anything because you’re like, “Ah, you know, I hate this piece that I’m writing,” or, “I have nothing to write.” And again, that just comes with the territory of writing.

And yet there will be days when you sit down and you write three paragraphs. Okay, you write 500 words, okay, in the same time that you’d usually do your 200. And again, this can only come about if we build in the time to write. And so we must simply and routinely, habitually, and with discipline—write.

Fourthly, you need to share your writing with others. Through our work as the written content editor at the Gospel Coalition Africa, I’ve realized that publishing your thoughts, your positions, your experiences online can be quite a daunting prospect for a lot of people, and especially for novice writers.

And I don’t think that this is a wrong or a bad thing. In fact, it’s probably a good instinct. Okay? Because the other extreme is people who think that the world just needs to hear everything that they have thought and they’re just going to bless everyone with all of those things. Okay? And that’s the one extreme.

On the other hand, what I encounter, I’d say more often, is this real hesitation. It’s like, “Well, I’m not so sure yet, you know, if I want to shoot this out.” And that’s all right, because this whole process that we’ve talked about up until now doesn’t necessarily have to reach the conclusion of publishing something.

But—and it’s important— to improve as a writer you do need more pairs of eyes to look at it. Okay? And this might take the form of a friend, of a family member, of your pastor. Okay, that would be a great set of eyes for something you’ve written, to give you feedback.

Because, you know, you sit with a piece of writing for a week, you know, it’s thousand words. You think it’s the best, you just think, “This is amazing. You know, this is City of God 2.0. You know, in 2,000 years they’re going to be like, you know, that book that came out then.”

And then you give it to someone else and they’re like, “Man, why did you move from paragraph one to two? Like I don’t even know what paragraph two is about. I can see the words, but you know, I don’t know why it’s come where it has after paragraph one.”

And then you go, “Oh, jeez, I assumed that they were thinking with me,” which they aren’t. They can only read with you. Okay? Which means they can only track with what you write. Okay?

And when you’re thinking about something for a long time, you start to assume that people can keep up. And the reality is they can’t. Okay? Writing is taking them and leading them through what it is so that by the time you get to your conclusions, they’re with you and you haven’t lost them.

So you’re looking back and they’ve fallen off here, they got lost over there, you know, in paragraph three, and they’re walking around looking, you know. And so you have to share your writing with people so that you can get feedback. This is a great way to improve writing.

And again, we do that—of course I do that as an editor—and encourage and invite all of you to share writing if you want to, if you want it to be published. But if not, to blog in a small space. You can blog in a way that no one can find it unless you share your link. Okay? And that sounds counterintuitive, but again this is not a bad thing to do because it’s there.

And there may come a time when you say, “Yeah, I’m going to switch it on now, and now people can find it.” But if not, it’s still a place where you can go, share it with a few people on WhatsApp and say, “Oh, please could you just read this? Take you five minutes. I’d love to hear your thoughts.” Okay.

And so, share your writing with others.

And then finally—or, minute. Do I have a minute? Yeah—you need to listen to what people feedback. Okay? And you need to do this with humility. Okay? This, in some ways, is the scariest part of writing for people. Okay, it’s that, “What will people say?”

You know, I remember when I started blogging. It was back in 2012, and I shared a draft. I got invited to blog on a platform, and I shared my first draft with the curator, who was also like my peer, and he was younger than me. And so I didn’t—I wasn’t like, I didn’t think the most of this guy.

And he sent back my article and there was like more colors in there than I’ve ever seen in a piece of writing. And I was just, you know, it’s like every line had a different color. And he was like, “You didn’t do this, this sentence is incomplete,” this—you know, down to the level of “you split the verb.” And I’m like, “Oh, I just wanted to share my writing with people, you know.”

And it was a very sobering thing, because again up until that point, you know, the people who had been reading my writing were theological lecturers, and they were paid to read what I wrote. Okay? They had to read it and give me a mark. They couldn’t, after a paragraph, be like, “This sucks, you know, let’s see what someone else wrote.” You know? But that is how people treat writing in the marketplace, right? If they’re lost after three paragraphs, they don’t have to go to the end. Okay? And they’re going to check out.

And this is where those people—readers, editors—and again when I say editor I don’t think professional necessarily, but those other sets of eyes who look at it and go, “Oh, you need to—you know, this conclusion, like, this is a conclusion from another article, because it’s not concluding this article.” Okay, you need those people. And then as they feedback, you need to listen.

Okay, I’m going to finish here. So, there’s a 20th-century theologian called Simone Weil. I’d encourage you all to read her. She’s got some great stuff. But she wrote an excellent essay on learning, and in it she identifies that one of the greatest temptations for the learner is in the face of correction. Okay? And she says that, “One of the greatest temptations when faced with correction on our writing is to give it a sideways glance, as if it were a bad thing, and then to hide it away forever.”

If we do this—which is what I wanted to do when I received that first blog post back, that first draft—I wanted to just bin it, you know, and start again, or just forget about it. You know, “I don’t want to write for you anymore, James. You’re a horrible curator.” And, you know,

But actually, it was an opportunity for me to go back, to look at what I had written with the comments that had been provided by someone who had taken the time—their time—to do that, so that I might improve my writing, and that my writing might therefore become a greater benefit to more readers.

And so Simone Weil, she says, “Instead we should take great pains to examine squarely, and to contemplate attentively and slowly, where our writing simply isn’t good enough. We must listen, get down to the origin of the fault, because as the saying goes, we can learn from our mistakes. And so we must listen to those who correct them—in our writing, and everywhere else as well.”

Concluding Prayer

And so I’m going to finish there. And—shall I pray for us, or what? After? No, after. Okay, let me pray, let me pray.

I’m going to pray using Ephesians 4 again. This is great.

Lord, we thank you that you equip us—your saints, your people—for works of service. Whether that is in the church, whether that is taking someone a meal, helping someone with their kids, you know, giving someone a lift, and many other ways in which we can serve practically. But also we know that writing is another way in which we can serve and minister to others.

Lord, I pray that as a result of tonight there might be an increase of that, so that your church, as Paul writes, would be built up, that it might grow strong, and that it might at the same time uphold your truth and do so with great love.

And we ask this in Christ’s name. Amen.