I just realized that, on the tenth of
this month, this blog touched the third anniversary of its beginning.
I guess that it is time to retell the story of why I started this
blog.
A long time ago, I remember not
when, a person sent me a comment through some other source, as I as
of yet haven't gotten the “comments” function of this site to
work (according to the functions screen on my end, it is supposed to
be operable), saying that I had a lot of time on my hands. That
person was absolutely correct. In the time immediately previous to
opening this blog, I had a job which was mainly sitting at a desk of
a high-rise condo, and pressing a button to allow residents in when
they came to the door. To a large extent, I was sitting at the desk
doing nothing. A couple of years previous to that, I was running a
small business which developed such that 90+% of my business was on
Saturdays and Sundays, making getting to the church I was going to
difficult. I knew that there was nothing special about Sunday as a
day of worship, so I looked on the internet for a church that met
sometime other than on the weekend. I couldn't find anything I was
comfortable with.
A couple of weeks later, my Sunday
business started late enough that I was able to get to the beginning
of the early morning service at my church. That day, Larry Kreider
was to speak, so out in the lobby, there was a selection of his books
for sale. One of them was his book “Starting a House Church” (or
something like that—I can't seem to find it on my bookshelf at the
moment). I didn't find it particularly useful, except that, in the
bibliography, it directed me to other works. That shows something of
my personality, as so many persons in Jesus' people read only simple
books, and definately don't read footnotes and bibliographies. That
eventually directed me to the works of Frank Viola and Wolfgang
Simson, and to a website that, in turn, directed me to the website of
the housechurches in my metro area. From that, I called up and
talked to a person who was connected to one of the housechurches,
called and invited myself to another one that met at a time I was
generally free, and started reading the works of the authors writing
on this subject.
Over time, my business failed, and I started the sit at a desk and
press a button job. I started picturing in my mind that the ideas in
George Barna & Frank Viola's Pagan Christianity and
Wolfgang Simson's Houses That Change the World might break
down into a group of 2 minute segments that would be appropriate for
radio, and wrote a number of scripts for the two minute programs.
Later, I added a few more from Steve Lyzenga's doctoral thesis that
can be read online,
http://house2harvest.org/docs/Simple_Churches_Releasing_Resources_S_Lyzenga.pdf.
Thanks to the wonders of the recording program Audacity, I recorded
these. Eventually, I temporarily had enough extra money to actually
get about six episodes broadcast on a local station. I started the
blog to post the texts of those scripts, which goes back to December
2010 and January 2011.
Over the past year, I haven't felt
well, specifically with regard to being able to think properly.
Also, since last March, many days, I've been putting in some time
working on a project fixing up my son's house. About two weeks ago,
I got to the end of that part of the project that I could do by
myself. Yesterday, fumbling around writing yesterday's post, the old
computer I was working on somehow flashed off the screen I was typing
on, and over to the page on Blogger which shows how many page views
my posts have received, and I saw that there has been a significant
increase in views on those posts of the last 15 months or so. As I
believe that what I wrote the first two months are the most
significant things I've written, I'm going to make a point of
reprising some of those entries.
Just, as a matter of intrest, yes,
that is my real phone number in them. No, to my total surprise, that
hasn't been a problem.
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