Reflections On Posting Faith-Based Content Online And The Future Of This Blog
Win souls and make disciples
“Win souls and make disciples”
It was a central part of the mission of the church that changed my life. There are a couple of IRL people I am focused on ministering to, and I try to ramble about it to strangers and acquaintances from time to time. But frankly, I don’t know what I’m doing. I think back to how I was led to faith. I was raised Catholic, but became pretty disillusioned with the whole thing very early on and didn’t believe for a long time. Then I noticed that Brent Beshore wouldn’t stop talking about Jesus.
This was curious to me. I had reached out to Brent a year or two earlier for career advice and he was kind enough to give some of his time. He was someone that I really respected professionally. There had been a couple of other professionals who I looked up to that had planted a similar seed.
I thought people who believed in God were, at best, using it as a crutch and were delusional, and at worst, stupid. But people like Brent and Francis Collins, the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute, seemed like they had figured some stuff out and managed just fine in life even while believing in this Jesus thing.
I found a church where people had something that I didn’t have and I knew - no, I felt, right off the bat - that they wanted to help me find it. From there, it was off to the races and it has become a bigger and bigger part of my life since then.
I struggled for a long time, and still do, about how to help other people find it. Eventually I decided that if Twitter brought me there, it might help me bring others along.
It was a tough decision. I had been building up a following for years. Since 2015. I view my Twitter account as a professional asset of sorts, and I wasn’t too keen on screwing it up.
I landed on the idea that helping even one person experience what I have would be worth screwing it up for.
And so I started posting about Jesus. I’d watch my follower count. Usually it doesn’t go down. I’d post about Jesus, watch the count trickle down a bit - maybe lose 3-10 followers over the course of a day - and then I’d do it again. It felt a little weird at first but I pushed through with help of Matthew 10:33 and it has gotten easier over time. It seems like more of steady march upward now. I think anyone who was going to unfollow has already done so.
I decided to start writing more detailed posts - mostly notes from sermons and other Christian content - on a biweekly basis and publish it on this blog. There were a couple of people that reached out, and that was rewarding. But I don’t feel like I am winning souls. I have two subscribers to this Substack, and one of them is me. The number of views on my posts ranges from 6 to 33. I think most of them are me.
I have 7k+ followers on Twitter. When I tweeted an excerpt from a Watchman Nee book the other day, it got 602 impressions. So I think it’s time to go in a different direction.
I have another Substack that is more investing focused, with a couple hundred followers. I want to start posting on there more regularly. I have been meaning to anyway. I will probably structure it by breaking it down into two sections, an Investing Section and a Non-Investing section. Come for the Investing, stay for Jesus. I will probably mix it in with other Non-Investing things. Huberman, meditation, tech and AI, etc. A Trojan Horse of sorts.
Another part of it is that I haven’t enjoyed posting on here as much I had aimed to. Tangible, concrete service has been somewhat of a weak point in my spiritual life. I tried joining the facilities team at my last church and I would show up at 7am to scrub the windows and mop the floors. But I was doing it reluctantly, and I don’t want to do that. I don’t think service should feel like that (2 Cor 9:7), and there are some things that I have been a part of where it didn’t feel like that.
I would be walking down the street listening to a podcast or sermon or audiobook and take notes compulsively because I was thinking about posting them. I don’t want it to be like that. And I am not sure how helpful or enjoyable that is for people anyway. I’d rather post the 3-5 key points that really stuck out and let people listen on their own if they so choose.
I also want to write more. It is a goal of mine. Writing is an activity that I think really improves my life for all of the reasons that David Perell talks about. But I think I have spread myself too thin. That’s what Kieran Drew told me and I think he’s right. “You might be trying to do too much. The most important thing you can do is narrow your focus and get everything under one brand for now. Its super hard to get momentum with one thing let alone 3!”
Besides doing it more often, another writing aspiration is to make it more personal. This post is more personal than all of the other ones on here. While I hope to mix some of my own voice in there, I don’t envision the Stock Thoughts investing Substack being very personal. Mostly links. But I am going to keep this Jesus Thoughts Substack, and it will serve as a place for more personal writings about Jesus, which I will link to in the Non-Investing section of the Stock Thoughts Substack. That way I will get more than 6 views.
If this blog or any of my Jesus posts on Twitter have meant anything to you, please reach out. I want to hear what you think.