First post, wherein I talk myself into starting a blog

A special welcome to irate parishioners, future call committees, and anyone else who has accidentally stumbled across my little blog here.

When I first arrived in my present congregation in 2007 they didn't even have a computer in the office.  We've come a long way since then.   In 2009 we launched our church website (deolutheran.org) as a way of offering some basic information to people in our community who (let's face it) generally know very little about Christianity.  I've been posting recordings of my sermons there for almost 3 years now.  Last year I finally was persuaded to start with the social media thing -- and have since become adept at reflecting other people's brilliance on our facebook page (facebook.com/deolutheran). Resistance was futile.

While these were both good steps, no church is fully geeked out until its pastor has a blog.  So here goes.   Truth be told I'm a little reluctant to do this, mostly because I spend a lot of time and effort each week writing sermons, and once they are done, the last thing I typically want to do is more writing. I'd much rather be soldering on one of my electronic abominations or learning  a new programming language.  These realities, combined with my hereditary aversion to any more public attention than is absolutely necessary, could easily conspire to block me from putting my thoughts out on display like this...

...but two ideas have emboldened me to publish this blog and (shudder) do so using my real name.

1. That I might potentially have something to say that would be of use to others. (I leave it to the reader to decide whether this is true or not.  It may well be that the reason my ancestors learned to keep a low profile was that they were raging narcissists with little to contribute to society)
2. That unless I accidentally post things that are true enough to make people angry, it is very unlikely that anyone will ever read any of what I post anyway.

So I'm making no promises at the moment.  I may end up being lazy and re-purposing some of my sermons and passing them off as blog posts. Or I might fire a genuine rant off into the ether from time to time.  Hopefully this blog will be read by people other than parishioners hunting heresy or future call committees trying to decide whether to bring me in for an interview.  But if not - screw it.  I am as much a sinner as the next guy -- and anyone who thinks it ought to be otherwise probably doesn't know jack about Lutheranism anyway.