1000 Posts!

This is my 1000th Post!

If you want to read all 1000, check out the Blog Archives. Ha!

Brief History

Here is a brief history of the Till He Comes blog.

June 19, 2007. The first post on this blog: Welcome to the TILL HE COMES Blog. The website has been in existence since 2001, but this is when I launched the blog. Prior to the blog, I was posting mainly sermons and Bible studies, some of which I am migrating over to my sermon pages.

December 19, 2007. Things went pretty well with the blog for about 5 months. I had a small, but growing readership, in large part due to the traffic I already had through my website, and also due to my work at a Christian non-profit organization and publishing company. I was getting published and speaking in conferences and churches. But on December 19, 2007, I published a post called The Heretic in Me which would change my life forever. I had no idea about the magnitude of the storm that this post would create in my life.

January 17, 2008. Within a month after writing that fateful post, I lost my job and most of my Christian friends. Though I had predicted that some would call me a heretic for the seven ideas I was studying (but had not actually believed), I didn’t actually think that anybody would actually call me a heretic and turn on me. But they did. I can count on one hand the people who did not reject me, criticize me, and condemn me. This is not the worst crisis that a person can face in their life, but it was a crisis for me. I wrote a post about what was going on here: From Crisis to Christless.

June 17, 2008. Over the next six months, I graduated from seminary and decided to become a tentmaking church planter. I just needed to find a way to “make tents.” In other words, I needed a job. So I applied for hundreds of jobs, and only got three interviews. Only one place offered to hire me: a carpet cleaning company.

November 21, 2008. Blogging really dropped off during my time as a carpet cleaner. Over the next five months, I worked 80 hours per week and had three surgeries. It became apparent that I could not clean carpets for long. So I looked for another job, and found one in New York.

August 27, 2009. This was the date of my 300th post, and I was floundering as a blogger. I didn’t have the time to blog, and there was a lot going on in my life, my job, and my marriage. I decided to try to focus this blog on writing about Scripture, but if you look at the the majority of the posts over the next two years, I still found myself writing mostly about church.

December 11, 2010. I decided to start taking blogging and writing seriously. This meant re-organizing my blog, trying to post every day, and studying the art and science of blogging. At this time, I was getting about 30 pageviews per day. This is also when I first created my Twitter account. I started reading blogs about blogging, interacting on other blogs, and began to teach myself about best blogging practices and design.

Blogging in 2011

Over the course of the next year, I made several good blogging friends online, and learned a lot about blogging, started several other blogs, and decided to pursue my dream of getting published. I am now averaging about 1400 pageviews per day. As I look over this past year of blogging, I would say that these are some of the best things that happened:

Befriended Alan Knox. Alan has got to be one of the best and most gracious and generous bloggers online. Seriously. I know of no one with his humility, honesty, integrity, and generosity. If you are looking for great insights into church and just an all-around great blog, make sure you read his blog, the Assembling of the Church.
Found John Saddington at Tentblogger. I learned the most about the technical side of blogging from John Saddington. I read and followed almost every post he had ever written. At some point, I purchased his Standard Theme, which really helped the speed and functionality of this site.
Decided to write a book called Close Your Church for Good through my blog. This process has helped me think through some issues about church, and has given me more than enough content to write about. It has also helped bring some much-needed consistency to this blog.
Joined Google Plus and Facebook. I get a lot of traffic from these social sites now, so although I don’t spend huge amounts of time there, they have been helpful in connecting me with other people around the world. Add me on Google Plus and “Like” me on Facebook and I will return the favor.
Met Sam from Grace Ground, and Anthony from Ant Writes. These are the top two commenters on this blog, and great blogging friends. Thanks, guys!
Wrote a little “throw away post” about something I read about writing in a CS Lewis book, which gained me over 100,000 visits in one month! I still remember wondering if it was worth wasting my time to write that post….

Blogging in 2012

This year is only a few weeks old, but there are already some great things happening. Here are a few:

Got a publishing deal with Civitas Press for a book called Finding Church. I’m working on this right now, and you can participate!
Started an email newsletter. I am pretty excited about this. I am going to try to publish 4 ebooks this year, and they will be made available to email newsletter subscribers for free.
To celebrate my 1000th post, I was hoping to have an ebook ready to send out to newsletter subscribers today. It is an ebook called The Skeleton Church. But it is not quite ready… This is good news for you, I suppose. There is till time to subscribe before I send it out (hopefully within a week). In the meantime, subscribers can still get a free copy of my very first (and experimental) ebook, The Lie. But don’t delay. As soon as I put out The Skeleton Church, I will no longer offer The Lie for free.

And that pretty much brings us up to today! Thank you all for your support over the years! I am looking forward to the next 1000 posts!

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