Welcome And Thank You To All Our New Subscribers!
Wow we’ve had a lot of new subscribers join us the past few days! So glad you are here! Welcome to All the Things With Pastor Clint.
I’ve been blogging forever. Really.
Way back in seminary in the mid-1990s (so like a decade before Facebook and Twitter and just a few years after the popularization of “Listservs”), I got started sending out a weekly email as a missionary in Slovakia, and then weekly emails from Seattle where I served my pastoral internship.
In 2001 back in the Twin Cities finishing up seminary that e-mail list morphed into a blog at Blogger entitled Lutheran Confessions. It’s all archived from 2002 until 2018, if you want to take a deep dive. That blog became surprisingly popular in the 2010s, enough so that I was invited to navigate over to Patheos and blog there.
Honestly, the Patheos move wasn’t that great. I’ve never liked web sites with heavy advertising, and Patheos got busier and busier with them, including the worst web advertising of all, the pop-up. So if you’ve followed my blogs over the years, my deepest apologies to you for that temporary mistake. All I can say is I was enticed by the “reach” of Patheos.
But now friends we are here, at Substack. Substack isn’t really like a blogging conglomerate in the traditional sense. Instead, it’s a tool. It’s set up to help maintain an e-mail list that is also a blog. You subscribe and get e-mails in your inbox whenever I post. All these e-mails are archived as posts on the blog.
The best thing about the blog: you as a reader can easily share these posts to social media. You help with the reach.
Of course, you can also forward the e-mails. That’s old-school but legit. If you’re feeling particularly multi-media, you can even print the e-mails out and put them in an envelope and mail them to your cousin. You’ll just need to find a stamp.
Substack doesn’t do advertisements. It’s visually spare and clean. I find this helpful as a reader and a writer.
Instead, they let each blogger set up a structure for subscriptions. I’ve set the blog so all subscribers receive all the content for free. Some readers choose to upgrade to paid subscriptions because they want to support content they like. There are monthly and annual options to do so. In the next couple of months, I’ll probably consult with paid subscribers and see if there’s something I can add that’s valuable (and especially for them) to the blog.
I’ve got a basic agenda moving forward. I’ve always blogged topically, and will continue to do. You can anticipate regular installments reflecting at the intersection of theology and daily life. But in social media (especially Facebook) for a while now I’ve practiced what I might call “open-source pastoring.” I plan to bring that open-source pastoring over here to the blog. Basically, it’s just me working through the nuts and bolts of what it means to be a pastor in community.
Into the mix, you get a couple of extra bonuses. First, Substack makes it easy to podcast. Since I interview authors and others on the regular, you’ll get access to those podcasts as they are posted. I’ve got a few up already. You can also find these podcasts at Apple Podcasts.
I also read a lot, so you can anticipate regular book reviews. And then just random other content about new music, movies, and games.
I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the blog with your friends and colleagues, and if you blog, add this blog to your blogroll.
Here’s a template you could use:
"Just discovered All the Things With Pastor Clint and subscribed to
by (Twitter: @Schnekloth)
Looking forward to reading about progressive Christian life post-pandemic"
But what I’d most appreciate is conversation in the comments. One reason I love Substack is the opportunity to build community here. I’m tired of community being beholden to algorithms on Twitter and Facebook where negative chatter is amplified. I’m a fighter as much as anyone, and you’ll get opinionated content here on the blog, but I’d rather we make our own fights than Facebook tell us which fights to have.
Again, welcome to all you new subscribers, and thanks for reading! I hope you are inspired here.