I just want to clarify. Going to MorningStar didn’t make my dreams any more real. They merely imparted to me, as Frank Herbert would say, “A terrible sense of purpose.” Before, I had plans. Now I am determined to follow through.
My apologies for all the introspection. But, it’s my site, and these are the thoughts that have been interesting me lately.
A quick (not) survey of my schemes.
A Christian Bookstore
This market is so underdeveloped. I have some major problems with nearly every Christian bookstore, chain or otherwise that I have ever encountered. There are three basic categories that I know for Christian media. The first is Theology, by which I mean textbooks. Original texts, Peer-reviewed journals, defining theological treatises, like Calvin’s Institutes. The thick stuff that your average reader doesn’t really want to read.
The second area is Didactic, by which I mean the vast industry I seem to have discovered for producing Sunday-school manuals for the denominations. Teaching aids, lesson plans, daily readers. This area actually ticks me off, because it seems that each denomination has their own specific publishing house that produces their propaganda, er, paraphernalia… oh! whatever, that they use to teach their people. So the vast majority of Christians, at least in the United States, is getting their theology dictated to them by for-profit publishing houses with clear theological slants. Most churches don’t pick and choose. If you’re a Baptist, you buy from Lifeway. If you’re a Methodist, you buy from Cokesbury. Each distributor is completely exclusive of the other irregardless of what may actually be the best teaching available. That strikes me as pretty stupid. Or at least narrow minded.
The third area, Retail (for lack of a better word), is by far the most dynamic. This is where all the books, movies, CD’s T-shirts and whatever else is out there is produced directly for people to just walk in, peruse, and buy. This is where most of our Christian culture comes from: Veggie tales, and Dennis Jernigan; Hank Hannegraff and Rick Joyner. (Yes, I did just use both those names in the same sentence) Ironically, though this is the furthest removed from the “theology” branch of Christian media, in the general public mind is where most of our theology is actually born.
And there are two problems with the way the market is currently being run. First of all, the Theology and Didactic branches of Christian media are usually completely divorced from what vendors sell retail. What’s more, Theology and Didactic materials are further divided by sect. You won’t find much Pentecostal theology at Lifeway, let alone a Pentecostal Sunday-school lesson plan. Secondly, and far more importantly, Christian retail is almost exclusively limited to major distributors. If a Christian CD isn’t distributed by Maranatha, Vineyard, or WorshipTogether.com, you probably won’t find it at your local Christian bookstore. Yet most of the Christian media that is produced is actually indie projects. How many itinerant preachers come to your church and at the end announce, “And be sure and check out my book, which is published by Nelsen Bible Distributors”? No. It was probably published by somebody you never heard of. Especially if the speaker has anything really new to say. Which means that if anything really new happens in the Body of Christ, you won’t find out about it until it’s already over.
I have a plan to fix that. And I could spend the next 3-4 pages explaining all of it. Suffice it to say that I want to create a system of stores that sell every form of Christian media available on a national level, and still manages to focus a good deal of attention on local writing, music, and art. If a book, CD, print, etc. becomes popular enough locally, it will then be distributed on a national level
Oh the plans I have for that… If I hit a high enough level of success, I plan to dabble a little bit in radio and the production end of the stick. Just imagine the potential if we ever hit the international level…
Moving on!
Ministry
I will get that degree. I’m not sure exactly what all I’m going to do with it. But I will get that degree.
Christian Fiction and Poetry
I’ve got a couple of novels, an epic poem, maybe a Christian TV series floating around here somewhere. I could go into detail on some of them, but I won’t do it now.
Bible Translation
This isn’t exactly high on my list. But my major pet peeve with English bibles is that the translators spent years learning to understand the original Greek and Hebrew of the Bible. But they spent about zero time learning the language into which they were translating it. The result has invariably been only half a translation, because the translator knew exactly the meaning of the original word, but didn’t have at his disposal the perfect word out of the 1 million available in the English language. So I’d like to do my own translation of the Bible. You know. In my spare time.
Family
This is at the bottom of my list, but it’s actually the most important. I’m 25 years old and I’ve been preparing for at least 20 to be a husband and father in the best family the world has ever seen. I want the world to be able to beat a path to my door and say “here lives the most wonderful family anyone has ever been a part of in a thousand years.” If you’re going to do it, you might as well do it right. I could go on forever about that too, but I don’t want to scare off any interested parties just yet.
Anyway. I expounded in some detail about the bookstore, but on each of these things, I’ve been scheming for quite some while, and could speak with some great depth on all of them.
These are a few of my favorite dreams.
neumatikos 