My own little Alternative Media Ministry endeavor

[Pavel Mosko]

This is a thread talking about my own little project I've been plinking on these last two years or decades depending on how you want to count it.

I guess I will start out tomorrow morning when I get my coffee talking about it. It's a bit long, and complex dealing with autobiographical stuff, with hopeful little lessons you might be able to learn and apply for yourself.


(UNDER CONSTRUCTION)


OF course another reason to also start the the thread here is at some point to have some threads on the prayer wall talking about what I'm doing etc. and it's a little better to have a thread describing it.

 

[Blade]

I like it..looking foreword to this.

 

[Pavel Mosko]

OK This thread is a Seth Godin exercise. Godin has a lot of acclaim on the internet when it comes to marketing in the age of the internet and many other niches. His latest niche is giving advice to creative people who want to make a living off their work rather than work a day job.


One of his major theses is that creative work is more a habit than something coming from a creative burst of inspiration etc. So in his mind things like "Writer's Block" do not exist. Apparently writer's block was something that was invented sometime in the 1800s, I thought it was from Percy Shelley who believed that poetry purely came from "the muse" (basically your creative inspiration). So Godin really encourages his audience to make a regular habit of doing the thing that they aspire to do. Ideally they should do it every day or at least as often as they can.


While I really like Seth Godin's advice and have benefitted from it (mostly as a source of encouragement from being depressed at different times) the stuff advocated isn't really news to me:

1) In my teenage to early adult years I dabbled with martial arts where this kind of thing came into play.


2) When I was in grad school studying counseling psychology, I was a little dismayed that I was forced to take an undergraduate class in Essay writing which I think in the end was a God send. The instructor was really great and it pointed out a lot of the neuro-psychology involved with things like writing. I always had some problems learning some little things with writing like memorizing some of the fine rules regarding the use of things like punctuation. Anyway one of the big pieces of advice for essay writing to improve yourself is just to do a lot of reading in general. The more reading you do especially from good or great writers, the more you absorb their syntax, idioms, vocabulary etc. automatically by osmosis.


and then there was my experience on a Postmodern Christian web board (really my first Christian message board experience) talked about in the next post...

 

[Pavel Mosko]

3) Theooze.com

I was on the now defunct "Postmodern Christian" discussion forum under the name "Addai". It was very interesting place for a lot of reasons, but it did sort of reinforced the Seth Godin advice.

I wrote a piece on "the Kiss of Piece" in the Assyrian liturgy that was aimed at an audience similar to the famous book "Evangelicals on the Canterbury trail", as well as the famous book "Becoming Orthodox" by Peter Quilquist. Anyway I made that writing the most pithy, and polished thing I could come up with. But then a funny thing happened......

Not many people read it. Some really liked it. But this one Millennial age poster really nuked it for having an arrogant tone, and I kind of realized she was right. Not so much based on what was going on in my head, but more as a side affect of the writing. In that piece I was trying to come up with the uber apologetic on liturgy and why it was important, blah blah blah blah. I was essentially trying to play wack a mole to every obvious objection to every would be naysayer. And after many tweaks and rewrites, I sort of had it, but the end result basically had the side affect of basically sounding arrogant because that kind of is the unintended side affect of trying to come up with the uber essay or apologetic work. There is no such thing as perfection as hard as we try... You can have some that is polished, but not perfect. Besides this I soon realized that imperfections can actually be a good thing (in the age of the internet people value things like authenticity, including tentativeness and maybe a little humility).



This event made me rethink my approach. I came to realize it was much better to put less polish in my work, and to actually show my though process at work in what I wrote. And I was really surprised at the increase in efficiency and over all relating to my audience. I talk a little bit on this also in my video, "the Ministry of Authenticity".

https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=623155615776647

This kind of point is really important in today online culture. I was working on having a book review series in another part of the board called "Called Advancing the Gospel in a Post Christian world" but got taken down because I had a direct link to a book called "Find Common Ground". I suppose I will retry putting up that topic and thread later, albeit without direct links to Amazon etc.
But anyway their is a lot of handwringing in the Christian world over things like Postmodernism, the fact we are becoming Post Christian while I am much more upbeat and optimistic on everything. I actually believe in some ways things are getting better for things like Evangelism and Apologetics because under the unofficial Christian Modernity there were often a lot of significant problems that people were in denial of. I talk a little about this sort of thing in a few old online threads like.


Pavel's Postmodern thread


the Bible Project and the Meta-Gospel


But anyway wrapping up and to do the literary trope/technique of "Book ends" and go back to Seth Godin. I believe that message board participation is one way of practicing and sharpening what you do. Well I got more to say on that... maybe I'll save that for another day. Thanks for reading.