Any Feedback?
I hope your late summer's going well! And that--for those of you, like me, on the Eastern seaboard--you made it through the hurricane with minimal damage, inconvenience or, God forbid, injury. (I'm writing this before Sunday, so I have no updates on my end.)
We're pondering next steps in our collective conversation here and I'd love any feedback you all have. I've been informally collecting some feedback on how we've done. Here are two perspectives that come my way most often.
- This blog is a great place for a unique conversation--but, that said, it's primarily serving a few dedicated "insiders" to this centered-set, Stage-4, Blue Ocean stuff. It works less well as a place for intrigued outsiders to dip their toe in the water.
- I hear all the time that what the Blue Ocean conversation is most-known for is its' comments on LGBT issues. I pretty much always hear this from people talking with conservative churchgoers who are alarmed by Blue Ocean's "liberal" take (in quotes because I don't feel well-understood by that characterization) on this. (One writer is aggressively trying to peddle an essay to Christianity Today on this subject.) So I find myself torn. Should we not care what outsiders who have no interest in the larger conversation here get upset about? Or is there some way to have different levels of this conversation?
So we've pondered things like trying to restart the blog in perhaps a broader-based way...without quite knowing what that would look like. We've wondered if blogging is an especially-helpful communication vehicle at all at this stage of our life together. We've drawn a blank pondering how, on the few occasions we do talk about LGBT concerns (which seems hard to avoid when talking about faith and culture) to make it helpful for those who are served by these discussions--without making those discussions a gate that anyone who wants to join in here has to walk through up front.
So welcome to what I and a few others have been thinking about. Do you have any thoughts?
