Please slap me in the mouth if I ever give you advice on how to start a big blog.

I’m wildly unqualified to tell you how to do that. Eight days after I started Stuff Christians Like, more than 4,300 people showed up all at once. It just went viral. I can’t take credit for that. I can’t pretend I’m particularly special or an expert on blogging.

Besides, I don’t want to talk about starting a blog. Starting a blog is easy. It takes about 3 seconds. Continuing a blog? That feels impossible some days. Trying to keep up with a calendar that never pauses or takes a break? Finding new ways to create fresh content, day after day, week after week, month after month? That’s hard.

That’s why today, I want to give you the 1 blogging secret I’ve learned from having a blog that’s been read by almost 1 million different people.

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Fine, I’ll say it.

I don’t know how to invite people to church.

I thought I did, I mean on the surface, “Do you want to come to church with me this Sunday?” is a pretty simple sentence to say. There aren’t any complicated words in there like “transcendentalism.” It’s a short and simple thought, and yet, I have a hard time saying that sentence.

So when I recently thought about inviting a coworker to church I went through a mental list of possible ways I could ask him:

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You know that friend who used to be a waiter? The one that whenever you go to a restaurant says, “You gotta leave a big tip. I was a waiter and it’s brutal, seriously, let’s leave a tip.” I’m becoming that guy with people raising funds. I’ve never tried to raise money before. Sure, for a mission trip during the summer in high school, but I mean big crazy financial goals for big important projects. Until the Vietnam Kindergarten Project.

I had no idea what my friends who are church planters or InterVarsity employees or missionaries went through. And the Vietnam Project went quickly! I can’t imagine the pressure of raising money each year or semester or month.

That’s why I’m excited to introduce you to Jarrett and Jeanne Stevens at Soul City Church. They made the 7 is greater than 1 video below which I think is one of the most brilliant videos I’ve ever seen and they’re raising money for something big and crazy in Chicago. Visit yearendstart.com for more info about getting involved.

I need your help. I’m not a good interviewer. And by “not good” I mean, “horrible.” And by “horrible” I mean “dolphins die when they read my lame interview questions.”

So when Zondervan offered me a chance to interview Rob Bell as part of his new tour, I immediately thought you should help with that.

If you don’t know who Rob Bell is, you can check out one of his books or video series:

Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith

Sex God: Exploring the Endless Connections between Sexuality and Spirituality

Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile

Drops Like Stars: A Few Thoughts on Creativity and Suffering

Nooma

I’m going to ask him about Church Marketing, dealing with haters, and make sure he’s OK with the satire we did about his glasses in the upcoming Stuff Christians Like book.

What do you want to ask Rob Bell?

Comment until Tuesday, December 15th. Best five questions will be answered by Rob Bell and you’ll win a free copy of his new book, Drops Like Stars. (It’s a $35 book, score!)

What should we ask Rob Bell?

(You can’t stop Curtis Honeycutt, you can only hope to contain him. When he’s not tearing it up over on Just Wallpaper he’s been known to drop a funny guest post on Stuff Christians Like. He’s back today with, Subtle Sunday Distractions. Enjoy.)

Subtle Sunday Distractions

Some Sunday mornings are no match for my wandering mind. I’m sitting there, in the back corner of the sanctuary (a few of us fondly refer to it as “sinners’ corner”), where I can see everything that is going on during the Sunday morning worship service. I feel like Simba looking out on his domain, except my domain consists of subtle distractions that keep me from focusing in church.

Everyone can spot a major distraction. There’s the classic screaming kid. The pastor’s mic doesn’t work. Randy Johnson sits in the pew in front of you so you can’t see anything except for the back of his formerly-mulleted cranial region. Those are easy.

I’m talking about those subtle worship distractions that you notice—you may just not notice that you notice them. I’ve taken the liberty to assign point values to each distraction so you can rate the severity of your problem of focusing on Sunday morning …

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This year, for like the 100th time, Vibe magazine refused to recognize Stuff Christians Like as one of the best rap blogs of the year. Fair enough, but don’t pretend like I don’t mention LL Cool J once every third post.

Fortunately, Collide Magazine put Stuff Christians Like in their reader choice awards. We’re in the Faith & Pop Culture Category.

Please vote for Stuff Christians Like  for this year’s award. The polls close Monday, so if you could vote today, that would be awesome.

Click here to vote.

I don’t know if hell has a PR department, but if they do, they’ve done a bang up job of getting satan worked out of the modern Christian vernacular.

I didn’t realize this until recently. In my attempts to be a relevant, culturally aware, cool Christian, I’ve virtually eliminated any mention of satan from my conversations. I’ll talk all day about building community or how to use social media to grow social justice, but satan? That guy gets a free pass.

In almost 700 posts on Stuff Christians Like I’ve only mentioned him seriously maybe 5 times. Here are the posts I’ve written that really reference him …

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For three more days, if you pre-order a copy of the Stuff Christians Like book, and email me, I’ll mail you a free chapter you can give someone as a Christmas gift. If you already pre-ordered it months ago, just email me and I’ll send you the chapter too. (It’s only $8.76, so it’s super cheap.)

I’ll also autograph it. And, if you’d like, I’ll sign it in someone else’s name if you’d prefer the signature of a famous person instead of mine.

I mentioned that on a radio station a week ago. I believe my quote was something like, “I’ll sign it as Donald Miller or Francis Chan if you’d prefer. Francis Chan is very kind. He won’t mind at all.” And as soon as I said it, the air went dead. I had done a horrible job explaining the joke and it just died. Crickets. The poor host just sat there, with me on the line thinking about saying, “Hey, you’ve been a great crowd. Make sure you try the flounder with capers.” The shame. Oh the shame.

But the offer stands. If you pre-order the Stuff Christians Like book before December 13th and email me, I’ll send you a free chapter of the book.

Click here to order it on Amazon

Click here to order it on Barnes & Noble

Razzle Dazzle,

Jon

Recently, a church group made a gangsta rap video about side hugs. Since I’ve written about the side hug phenomenon a bunch and it’s on the cover of the Stuff Christians Like book, some people assumed I did the video. I didn’t but I did manage to get one piece of really funny hate mail.

Here, as I’ve chronicled on Twitter, is a section of what someone emailed me concerning the video:

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Dear shelf,

I don’t even know where to start this letter, you long rectangular piece of wood attached to the wall above the urinals in the bathroom at church, you.

I saw you just last weekend after the worship service, and I thought to myself, “There you are. You’re great.” I looked at your ample shelf, a flat surface that seems to say, “Hey, got a heavy Bible? Here, let me hold that for you. Go ahead, I’ll shoulder that burden while you’re in the bathroom.”

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