This weekend marks five years since the birth of this blog. It’s hard to measure how much the thoughts and conversations I’ve had here have marked my journey, but I know it’s significant. This blog began in a time of personal transition, and in many ways, that transition continues. My best hope is that the season of transition has shifted into a hunger for lifelong learning.

Here are a few different ways of looking back at this blog through the years, along with a peek forward:

random facts

• The original domain name, which still points here, was Subvergence.org. The meaning for the name was described in the first post.
• In February of 2005, I changed the name (and domain) to Some Strange Ideas.
• The site was first built with Drupal, though I switched to WordPress 1.2 within the first month. Not knowing how to import and export, I clearly remember sitting in my parents’ living room on a vacation and copying and pasting all the first posts and comments from Drupal to WordPress.
• There have been 823 posts and 2082 comments. Akismet has caught 281,667 spam comments. I’ve used 444 different tags.
• Out of this blog, I’ve launched several other blogs…more than I care to mention! Most notable has been Creativityist, which now has twice the traffic and subscribers of this blog.

different looks

Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, here are some of the old looks of the site I was able to recover:

memorable posts

Most of the 823 posts are a blur, but as I scan through titles in the archives, these are some posts that I remember…most of which still shape how I think today:

celebrate the residue – 08/15/04
ends, means, or by-product? – 11/04/04
pondering pragmatists – 12/09/04
what is spiritual maturity? – 01/29/05
hazardous waste connections – 03/09/05
consummity – 06/05/05
the kingdom of creativity – 07/05/05
struggler 07/08/05
revernaculation: go to heaven – 07/25/05
apolitically political – 08/25/05
covenant vs membership – 11/02/05
church planting as missions -12/09/05
i want to be a semiotician – 04/24/06
umm…what about monday, tuesday, wednesday, thursday, friday, and saturday? – 05/27/06
to-do guidelines – 07/31/06
pass the mustard [the mustard manifesto] – 03/12/08
being life together – 07/20/08
of parking lots and presence – 09/09/08
my job description – 11/07/08

the next five years?

So what do the next five years hold? I’m glad to say I don’t know!

As I’ve diversified my thoughts to other blogs and Twitter, this blog has primarily become a place where I reflect on reading, theology, and church leadership. I hope to continue that, but I also find myself pondering what it means to widen the audience. I’ve spent the last years primarily blogging with a progressive Christian audience in mind.

Being only a “part-time” pastor for the last year has given me the opportunity to spend more time with people who aren’t part of a church than ever before. And I love it. I find myself wanting to make this conversation wider, and to turn it into a place where people with any mixture of faith (or non-faith) background would be interested enough to come and listen to my perspective on life through the lens of Christian spirituality.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

Last night, while watching Michael Clayton, I started playing around with a new template for this blog. That might not have been the best idea, because I missed about three, or fifteen, important developments in the plot. But at least I have a new template to show for it.

My sidebar had built up about four years of clutter which I have scraped away. Some of the sidebar content was moved to subpages, thanks to the miracle of WordPress page templates. The rest of it is just gone.

Enjoy.