Let's Be Real

You're one of the top Christian bloggers in the country, in terms of readers and subscribers. Give us the scoop, how do you write a good blog?

Anne:
I think you have to listen more than you talk, and give more than you take. That's my theme for this year. Being interactive. Don't do it just to be successful. There's no strategy behind my blog - a lot of it is time. I've been doing it for the last 3 1/2 years — developing relationships and not just trying to be a stat freak.

Just do what's inside you, and realize that it's not about you. Someone recently said "If we cared more about blessing people then impressing people, Jesus would be happy." We always worry about "what's this gonna look like, what's this gonna sound like, how can I get more people to read this" — who cares? Just let it be a blessing to someone. Be respectful, be open minded ... that's it, no amazing strategy.

You ask a lot of good questions too, don't you?

Yeah, I keep learning that I don't have anything figured out. There's a few thousand really smart people that read my blog that can give some very wise input. So when I run across these gray area questions, I like to pose them to my readers. But these kinds of questions can go both ways — either people will fight and be jerks, or they can go really good where some good insights are opened up.

For example, recently I asked the question of "why is it a sin to be gay?" I was counseling a girl that was struggling with this and she asked why did God make it a sin to be gay? So I posed the question on my blog, and there's been a lot of different view points and comments. The cool thing is that it's a really good dialog on this taboo issue — people are linking to other sites, and meeting each other, exchanging emails and finding new blogs to read.

It's really neat. I pay just $6.95 a month to host a great forum for people to talk.

Tell us a little about your book that came out recently, Mad Church Disease, what you've seen and why you've writing it.

The biggest thing I've seen is that people aren't talking about the stress and things they're experiencing within the church. Whether it's burnout or depression or different things they're wrestling with. We feel like we have to carry around a professional ministry demeanor.

It's not just mega churches. Everyone loves to point the finger at mega churches. But it happens in mega churches, it happens in medium churches it happens in home churches. It happens wherever there are people because people are flawed.

The problem is we're not talking about it.

Personally, when I was going through my burnout I was working at a church, had been there for 2 years. I took the position because I liked the power behind it — I wanted to be the youngest girl on leadership team. I was 25 and would be rubbing shoulders with all the important people on staff.

But I didn't have boundaries, and even if I did I wouldn't have known how to implement them.

A couple years into it, I started getting physically sick — that's how stress manifests in my body, personally. I went to a doctor and they did a CAT scan and found all this inflammation in my abdominal cavity. They said "Hey, we think you have appendicitis." So I was like, "okay, just a little surgery" I was bummed that I'd be missing work.

They admitted me and did some more tests and came back and said "actually, we don't know what's wrong." They thought it might be several other things (including colon cancer so I had to do that ... thing "You're gonna do WHAT!?") I had to swallow all kinds of things and they did all these x-rays. The whole time I'm in tremendous pain, doped out on painkillers.

After a week of this, and all these tests, they came back and didn't know what it was and finally asked "How is your stress level." My husband kinda gave a laugh — because he had been telling me all along "If you don't slow down, you're gonna burn out," but I didn't listen.

They told me that if I didn't change my lifestyle I would be back in the hospital in the next year. That really shook me up. I took some drugs to fix the physical symptoms, but emotionally I was a wreck. I started having all these anxiety attacks and there were days I couldn't get out of bed, I was so depressed.

Relationally, I had shut down and withdrawn from all these relationships, because I didn't have the I-have-it-together face. I was scared people would think I wasn't spiritual enough to do my job because I didn't have it all together.

I ended up taking three weeks of absence from my job. Went into counseling for several months and it was amazing. She helped me to see what was happening from an objective point of view and put me on the path to getting better.

I started realizing, okay, I had two pastors that I worked for that had affairs — within the church, with other staff members. And it's really sad because that's such a common thing now. People are like "Oh that's too bad." But nobody's shocked by it anymore, it's just kind-of the culture that we've become.

I feel like we need to just start talking about it. It's hard and you may lose your job because of the things you're going thru. That's your job, that's your livelihood. But God doesn't call us to love our jobs. He calls us to love Him and love ourselves. If we're not loving ourselves, we can't fully love others the way God intended us to.

You talk a lot about this idea of telling your story and being real. What do you think is the challenge to being real, and how we overcome that?

The challenge is fear of judgement. The only way to counteract that is to exude grace from your own life and lead by example. Going first and being honest first gives people open up, you've given them the permission to go second. In my own experience talking about burn-out and other struggles, I do get hate mail, but it also allows people to open up and share about their struggles as well.

By living your life as authentically as you can. Realizing that you might get judged and you might get hurt and you'll find-out who your friends are. But at least your being honest with yourself, not hiding, and you're setting a huge example by doing that — an example of hope.

You seem to be a part of a community of bloggers and leaders that are collaborating to be authentic, that seems like a new thing, talk a little about that.

The generation younger than us, 12-25 year olds, they're really craving that rawness and that realness. They've seen their parents with the independent spirit and the "I've got it together" attitude. It's almost a knee-jerk reaction for us to do the opposite. Unfortunately a lot of my friends' parents are getting divorced after having been married for 30 years — it seems that people were staying married and pretending to be wonderful and perfect.

We're in this kinda middle generation, where we have the ability and opportunity to pick which way we're gonna go. We can either go the way our parents did, or we can start something new, because we've seen the other way. It's an opportunity to lead by example for that younger generation. It takes a good 10 years for something to be formed in someone, so we've gotta start now, because, in 10 years these 12 year olds are gonna be 22 and it will be their time, will they be prepared?

Okay, let's talk about the unplugged evening session you will be doing.

It will be an evening with Carlos Whittaker and Jon Acuff and myself. Just a candid evening of discussion and audience interaction. We're really passionate about talking about the issues that many of us ignore. We don't have it all figured out, and we're all in this together, so why not just talk about it. It will be February 26th, at Buckhead Christian Church (not the Buckhead NorthPoint campus). You can go to our website - OffTheBlogs.com - to get more details. And there will be worship with Aaron Keyes, a really gifted worship pastor. Hopefully it will be different from anything you've been to lately.

Thanks for the interview, Anne. Check-out Anne Jackson's blog: flowerdust.net

 

2 Comments »

1. Great interview. Wish I could just bust off and go to ATL to be a part of that.  But I’ll be here at the fortress of solitude in the Pacific NW holding up my side of the continent.

   Comment by Jim Gray - Feb 16, 2009 @ 03:47 PM

2. I just ordered your book. I am so thankful that I work in a place that can handle struggles and questions in the midst of really hard ministry, but we can do even better. I have such a hard time relating to inauthenticity in people. I don’t understand what good it serves anyone. It is crippling and how can we make an impact on this world if we cannot even be real inside our “safe” churches? Anyway, thanks for the interview.

   Comment by Claudia McGuire - Mar 04, 2009 @ 05:19 PM

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