Grand Reopening!

 Hello Everyone! It’s been a while, I know. Consider this post an announcement and an explanation. The announcement is that Quest Forums is back. After some valuable advice and some careful consideration, I have decided to “return to my first love,” as it were. No meetings are in view. Instead, I will be solely focusing on writing for the website. The goal is still the same, however. I will talk about what interests me, and the thing that would interest me the most is answering questions. If you have them, please send them my way! The social media buttons in the sidebar are still in working order, and I would love to hear from you.

Explaining the Past

As for the explanation, well, that’s a bit more involved. In the first place, I feel I owe an explanation for why Quest Forums went silent. Looking back on the last year or so, there is not one single moment that I can really identify as the breaking point. I was doing weekly blog posts up until February 2017 along with sporadic posts after that, and regular short posts on Facebook until June. But I guess what really put me off my game was the end of the meetings.

The problem is that the meetings were part of a larger plan. I had a vision for what I wanted Quest to be, and I was doing what I could to achieve it. Stage 1 was the articles. I saw them as the stepping-stone to Stage 2, the meetings. They, in turn, were meant to lead to Stage 3, a new church with an intentional focus on answering the questions of people curious about the Christian faith. When I stalled at Stage 2, it just felt like the experiment was over. I do not regret having made the attempt. There just seemed to be little reason to continue. In other words, I lost interest.

So the first half of the reason I stopped working on Quest Forums was that its purpose seemed fulfilled (or unfulfillable.) The other half was what else I had on my mind. In the second part of 2017, I was hard at work completing my MDiv. and doing my internship. I was also very heavily involved in politics, working on campaigns most of last year and through the first half of this one. What it all amounts to, then, is that Quest was off my mind and other things were on it, and I got out of the habit of writing here.

Explaining the Present

That is the explanation for why I stopped. What, you may ask, is the one for why I am starting again? In a word, necessity. One aspect of this space is to be a journal for me, so I will be frank and hope no one peeking into my internal dialogue will think worse of me for it. I am a seminary-educated, ordained minister, but I am struggling to find a ministry position. For a number of reasons not worth going into even here, few doors have opened and those that did ended up being slammed in my face. But the ministry is still my calling, and I need an outlet.

My thought is that a regular return to writing can kill a few birds with one stone. One, it will allow me to stretch my mental muscle. I want to be able to express the things of God, and this is a way to do it.

Two, it can act as a portfolio. One of my issues in finding a church is my lack of experience. It is a vicious cycle of needing it in order to get it, but this may allow me to break through at least a little. Here, people can get a sense of what I can do.

Three, I really hope to be able to do some good. I am not bloviating when I ask for questions. I love leading people into an exploration of the Scriptures. That might just be a restatement of Reason One, but I really want to stress the sense of dialogue. I can talk to myself. Hearing from others, however, would mean a lot more to everyone.

And Four, a very new thought, is that Quest Forums can serve as a place for others to express themselves, as well. I do not mean solely through their questions. Rather, I am also planning to seek out contributors, those willing and able to offer their individual insights. As an editor, I will be happy to share the thoughts of people with something to say but perhaps nowhere of their own to say it. If you would be interested in that, feel free to let me know.

TL;DR

I’ve spent some time on Reddit and picked up the “TL;DR.” It stands for “Too long; didn’t read,” and offers a summary of a long post (so maybe I need to make it a regular feature!). For this one, at least, the TL;DR is that Quest Forums is back. It will be purely a website from this point on. I have been motivated to return to form, providing a place for discussions about God, the Bible, and the world around us. I will express my own thoughts, at the very least. I will also be soliciting questioners and contributors. If you have an interest in being one or the other, feel free to get in touch. And I would ask everyone reading this to get involved by liking, sharing, retweeting, and generally telling people about what is going on here so that we can build a sizeable audience. The more visitors there are, the more of my goals can be met. If you see the Lord at work in this, I hope you will be willing to take part in working with Him. Even if it feels like a small role, it will make big difference.