October 31, one week from today, will mark the 491st anniversary of the day that Martin Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of the church at Wittenburg. In so doing he struck a match, beginning a fire that quickly spread throughout Europe and throughout the world. Having become increasingly disillusioned with the doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church, and in particular the sale of indulgences, Luther wrote his Theses to try to begin the process of reform. While he was unable to bring reform to the church, he did trigger the Protestant Reformation by rediscovering the Gospel—the good news of salvation by grace through faith. The Reformation had profound influence in politics, art, literature and theology—while it was at its heart a Christian movement, it impacted all areas of society. That seemingly insignificant act is, in reality, one of the defining points of history. It is a shame that the day has largely been forgotten in favor of what is now the year’s most popular day, Halloween (Halloween is, after all, one of the few holidays that our society can celebrate without shame and without feeling politically incorrect).

For the past two years, on October 31, I have hosted a “Reformation Day Symposium” and invited bloggers to write articles dealing with the Reformation. A whole crowd of bloggers have participated and it has been a joy to read all of the articles written to celebrate such a monumental occasion in the history of the church.

Due to the success of this event, it seemed worthwhile to me to revisit the idea and make something of a tradition out of it. So once again I’m asking you to consider blogging about the Reformation to celebrate Reformation Day. As I’ve done in years past, I’ll link to all of the posts from this site. And as I’ve done before, I’ll award prizes to the “best” entries (as judged by myself and likely a couple of other judges, and based on whatever subjective criteria we come up with).

You may want to reflect on a person, an event, or a particular point of theology. The topic is wide open, so long as it somehow ties in to Reformation Day. And remember, you do not need to be Reformed to appreciate the Reformation and all it stood for. If you do not have a blog of your own, but would still like to participate, why not ask another blogger if you can “guest” on his site that day.

So start thinking, start writing, and prepare to post your articles on October 31. When you have prepared an article and posted it (please hold off posting until October 31), include a URL to my blog (so I can find all of the posts using Technorati and Google Blog Search) and send me an email to make sure that your article has been included.

In the past months the server that hosts this site has been dragging a little bit. It has gone down a few times and has begin consuming too many resources. And so I’ve decided to move to a new server with a host that is dedicated to supporting Movabletype, the software that runs behind the scenes here. While I was going through all the trouble of moving to the new server, I decided to rebuild the site’s templates from the ground-up (or nearly so) and to tinker just a little bit with the site’s features and design. I also upgraded to the latest version of the software.

And so by this morning most of you should be seeing the site on its new server. I, on the other hand, am still waiting for the changes to “take” and continue to see the old site.

There are a few new features on this site you may like to know about:

At long last I changed around the top banner. Gone is the lonely winter tree. As much as I love the image, I think a year was long enough for it to be there. In its place is a chair. Yup, a chair. This will, of course, be utterly irrelevant to those of you who read via RSS!

You can now create an account on the site. This will be useful to those of you who comment regularly. The account will mean you can sign in and not have to continually enter your username, email address, and so on. It also gives you the ability to track your old comments, to track other people’s comments, etc. The page where you do all of this is still be perfected, so you’ll have to give me some time in that regard.

The front page has been simplified a little bit (since it was getting a bit cluttered). I removed much of what was there and replaced it with a poll/survey and ActionStream (which tracks what I do in other places on the web—Digg, Twitter, and so on). I removed A La Carte from the sidebar and it is now in the same time line as the other posts.

There are quite a few other changes that are sufficiently insignificant that they are probably not worth mentioning.

Beyond these changes, I expect things to continue here pretty much as they have for the past six years.

Last year around this time I began what I suppose is about to become a tradition—I made up a book guide to help people choose books to buy others for Christmas (or, of course, just to buy for themselves). As you know, I read and review a lot of books, usually around 100 per year. I have been pleased to find that others are able to benefit from my love of reading through these reviews. It has always been my purpose to help put good books in the hands of believers while helping them avoid ones that just aren’t worth reading. On occasion I’ve been told that people have difficulty navigating the large number of reviews on my blog. To alleviate that problem, I have created a mini-site in which I will list only books I recommend (I will not list books I do not recommend). I have shared my recommendations in a variety of categories. I hope and trust you will find this beneficial.

Click Here For The 2007 Book Guide

If you are after even more reviews, you could always visit my other site, Discerning Reader. Their you’ll find these reviews as well as ones written by some other talented reviewers.

As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, I’ve begun to do a bit of advertising through this site. I have added spots for three 125 x 125 banner ads in the right sidebar and have also opened up a bit of space for some text ads. Though I’m somewhat leery of doing this, I explained last week that the time has come, I think, to attempt to monetize the blog just a little bit. I think it offers a good platform for a variety of advertisers and hope to provide advertisements that will serve the readers.

If you are interested in doing some online advertising through this site, I’d be glad to send you the appropriate information. Simply contact me and I’ll send you a rate sheet and other information.

This blog passes a milestone…

Today marks the fifth anniversary of the day I began this web site. In September of 2002, the first month this site was in operation—just a little blog dedicated to sharing pictures of my children with family members who had moved far away—it had two visitors, my mother and my wife. And I thought that was just fine. Just five years later, in September of 2007, the pictures of my family are long gone from the site and I expect nearly 200,000 people to take in at least one of its articles. And that’s fine too. I had no expectations for the site when I first registered the domain challies.com, but had I taken the time to dream a little I’m confident I could never have imagined so many people would make it a part of their lives. I find it profoundly humbling. I did not set out to create a blog that anyone beyond my family would care to read. Having said that, I am grateful that God has seen fit to so bless the site and I now seek to be a faithful steward of the responsibility with which He has entrusted me. It’s been quite the ride. And I suspect it’s only just begun.

When I look back to the history of my blog I can see that the site began to gain a bit of momentum and became much more valuable to me—much more of a pleasure to me—just at the time God graciously taught me that the site is not primarily a forum for me to voice my opinion, as if that is worth anything, but rather that it represents an opportunity to serve the church. It was then that I began to focus attention on directing people to resources beyond the site—to other blogs, to other ministries, and to books, resources and services that can benefit the church. It was then that I began to turn the focus from myself and turned it instead to the church. Long-time readers may note that it was about this time that I turned away from “watch-blogging” and moved instead towards what I hope is a more biblical form of discernment. It has been this desire, the desire to serve God by serving the church, that has led me to invest so much time and effort in this blog.

It’s that desire that keeps me going. And I do intend to keep going. I love blogging and intend to keep it up for the long haul. I love writing. These words, drawn from the Acknowledgments section of the book Women’s Ministry in the Local Church continue to inspire and motivate me. “Writing … is sweet fellowship with the Lord. He instructs me as I write. If no one ever reads it, His purpose has been accomplished in my own soul. I am satisfied. If He is pleased to use it in the lives of others, may He be glorified.”

At least one thing is going to change around here. As traffic to the blog has increased and as my responsibilities to it have grown accordingly (to say nothing of Discerning Reader!), I’ve become increasingly aware of my inability to provide the quality (and to some degree, the quantity) of content I would like to be able to create. At the same time I’ve begun to realize the potential difficulties I face in attempting to balance writing with providing an income to care for my family through my full-time occupation as a self-employed web designer. There are so many things I would like to be able to do, but so little time as I have to dedicate myself primarily to web design.

I feel that God has entrusted me with a unique ministry through my blog (and through Discerning Reader) but increasingly feel unable to give it my very best. There are hundreds of articles I would like to write for the blog and so many ways in which I'd like to support ministries and to support other bloggers, but time fails me to even attempt many of the things I'd so like to do. I receive many important and thoughtful emails, but am often unable to dedicate the time to crafting similarly thoughtful replies. As the release of my book draws near I am receiving increased invitations to speak, to participate in conferences and radio programs and to write for other publications.

So I’ve made the decision that I am going to begin running a few advertisements on the blog. I have been very hesitant to do so in the past, but can see that circumstances are now making it a near-necessity. So in the coming weeks you’ll start to see some ads show up. I hate to do this in some ways, but just feel the time has come. I hope you’ll keep an eye on the ads, clicking them and making this experiment a success!

It is my hope and prayer that this will allow me to dedicate more time and attention to writing content that will serve the church, thus serving the Lord of the church. I’m going to keep writing, praying that God will continue to work in me as I do so. And I hope that He grants grace that I can study His Word and share with you some of what He has been teaching me. So stick around; I think we’re only just getting warmed up around here.

As I wrap up for the day, I know I would be remiss to neglect thanking you, the reader of this site. Your prayers and support and gifts and encouragement have blessed me immeasurably over the years. I’m grateful to count many of you as friends and eagerly anticipate getting to know more of you as time goes on. You are a blessing to me.

SDG.

P.S.- Here’s a picture my friend Peter sent me this morning. He’s obviously getting an early start on celebrating the site’s birthday…

If you’re like me there are probably quite a few books that you wish you had read and yet, for some reason, you still haven’t. There are classics kicking around your desk that you’ve been meaning to pick up, but to this point you’ve never actually taken the time to read them. Or perhaps you’ve read bits and pieces but have never read the whole thing. Maybe it’s Holiness by J.C. Ryle or The Freedom of the Will by Jonathan Edwards or a portion of John Owens’ voluminous writings. Maybe it’s Calvin’s Institutes or Augustine’s Confessions. I’ve read some, but certainly not all, of the classics I’d like to read. Some of these are on my list!

So I’m wondering if there are some readers out there who would be interested in attacking a classic or two with me. I figure we can read a chapter per week (or a few pages per week depending on the book’s format) and have some discussion right here on this blog. I’ll post a topic and we can engage in some back and forth about what the chapter has covered. Don’t think you’ll be required to say anything or to say anything profound. If you want you can just remain a silent participant, reading the books but not talking about them. In either case you will at least benefit from the reading.

To be honest, I think this is the only way I’ll ever really discipline myself to read some of these books. Maybe this kind of structure can help you too. I’ll see if I can’t work out a discount with some online retailer so we can get the books at a good price if we don’t already own them.

So who’s with me? And if you are, what would you like to read?

I wrote about my site yesterday and I’m going to do so again today. Please forgive what must appear to be narcissism. I don’t plan on posting about it again for a while after today. But because I added several new features in yesterday’s redesign, I wanted to introduce them to you and show you how they can make your life easier and can make all of your wildest dreams come true. That may be overstating it. But there are some neat features that may help you use this site better and help you enjoy other blogs more as well.

I’ll start with the main page:

There are five things I’ve highlighted here:

1. I know you already know about A La Carte, but I’ve now made it better, I think, by making the titles more descriptive. If you are a blogger, you’ll appreciate the value of having descriptive hyperlinks to your site. You can comment on A La Carte entries and in the very near future I’ll create a proper archive of all of the previous entries.
2. I am going to tentatively add a little bit of advertising to the site. Just a little bit. What I’ve added here is just a link to a pay-per-click kind of program with Westminster Books. I don’t ever anticipate allowing the kind of overwhelmingly in-your-face advertising that a lot of blogs have! But this gives you a way you can support this site and support a good online retailer. And it’s as easy as a click.
3. The Subscribe/Bookmarks/Tools area will let you subscribe to the site via RSS or email, add the site as a favorite at Technorati or Del.icio.us. And, of course, it the font is too small you can adjust it there. If you have never used Technorati, you may enjoy visiting it and perhaps making it a regular stop.
4. The Recent Comments area will show you a list of the most recent comments, showing who made them and the topic of discussion.
5. Finally, the Active Discussion area (which was at the top of the page in the old design) will show you a list of topics that have seen recent discussion. This tells you which topics are generating the most discussion.

Now we’ll turn to the interior pages.

I’ve highlighted five things.

1. These links are a simple way of navigating from one post to the next or previous one. Pretty simple, I admit, but handy if you want to read a few pages or want to catch up with discussion on multiple articles.
2. One of the most interesting aspects of blogging is how one blog influences others and how bloggers interact with each other. This Technorati link is a simple way of seeing what other bloggers are saying about a particular story. If you are a blog reader, you can click this link to read other opinions on the article I’ve written. If you have a blog of your own and link to an article I’ve written, it should automagically appear here and allow people to navigate from my site to your own.
3. I’m a latecomer to the tagging game, but have finally added them. Tags allow a simple method of marking the content of a post for later reference and of building relationships between various posts. Clicking on a tag will take you to a search function that will find a list of similarly-tagged stories. Because I’ve only just begun tagging it will take a bit of time for the full power of this feature to become obvious.
4. The Related Entries area uses a database search to come up with stories that are somehow related to this one. It is a bit hit-and-miss at times, but typically does pretty well with coming up with related entries. So if the current article interests you, you can click on the tags or on the related entries to read more.
5. If you are a user of social media, you can now link any article to just about any social media platform. Alternatively, if you want to subscribe to the RSS or email feed, you can do so here.

And one bonus feature: the “Submit” button should now be disabled as soon as you post a comment, meaning that we’ll see fewer double posts. The server is still a bit slow but at least we should no longer have multitudes of repeated comments!

So there are ten features, some new and some merely redesigned, that I hope will make browsing this site more enjoyable. Tomorrow we’ll return to more normal programming.

The site gets its annual design update.

The upgrade went fairly well, as these things go. If you are still seeing the old site or are seeing a messy hybrid, trying hitting “Refresh” in your browser a couple of times. That should clear things up.

Whenever I change the look of the site I am always asked why (and tend to receive plenty of negative feedback as well!). There are a few reasons for this upgrade. As I explained a little while ago, there are three main ones: a) I am easily bored with my designs, b) the sites serves, in part, as a gateway to my web design company and it is important to keep it looking fresh or c) the nature of the site changes a bit over time and there is something I wish to emphasize that cannot easily be done with the current design. All of these reasons have come together this time. Especially, though, I’ve had to prepare for the lead-up to the book, knowing that I’ll need to make the book available through the site and begin to “promote” it in some way. I think the new design lends itself to that task a little better. I am also considering integrating my company site with the blog.

The new design offers some new features that were also integral to the decision to switch. For example, I’ve now added tags to posts and this should serve as a good way of tying posts together and of quickly categorizing them. I’ve also added more features for those of you who use various social media and who wish to interact with the content a little more. And I’ve transitioned to a better system of URLs (search engine friendly, for those who care). Finally, I’m preparing the site for the release of the new version of Movabletype, my blogging software, and think the new features and new design will work best with that new software.

Anyways, work continues. I’ll continue to find and weed out problems as they occur today. Please continue to be patient with me!

7:06 AM - Today is the day I’m going to be moving to a whole new design for this blog. So please bear with me as, for the next couple of hours at least, things could be a little flaky around here. Images may not work for a while, formatting will be strange, and so on. So hang tight and I’ll post when things are returning to normal.

Featuring…You?

Way back near the end of 2005 I began the feature I called “King for a Week,” where I highlight another person’s blog for a week or two (perhaps the name was not the best choice, but it’s too late to change it now). I’m glad I did this and, though I’ve pretty well exhausted my list of long-time regular reads, I plan to continue with it. But I realize that there are many readers who do not have blogs (or who have a life beyond their blogs) and I thought it would be fun to find a way of featuring some of your contributions to the kingdom. Thus I’m interested in connecting with people who are involved in some kind of creative endeavor—perhaps music, art, photography, short stories, poetry or the like. I think even of landscaping or fashion or any other pursuit that involves creating things for the glory of God. If you fit the bill (or know someone who does), why don’t you send me an email and we can talk about this feature. I’d love to have the opportunity to showcase your creations and the ways you serve the Lord with your talents.

A New Look

Every now and again, I guess it is about once per year on average, I update the look of this site. I do this for various reasons, but usually because a) I am easily bored with my designs, b) the sites serves, in part, as a gateway to my web design company and it is important to keep it looking fresh or c) the nature of the site changes a bit over time and there is something I wish to emphasize that cannot easily be done with the current design. I guess all of these reasons have come together this time. Especially, though, I’ve had to prepare for the lead-up to the book, knowing that I’ll need to make the book available through the site and begin to “promote” it in some way. I think the new design lends itself to that task a little better. I am also considering integrating my company site with the blog. Put all of that together, and it makes sense to move to a new design, I think.

I’ve been tossing around this new design for a while, bouncing it off Facebook friends and just about anyone else who cares to give it a look. On the whole it has been positively received and I hope to move to it about a week from now. Half of you will probably hate it (half always do when I change designs) but you’ll just have to trust it’s for a good cause! Even if you don’t like the look quite as much, I think you’ll agree that the functionality is improved.

Commenting

If you are one of the readers who comments on occasion you’ll know that the commenting system is running a bit slowly. As I’ve mentioned in the past, I think I may be maxing out the server the site is on, though I don’t really know how this could be. I can’t figure out why else things would be running slowly. A new version of Movabletype (my blogging software) is expected soon and I will upgrade and hope it helps solve the problems. If not I may consider changing hosts or potentially moving to Wordpress or something similar. Either way, I don’t like waiting 45 seconds for comments to appear any more than you do. And, while that is annoying, what is worse is when people figure nothing has happened and hit the button a couple more times! So I’ll see what I can do.

Less Fun

I think it is time to drop the “Putting the fun in fundamentalism” tag that has accompanied this site since its infancy. That tag actually followed me to the blog from an online community I used to be involved with. I took it on before I really understand the connotations of defining myself as a fundamentalist. It’s not that I’m scared or ashamed of the word, but I’m not sure that I want the book to be associated with it! So if you have alternate suggestions, feel free to send them along!

You may recall that last year I did several interviews and posted them to this site. I interviewed, among others, Sam Waldron, Wayne Grudem and Derek Webb. I would like to put together another series of interviews to be posted sometime this fall and winter. I am thinking of turning them into podcasts, posting audio of the interviews this year rather than transcribing them as I have done in the past. I’ll decide that later. In the meantime, I am interested in gathering suggestions for people I may like to interview. I am not likely to have access to many of the top-tier Christian personalities (this blog may be reasonably popular but it is still, after all, only a blog) but am certainly not afraid to seek out interviews with anyone. The worst they can say, after all, is “No!” I suppose they could laugh at me too, and that would hurt my feelings. But either way, I’m not afraid to do the legwork and to request interviews.

I do not think I’ll have a topical focus this year from interview to interview. Rather, I’ll approach each differently based on the person I am interviewing. I would prefer to interview people with interesting stories than people who are simply the most popular. So feel free to send along your suggestions, either in the comments or by email. They can be Calvinist or Arminian, Christian or non, male or female, theologians or musicians…