Seven Years and Counting
SharperIron launched in January of 2005 and is now seven years old.
For me, the experience has been broadly—and sometimes intensely—educational. In the early years, that experience involved writing monthly, reading weekly and dropping into the forums once in a while. In the spring of ‘08 my involvement increased steeply. SI quickly became a technical, financial, and interpersonal challenge. Though I’ve often felt a bit out of my league, the challenges have never failed to be interesting. They have also rarely failed to teach me things. I’m grateful for that.
The site has been on a journey from day one. The question I ponder fairly often lately is, where has it been headed and where is it headed now? If I can borrow a phrase from a real leader (George H. W. Bush), “the vision thing” often eludes me.
As with any new thing, a website only gets to make the Really Big Splash—the everybody quickly discovering it splash—once (if at all). And SI did have quite a splash in ‘05 and ‘06. We’re well past those days now and have to think more in terms of what long term contribution we can make to conservative Christianity in general and fundamentalism in particular.
Your thoughts on what that contribution should be are most welcome.
In its unique and relatively small way, the site can encourage (and has encouraged) accessible, thoughtful writing and discussion—as a means of believers sharpening one another. Beyond that, it isn’t clear to me what a website like this one can do. But I remain open to discovering more.
Something we need
Speaking of accessible, thoughtful writing, consider this an open casting call for writers. Though we continue to find some pretty good stuff in the work of various bloggers as well as some print publications (such as Baptist Bulletin and Voice), SI could use more work that is exclusive and arrives at regular intervals.
So if you’re tired of blogging on your own but would like an outlet once a month or once a quarter, send us a sample of your writing. The best stuff is concise, passionate, timely and accessible (no advanced theological education required)—yet pushes readers a bit into areas of study that are unfamiliar or only marginally familiar.
But we’re not solely interested in “issues” and cerebral content. Reflection on how truth applies personally—in experience—is no less important than thinking about assertions, arguments, and evidence. I happen to think the latter is undervalued in our age—and in fundamentalism in particular—but in our efforts to correct that imbalance, we shouldn’t create another by neglecting “the thinking of the heart.”
It’s all thinking, and, to me, that’s what SharperIron is about.
If you’ve never been interested in blogging but would like to get your writing in front of the Internet readership a bit, SI may be a good opportunity for you as well. We’ve never entirely fit the blog mold.
Some coming changes
Aside from cosmetic changes, the Forums at SharperIron have remained essentially unchanged for seven years. That’s something like half a century in Web years. The team reached a consensus some time ago that a forum relaunch would be a good idea.
Accordingly, look for that to happen sometime in June. The plan so far involves shutting the forums down for a while (not more than a couple weeks probably) to redesign and reopen—hopefully with a little fanfare (needed: experts in “the fanfare thing”).
Redesign ideas include shrinking the number of categories, introducing some new ones, giving users more ability to tag and interrelate threads, giving the forums more front page visibility and perhaps interfacing better with Facebook and Twitter—and of course, a visual update (including more industry-standard post-formatting tools; think WYSIWYG).
Your ideas on these improvements and other ways to improve the forum experience are most welcome.
In the months leading up to the Forum relaunch, expect to see some design updates to other parts of the site.
Identity questions
Along the way, critics have accused SI of having an anti-fundamentalist bias, of being a secretly neo-evangelical organization, etc. The criticism resembles truth in one respect: we’ve always had readers and forum participants who were not what some fundamentalists would include in their definition of “fundamentalist.”
And we’ve always been interested in helping fundamentalism by challenging it, rather than simply lauding it. (Certainly fundamentalists should understand the value of challenging people—it’s just that, as a movement at least, we’ve preferred to major on challenging those outside rather than those inside. But those days are pretty much over.)
One conversation the Team has had more than once concerns whether we should re-characterize the site from being “for” fundamentalists to being “hosted by fundamentalists.” It’s evident that this shift would involve some trade-offs. On the positive side, the change would free us from the perception that we need to define in some way who is a fundamentalist and who is not when we decide who may participate in discussions.
Also on the positive side, there can be little doubt that the segment of Christianity willing to openly style itself “fundamentalist” is shrinking. So, de-emphasizing the fundamentalist identity of those who participate in discussions has the potential to open us up to a larger field of potential joiners.
And “hosted by fundamentalists” rather than “existing for fundamentalists” has the additional advantage of more accurately describing how many of us see the status quo—that is, to a lot of us, the site has had not-quite-fundamentalists participating in various ways from day one.
The decision hasn’t been made yet (and really involves a pretty minor tweak to how we “brand” the site in any case). So consider this a not very subtle trial balloon. In any case, those who run the site are, and fully intend to remain, fundamentalists (in the strictly-peaceful, not hurt anybody or blow anything up sense!).
To sum up, from my point of view, it’s been a pretty interesting and fun seven years and I look forward to days as good—or better—ahead. Thanks to all of you who have been readers, writers, commenters, moderators, editors, and admins since ‘05. Thanks to the high-energy, entrepreneurial guys who got the site started. Thanks even to detractors who have prompted many team conversations that would have otherwise been pretty dull (though dull is really nice sometimes).
Most of all, thanks to God for putting us in such an interesting world, giving us minds, and encouraging us to imitate Him—in our small, weak ways—by thinking, creating, interacting, and persuading.
Aaron Blumer Bio
Aaron Blumer, SharperIron’s second publisher, is a Michigan native and graduate of Bob Jones University (Greenville, SC) and Central Baptist Theological Seminary (Plymouth, MN). He and his family live in a small town in western Wisconsin, not far from where he pastored Grace Baptist Church for thirteen years. He is employed in customer service for UnitedHealth Group and teaches high school rhetoric (and sometimes logic and government) at Baldwin Christian School.
[Shaynus] So the casting call for writers has come out. I foggily (is that a word?) remember that word documents need to be sent and formatted a certain way, ect. Does anyone have and SI writing template I could download?Shaynus-
I’m fairly sure that if you put it into a plain text or Word doc (no special features other than the standard bold, italics, and underline), our guy will take care of the rest. You can get more details at: http://sharperiron.org/writing-for-sharperiron
"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells
In many Christian sects or denominations where material is used from outside sources, those hosting such use of this material will make sure to include where such Teachers depart from their sectarian values while still using its benefits to insure a protection of the students in the care, even in very loose forums or discussions. It is worth considering, in my view. It would serve to strengthen SI’s profile while enlarging their ability to use other materials.
This one’s too long, too, but it’ll have to do.
I don’t think we’re likely to post articles that are “outside the boundaries of fundamentalism” or with content that “crosses fundamentalist boundaries.”
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by the question.
I guess two scenarios that might be close come to mind:
1- articles that are about the boundaries of fundamentalism. Since there is a lot of disagreement on that topic, it’s likely that writing of that sort will put one boundary or another someplace that not all agree is the proper place (understatement!).
2- articles by people that not everybody would agree are fundamentalists.
I’m certainly comfortable communicating—if it needs saying—that not everybody who’s material we post would be considered a fundamentalist by everybody and that not every idea would be considered a fundamentalist idea by everybody. But isn’t that pretty obvious? I mean, to some, you’re not a fundamentalist if you ever say “Billy Graham” without also saying “the rotten compromiser,” or if you think the Sovereign Grace people have a few good songs.
So if we started rating the fundamentalist authenticity of every idea or writer, wouldn’t we be trying to prescribe for everybody what real fundamentalism is or isn’t? We exist to debate those sorts of things, not to prescribe them.
That said, we do claim by our doctrinal statement that fundamentalism is not less than certain things. It’s the “how much more than that is it?” part that is debated, and we wouldn’t want to stifle that discussion (or just make a lot of unnecessary work for ourselves by weighing in on it every time).
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
I don’t think we’re likely to post articles that are “outside the boundaries of fundamentalism” or with content that “crosses fundamentalist boundaries.”So, may I understand that when you published Steve Davis’ articles both disagreeing with historical fundamentalism’s acceptance and teaching of cessationism and asserting a form of non-cessationism you, or at least SI collectively, believes it is an unsettled boundary within fundamentalism?
I’m not entirely sure what you mean by the question.
Of course Steve is not what I had in view, it was a general question but since you pressed for what I believe some might consider an example, here is one that immediately comes to mind.
But what I had in view, more extensively, was those things SI might normally link to which are not published by SI, which might contain a substantial worthwhile treatment of a doctrine minus a point or two which needs editorial clarification or qualification. In that way you can model for other believers how to use other sources with discernment. It is just an idea for what might be more broad SI published articles while integrally preserving their own boundaries.
As far as our boundaries go, we did publish some time ago a number of http://sharperiron.org/leadership-doctrinal-distinctives] doctrinal distinctives that the mods and admins hold to , which includes young earth 6x24 creation.
About Filings.. they’ve continued to be confusing to people. Still don’t really understand why. But, in any case, there is already a disclaimer in the Filings header. I don’t see much value in trying to weigh in on every Filings post and tell the world what we think of it. We already do that fairly often in the comments section… which is what the comments section is for.
Occasionally, we do editorialize a little in the Filings, but I think it would be impractical to create that expectation. Usually, when we’re posting Filings, we’re noting something interesting and potentially important that just hit the news. There’s no way the team is going to discuss each of these and arrive at a unified voice on what we think of each of these items so that we can post them with an official SI position. A good bit of the time, there would be no consensus on the team.
Again, SI has not bean—and isn’t going to be—yet another fundamentalist entity that is making a (implicit) claim to speaking with authority on issues. This is place to think about questions, not decree answers.
As for short disclaimers about evangelical leaders to say “SI does not support all of the ideas and practices of so and so” and the like… That’s so tedious and should go without saying by now. Maybe we’ll add a blanket Mother of All Disclaimers in the About pages somewhere: “SI does not support all of the ideas and practices of anybody. No exceptions.”
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
"Our task today is to tell people — who no longer know what sin is...no longer see themselves as sinners, and no longer have room for these categories — that Christ died for sins of which they do not think they’re guilty." - David Wells
Thanks, I am indeed well aware of that. My comments, though, were not with that interest in mind. But thank you for the reminder, I am sure for everyone who might not be aware of that.
[Aaron Blumer] The discussion on the article you mentioned showed that not all fundamentalists see 6x24 as a boundary of fundamentalism. Who’s right or wrong about that… SI’s purpose is to have interesting conversations about matters like these, not to try to exercise an authoritative voice on them.Thanks Aaron, so before I conclude, I do want to be clear in understanding that from your post the take away (not the only take away of course) with respect to the issue of cessationaism vs non-cessationism, you, or SI more specifically, does not consider this a settled issue in fundamentalism resulting in it being part of a clear identifying feature of a fundamentalist, though you or SI or other fundamentalist might have their own settled position?
The fact that articles or discussions about boundary questions occur on SI should not be taken to mean that SI considers the matters being debated to be non-essential to the identity of fundamentalism.
I’m sure I can say that more concisely but time presses. Class in like 15 seconds.
The boundaries not open for discussion would be pretty much those in the doctrinal statement…. though there might even be ways talk about (and invariably debate) how they function as boundaries and what they mean, etc.
I mean, if even one person and only one questions whether idea x is really an essential for fundamentalist identity, there could be good reasons to have a conversation about it. The conversation doesn’t mean that the point is really a non-essential.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
As a charismatic fundamentalist I sometimes feel I am amongst other fish who do not find my presence in their tank totally comfortable
but I have nevertheless been well blessed by the spiritual food on which I been fed. What I can’t digest, I leave but have not been left malnourished.
Richard Pajak
I’m kidding. I’m sure you do find yourself in a small minority in discussions here, but I’m glad to hear you’ve found the experience helpful (and apparently not too brutal).
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.
Discussion