Top 5 Free Range Priest articles from 2024
Church stats, marriage advice, and and C.S. Lewis
I moved my ‘Free Range Priest’ blog to Substack in May. Since then I have tripled my readership and gained 5x the paid subscribers. But the very best thing about the change has been finding the community.
Just being part of Substack has made me feel more optimistic about the future of church.
My purpose for writing - and for my whole ministry! - is re-imagining church in the digital age. I’ve been blown away by how many people are doing exactly that here - and how many are doing other work that continues to inspire and challenge me to do mine better.
I’ve posted 73 times in the past 7 months! (some were re-posts from my old blog). Yesterday I looked at my statistics to see which ones were most read, and got a few surprises…
Church Stats and a River in Egypt
My readership is not large - though I’m grateful for and blessed by each one of you. 300-400 views of one of my posts just thrills me.
So when I saw that I had 1.08k views of this post, I was happily shocked!
I would call this my greatest writing success of the year, and not just in terms of numbers.
This is the core of my ministry: we no longer have a choice about being church in new ways. But we do have opportunities.
I think people are hearing it. It’s exciting.
25 things I’ve learned from wearing a clergy collar
In 2025, I will celebrate a quarter of a century of being a priest. I was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church in June 1999, so I first started wearing a collar then.
I could never have even imagined the wild ride it’s been.
photo credit: Franklin Golden 10 (counter-intuitive) things I’ve learned in 10 years of (a really good!) marriage
Being married to the love of my life is the most amazing miracle I’ve ever been part of. It has everything to do with my faith. So I took a little detour from writing about communities of faith to writing about a smaller community of love.
photo credit: K. Mitch Hodge
It’s always been a pet peeve of mine that the internet thinks C.S. Lewis said a lot of things he never did. I even corrected someone in my doctor’s office about this! (I’m the worst patient ever…)
Little did I know that whole books, blogs, and articles are devoted to this very thing.
‘Why don’t we just do ‘house church’’?
Every time - every time - I talk with clergy or congregations about what they would do if they could start church from scratch, this is what they say.
This is not about church buildings (or not just about that).
It’s about the longing for less of the ‘stuff’ of church, and more of the ‘good stuff’’.
I’m so grateful for all of you who read and engage with my writing and my ministry. And I’m so grateful to all of the writers I’ve met via Substack, and how you’ve inspired and enriched my writing.
Blessings on a new year of sharing what’s good in the world.