What a Harper Collins Producer Told Me About Online Ministry

make it your ambition to lead a quiet life

It was 2021. Every Woman a Theologian was turned in to the team at Harper Collins (W Publishing) and we were in the throes of writing the companion workbook for video recording that summer. The plan: record all eight sessions right here, at the farmhouse, within a week.

And that’s exactly what we did. The videos for Every Woman a Theologian are all recorded in my dining room (albeit with the chandelier removed). The kitchen was rearranged into a set and hasn’t looked that good since. Josh kept the children — then aged six, four, and one — as busy as he could while we recorded the sessions at the house and B-roll elsewhere in the Petoskey area.

The Harper team was wonderful to work with and I felt incredibly honored to create videos with them. The team worked with speakers and writers like Ann Voskamp, Lee Strobel, Sheila Walsh, Lisa Harper, and so many more. I was only thirty-one years old at the time, a puppy in the ministry world, and I felt very out of my depth working with such a professional team. I had so much to learn.

Over dinner one night, the summer sun gleaming in yellow rectangles across the outdoor dining table, I asked one of the producers: “What is the best advice you’d give someone in ministry, with everything you’ve seen?”

I don’t remember his exact words but I do remember his exact sentiments: “Never become so immersed in church-world you’re no longer living a real life.” He went on to describe what he meant: A ministry lived in conferences and echo chambers, a life lived from church to church, never in the world, never with difficult neighbors, whose only human experiences occurred in airport waiting areas.

In short: Stay rooted in a real life, and your ministry will always be relevant.

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I’m thinking about his advice this week. I’m about to start another filming, this time with Lifeway Women. We’re recording my new Bible study, Every Good Gift — a study on spiritual gifts. The circumstances leading up to this week have not been easy. My children were violently sick for a week; I was sick for a week; we navigated several painful conflicts; we had an increased parenting load; our neighbors’ bulls got into our yard and nearly trampled Josh — and that’s just the highlight reel!

This morning I was working line by line through the teaching outlines for the first four study sessions, all of which will be filmed tomorrow. Josh had several pressing engagements and had to leave the house. And — as my regular readers know — we share childcare duties (aka: we don’t have a nanny or babysitter outside of date nights and very occasional mornings). I worked while the baby napped and the older children went to the woods to set up a fairy camp. But it wasn’t long until Baby was awake and I was making bottles, collecting laundry, hanging the laundry out, shooing goats away from the bird feeders, sweeping the kitchen and all the normal life things that make up my days. The older kids arrived back as I was hanging the laundry and left backpacks, beach towels, and wizard staffs all over the lawn.¹

The spiritual gift outlines sat on the table, interrupted. And the gifts I used this morning didn’t seem very spiritual. How spiritual is hanging underwear on a clothesline, really?

Line by line, I write the things I hope will bless and empower the women of God to do His work around the world.

Line by line, I hang wet onesies and khaki pants in the sun, a work that doesn’t seem very impactful and won’t be heard around the world.

Line by line, the words I write preach back to me: spiritual gifts don’t exist for our glory or exaltation; they exist for the building up of the whole Church. They exist to show the world one part of Christ’s body so they may come to know the goodness of the whole Body working together.

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In the olden days of platform-ministry, the danger was a literal, physical platform. It was spending years of weekends at a conferences and women’s events, never known by the people on your street. These days the danger is an invisible one. An online ministry lived in Instagram and echo chambers, a life lived from post to post, reel to reel, never with difficult neighbors, whose only human experience occurs in the Starbucks drive-through line.

We desperately try to be relevant, to speak to the current issues and current generation, but the best way to stay relevant is to live rooted in a real life. One way to know you’re on the verge of danger? You cannot leave the online world. You are addicted to people’s view of you: their likes, comments, DMs, even their missing of you online, but you don’t know or care who misses you in real life.

You track who “shows up” for you, who reshares your stuff (or doesn’t), and can’t go a day without checking the latest news — social or global. The normal life stuff doesn’t matter unless it’s posted.

This is a life lived on a platform. It has a “real life” marked by performance. But it is not marked by presence.

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I print out the teaching outlines and begin marking them with a purple pen. I “lost”several hours of writing time taking care of my children and tending the house. There was nothing I could do about it, but perhaps it’s better that way. When I talk about the gift of teaching, I can honestly say: the Holy Spirit has to come through! When I talk to about the gift of service, I can say: it’s unseen work by everyone but God.

And when I speak to the gift of wisdom, I’ll think of the Harper Collins producer who set thirty-one year old me on a better path of ministry, because he encouraged me to house my work in a quiet life with busy hands (1 Thess. 4:11-12).

“…make it your ambition to lead a quiet life: You should mind your own business and work with your hands, just as we told you, so that your daily life may win the respect of outsiders and so that you will not be dependent on anybody.”

1. Evidence of creativity, I tell myself.