Welcome to Our House

How do we establish our blogs as a particular kind of place?

This is one question we've been thinking about in a big way over at HighCallingBlogs.

In the background, we spend time thinking abstractly:

- we want to be a place of grace
- we want to be a thoughtful community
- we want to be real
- we want to be a place that feels safe yet nurtures growth and change

Are you asleep yet?

For us at HCB, these are important pieces of our vision, but like Heath & Heath note, abstractions don't go very far towards inspiring people to understanding or participation. What we need is concreteness. A vision of the place you can see, maybe even smell and feel in your head.

I think this is why we at HCB have instinctively migrated to "house talk." Stop in to any given conversation and you'll see us inviting people to a table, replete with apple pie, fried chicken, or a Lenten Satchel. We talk about pulling up a chair, pouring a drink, looking at photo albums. Sometimes we even talk about mowing the lawn.

There is no rule about this. Nobody has said we have to use "house language." But we want to make HCB a place you could call your home on the Internet. So I suspect we'll keep talking about sweet tea right along with theology. And the heaven (or hell, as the case may be) of the humble Texan chili pepper.

If you haven't come to our house yet (or even if you have), we'd love to have you for a visit. The door's open. Music is on. And there's a batch of biscuits in the oven.

Shoes at the Inn photo, by L.L. Barkat.

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Over at HighCallingBlogs we're reading and discussing Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. Want to join us? :)