The Most Important Invitation I'll Send This Year
Join my Member community at a once only annual discount. Get candid podcasts, monthly Zooms, and connections with the readers who make this work possible.
What if your support could help a young man discover his calling? Buy buildings that transform a downtown? Reshape how millions understand their faith?
This past March I received a 4,000-word profile in the New York Times. It is extremely rare to get this kind of press, so I was very pleased it happened.
But my work is about much more than just building up my own brand. It’s about making a real, positive impact in the world.
My three worlds of evangelicalism model has become the lens through which American evangelicals understand our current cultural moment. NYT reporter Ruth Graham told me that my name comes up more than any other thinker when she talks to evangelicals.
But it’s about more than just this one piece.
A Christian business leader read my writings about “owned space” and decided to buy up several buildings in the downtown of his community. He’s now renovating them and putting very interesting, high quality businesses in them. This is both ensuring long-term friendly ownership of space in the culture center of his town and bringing real, tangible civic improvements that benefit the whole community.
A young man wrote to me in late August telling me that he read my essay on what ladders we choose to climb while he was going to meet with the admissions office at his state’s main university. He’d originally planned to go to State U, but decided to apply to Yale, was admitted, and is now a freshman there this fall.
The Ivy League is far from perfect, and nobody needs to go to Yale. I went to State U myself. But my work opened this young man’s eyes to possibilities he’d never considered, and it gave him insight that allowed him to make the choice he thought was right for him from a broader set of options than he’d been thinking about.
These are the sorts of things I strive to do. And I’m not done yet. I have a major essay coming out soon in First Things on the lack of evangelical elites in our society, and what to do about that.
You make this work and these things possible. The bulk of my funding comes from you - my readers. I’m not backed by a big institution. I’m dependent on readers like you to make this possible.
Every year at Christmas time I make my Member program, my highest tier of support, available at a big discount of 30-40% off. This year please consider becoming a Member.
My Member community is the most important group of supporters I have. I’d be honored to have you among them.
Members get every benefit of being a paid Subscriber on Substack, plus:
A monthly Member-only solo podcast from me.
A monthly Member-only interactive Zoom session on hot topics like the Charlie Kirk assassination and lessons from the LDS (Mormon) church.
A private Member-only Slack channel for the community.
A quarterly “state of the mission” update with key metrics and insights about what I’m up to and how things are going.
In my Member content, I’m able to be a lot more candid than I am in my public facing work. I’m able to “name names” in ways I don’t typically like to do. For example, I have candid podcasts on the state of the Presbyterian Church in America and a friendly but critical analysis of John Piper’s famous “seashells” sermon.
I also give an early look into what I’m working on next, and sometimes give Members the chance to provide feedback and input into that.
And of course there’s the opportunity for community with other Members. A pastor in my Member group just posted a picture in our Slack group of him with another Member who had just come to visit his church.
In short, there’s a lot of real value in this. It’s not only about supporting me or simply getting more of the same material I already produce, but about a different class of content.
If you’re already a paid subscriber, becoming a Member means going deeper into the work that’s already valuable to you - with more candid analysis, earlier access to my thinking, and connection with other serious readers.
Through December 12 only, you can become a Member for just $360/year - 40% off the regular monthly rate.
If you’d rather pay monthly, you can do so on Patreon for $35/month - 30% off the regular monthly rate of $50.
Sign up today because you don’t want to miss this limited time only discount. If you don’t sign up now, you’ll miss a year of insightful conversations and connections.
Join us today and be part of shaping this mission. Because my work is making an important impact in the world - and I need your help to keep doing that.
Your support isn’t just helping me. It’s helping change the world and people’s lives for the better - like that town that is being transformed and that young man at Yale.
Or join monthly, on Patreon for $35/month - 30% off the regular monthly rate of $50.