[Dialogue] 12/09/10, Spong: Birth, Maturity, Transition

[elliestock at aol.com]

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Dear Reader,
Starting in January 2011, this newsletter will be managed and distributed by a new publisher, The Center for Progressive Christianity. You should not see any changes in the newsletter's appearance or experience any interruption in service. If you have questions, please email support at johnshelbyspong.com or you can contact the new publisher directly at deshna at tcpc.org. 
A Note From Mike Keriakos and Ben Wolin, Founders of Everyday Health, Inc.
We're very grateful that Bishop Spong entrusted his long reputation to a couple of guys in a kitchen in Brooklyn. We're thrilled by what we achieved together, and saddened that our business took us squarely into the health category, and away from publishing Bishop Spong's important message. We wish him and his new publisher the best of luck in continuing this worthwhile pursuit. 
Sincerely,
Mike and Ben





Thursday December 09, 2010 

Birth, Maturity, Transition

The story began in 2001 when Mark Tauber, now my publisher at Harper Collins, but then with BeliefNet.com, came to our home in New Jersey to see if I would be interested in being the author of a subscription column that would be marketed by a new company that he and two other friends were planning to form. I had previously been a columnist for BeliefNet, but despite my column's success, it ended when BeliefNet went into bankruptcy.
The original premise of this company was that people who shared a common interest would like to hear on a regular basis from one who was regarded as knowledgeable in that field, thus providing regular, informed opinion to a larger audience, than could be done by newspapers with an occasional op-ed piece. Mark was particularly interested in learning whether there was a sufficient audience, via the Internet, that would be interested in a serious, theologically-oriented column. That was the moment when the seed that would grow into this column was originally planted. When that evening ended our agreement was that we would think about it.
Later, Mark brought his two partners, Ben Wolin and Mike Keriakos, for dinner at a local restaurant for extensive conversation designed to put flesh on this proposal. That evening, the decision was made that their new company, then called Agora Media, would be formed and their first "product" would be my weekly column to be entitled "A New Christianity For a New World." We hoped that this title would convey both a serious and an intellectual approach to theological issues and current events. The column was to consist of a 1,500-word weekly essay that would examine theological and biblical issues, as well as offering a theological perspective on political issues, economic issues and the news of the day. Each week the column would also include a question and answer feature that would allow dialogue with my readers on the subject matter of the columns or whatever else might be on my readers'; minds. The questions would come from those who subscribed to this column, but in time this was expanded to include the people, who attended lectures that I delivered both across the nation and around the world.
When the column was actually launched a few weeks later, my first discovery was that producing a weekly essay of 1,500 words was hard work. I struggled through a very slow beginning in which I felt that the work involved and the time required was simply not justified on the basis of the very few original subscribers. I do not know how many people can actually imagine what goes into writing a weekly column. First, the idea or topic is settled on, and then the necessary research is done. This is followed by a first draft that goes to my typist, the ever faithful Rosemary Halsted. On that newly-typed piece, I do the first editorial run through and make necessary changes. Next, I turn it over to my professional editor, who happens to be my wife, and she makes sure that all the sentences are good, the punctuation correct, the facts confirmed to be accurate and every idea in the essay is clear. She then returns the column to me for acceptance of her suggested changes, which normally include her recommendations as to which lines need to be rewritten. When her changes are incorporated, the column is sent to AgoraMedia for distribution to our subscribers. Each column requires about twenty working hours, fifteen of which, at a minimum, are my share. I really do not understand how David Brooks and Maureen Dowd put out two columns each week for the New York Times!
The subscriber base was very small at first. I remember when we passed the 100 subscriber mark. By the end of the first year, however, we had passed 1,000 and by the end of three years, we had passed 5,000 and the column was established. It has continued to grow since. We discovered quickly that our subscribers were passing these columns on with great regularity. Almost every column revealed a 200&37; and some got as high as a 500&37; pass on rate, which means that if 5,000 people received the original, 25,000 people actually received the column. We had one Australian lady, who had her own subscription list, forwarding it each week to hundreds.
Questions elicited by the column began to flow in from my readers until I had literally thousands of responses. We had clearly touched a groundswell of interest. The question and answer part of our format went through a similar production process as the columns with two notable exceptions. First, I did not originate the ideas, they came from the questioners themselves, and second, Agora Media decided to build a data base of responders to whom the question and answer part of each week's offering would be sent free of charge to anyone who expressed interest. In dialogue with HarperCollins an arrangement was made to offer a four week free subscription to my column to those who purchased one of my books as a promotion idea. At the end of this free subscription period they would either become regular subscribers or be added to the question and answer part of the column free of charge for as long as they wished. Later this same offer was extended to those attending my lectur es anywhere in the world.
The number of subscribers thus began to rise markedly and those receiving the free Q and A feature rose even more rapidly. Soon we had an extended community that reached as high as 100,000. This column and its ancillary activities had become the most popular and longest running piece of religious journalism on the Internet.
Meanwhile Agora Media was going through its own growth phase. From its humble origins as a website dedicated to building special interest audiences, it began to migrate more and more toward diet and health issues. Its most popular product during this first fast growth phase was the South Beach Diet website and email newsletter, which offered customized meal plans, recipes and health advice. At this time the company changed its name to Waterfront Media and it began to be noticed as a vital new force in interest marketing. Then with a series of shifts toward total health and health care and a merger with another health-oriented website, they exploded and today rank as the largest on line health destination on the web, averaging 25 million visitors every month. Suddenly drug makers and other health industries began to advertise extensively on this site. The Wall Street Journal wrote about them quite favorably. In 2007 once again they changed their name, this time to Ev eryday Health in order to reflect more accurately their primary focus. So this company that started in a Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, New York, kitchen with three employees and a few columnists has now grown into a major company employing 350 and occupying a large Manhattan office. Last year they became a hundred million dollar business.
My column was the last vestige of their early beginnings and, while successful, was on a clearly more humble level. Yet this column has also had its adventures. Many columns have been reproduced in the secular and religious media. They have been run as op-ed pieces in a variety of newspapers. Permission to reproduce them in other journals or blogs has always been granted to anyone who requested it. The only requirement was that they acknowledge the source and direct their readers to the website. The column has been attacked by fundamentalists of both a Catholic and Protestant variety. It has been referred to and distributed in schools of higher learning. A 2009 column entitled "My Manifesto" on the homosexual debate went viral and was reproduced over a million times in publications all over the world. That column was published on Thursday at 2:00 a.m. EST and I had a response from Phnom Penh in Cambodia by 10:00 a.m. By the end of the week I had received almost 10, 000 responses. Everyday Health created a website where people could sign onto the Manifesto. Thousands did. I have done a series of columns on such topics as the origins of each of the books of the Bible, an analysis of the Five Fundamentals published in a series of pamphlets, written between 1910-1915, which put the word "Fundamentalism" into our vocabulary. I have marked the deaths and the contributions of people like William Sloan Coffin, Michael Douglas Goulder, John Hines, John Paul II and Jerry Falwell. In the nine years of this column's life, I have built a library of about 500 columns.
It became obvious two years ago that my column no longer fitted into the Everyday Health network of websites, but neither they nor I wanted to end what had been such a successful venture until we could locate this column under the auspices of another site. The people at Everyday Health worked with me to locate and train their successor to my column. On January 1 that transition will occur. I doubt if my regular subscribers will notice the difference. My new publisher will be The Center for Progressive Christianity, located in the Seattle, Washington, area. The list of subscribers and those receiving the Q and As will be managed intact with the same promises that these lists will never be shared with anyone for any purpose. The billing and credit card numbers will be handled by a publicly listed major corporation, again with the same security and integrity as before. The one difference will be that TCPC is a non-profit organization so that all profits, after expenses, will go to this organization. It is an organization that I actually helped to start a number of years ago and to which I continue to contribute annually. It shares very deeply the same goals that I have sought to develop in my column.
So with great thanks to the founders of Everyday Health and to those individuals with whom I have worked so closely over the years in the production of the column, I bid them farewell and I welcome as my new publisher, Fred Plumer, the head of TCPC, with whom I have agreed to continue to write this column for at least three more years. To my readers, I look forward to continuing to come into your homes once a week as we explore in ever new ways "A New Christianity For a New World." 

– John Shelby Spong
 




Question and Answer 
With John Shelby Spong


Marge Young via the internet writes: 
My husband and I have read Sins of the Scripture and I was so impressed by its message that I called the leader of the Focus Study (Presbyterian Church) group that we attend and suggested that we study it. We had our first meeting last night on Chapter One. Our next assignment is to read through Section 2. More fun to read further. In re–reading Chapter Two, I wonder what seminaries are discussing today as they teach future pastors. Are they considering the science of the 21st century? The points you have made so clearly — and points that many ordinary people in Bible classes have questioned — and yet our clergy does not seem to recognize. In my paperback edition, pp 25-26, I am happy to read your goal. Where do you see the progress getting to the churches? Do Catholics see this at all?
Marge Young via the internet writes: 
My husband and I have read Sins of the Scripture and I was so impressed by its message that I called the leader of the Focus Study (Presbyterian Church) group that we attend and suggested that we study it. We had our first meeting last night on Chapter One. Our next assignment is to read through Section 2. More fun to read further. In re–reading Chapter Two, I wonder what seminaries are discussing today as they teach future pastors. Are they considering the science of the 21st century? The points you have made so clearly — and points that many ordinary people in Bible classes have questioned — and yet our clergy does not seem to recognize. In my paperback edition, pp 25-26, I am happy to read your goal. Where do you see the progress getting to the churches? Do Catholics see this at all?



Dear Marge, 
Thank you for your letter and kind comments. I do not know how to respond to your question about what seminaries are teaching. The reason for that is that seminaries (or theological colleges as they are called in some parts of the world) are like the church itself, they are all over the place. No one tradition has a monopoly on insight or on retrogressive thinking. The seminaries that do the best are, in my opinion, those connected with no denomination, Catholic or Protestant. I think of places like Union Seminary in New York, Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the University of Chicago's Divinity School. Each of these institutions is engaged with the wider academic world whose campus they share (Union relates to Columbia University in New York City) and they cannot thus be isolated in their intramural religious concerns. 
The next groups that I also think do well are those involved in religious consortiums that allow cross enrollment and normally have a single library. Illustrations of this would be theological consortiums in Boston, Washington, Berkeley, California and in Vancouver, in British Columbia. 
When you come to the isolated denominational schools, you always have theological pressure toward forcing conformity from the denomination's hierarchy that tends to militate against their professors being either adventuresome or scholarly. Of course they are also able to find professors who feel at home inside those imposed comfort levels. Yet within this category, there are still some exceptionally good places. I have had the pleasure of lecturing in such seminaries as Iliff in Denver, Duke Divinity School in Durham, United Theological Seminary in Minneapolis and Drew Theological Seminary in Madison, New Jersey. I found all of them to be exciting places, with the Methodist seminaries at Duke and Drew being deeply integrated in the life of the two universities whose campuses they share. In fact, at Drew University it is actually the university that shares the Divinity School's campus. Of the denominational schools, The Pacific School of Religion (UCC Berkeley) is th e most overt about its willingness to engage real life and real scholarship. 
Some seminaries in all denominations are far more places of propaganda than they are places of learning. By this I mean that they tend to engage issues or to pursue knowledge only to the degree that it does not threaten or challenge official Christian teaching. These will range from traditional training centers to fundamentalist campuses about which little can be done except to ignore them. 
There is one final roadblock to truth and that is some pastors, trained at good seminaries, refuse to share their critical knowledge with the people who occupy the pews for fear of "upsetting the faithful." I have long believed that it is those pastors themselves who are the ones who are most upset by new truth. 
Thanks for writing. 

– John Shelby Spong






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