A Note to Our Readers:
JwJ 2004–2013

           This week brings two important milestones. First, Sunday marks the completion of nine years of Journey with Jesus. We launched our "weekly webzine for the global church" on June 23, 2004. Since then we've served over 3.6 million readers in 233 countries and territories — or, more accurately, since every once in a while I get this question, in 233 of the world's 252 "internet top-level domains."

           Thanks to our web master Ray Cowan, who in many ways makes JwJ possible. In his day job Ray is a particle physicist for MIT at Stanford. Whereas I write all of our content, except for an occasional guest review and the monthly music reviews by David Werther, Ray manages all things technical. If you have any experience at this, you know that's not an easy job. We post new material every Sunday night, and Ray hasn't missed a single one of those weekly rituals in 468 weeks. Thanks, Ray!

Jesus the Good Shepherd in the Catacomb of San Callisto.

           Thanks, too, to our JwJ board, which holds quarterly meetings. Our board remains a source of support, encouragement, wisdom, and provocation.

           And thanks to our donors. Your generosity has made JwJ all free, to all readers, all the time. We're also free of all advertisement.

           If you go to our drop down menu "About Us" and then click on "Who We Are," you'll discover JwJ's ministry vision. From our beginning nine years ago, we've been guided by six values.

           My weekly essays follow the Revised Common Lectionary, and so JwJ aims for biblical fidelity. The Bible is a mini-library of 66 books, written mainly in Hebrew and Greek by about 40 authors across more than a thousand years. It's long (my bible is 1,635 pages), has many plot twists, and is rooted in ancient cultural settings that are foreign to us today. Despite the complexities of the Bible as a human word about God, believers still listen to it for a divine word about humanity.

           We also aim for cultural relevance. The issues we face today are different than those two thousand years ago. We publish not only essays on the Bible, but also reviews of books, film, music, and poetry. If you go to our comprehensive index of 450 book reviews, for example, you'll find some religious titles, but also reviews from a dozen subject categories like art, science, history, and politics. At JwJ I hope the ancient biblical text and the contemporary cultural context collide in an unending conversation.

Women celebrate the eucharist.

           Real people have honest questions, and so at JwJ no query is off limits. Vibrant faith requires critical inquiry. Enthusiasm without enlightenment is always dangerous. Such critical inquiry fosters theological modesty. Elie Wiesel once observed that we discover God in the questions as well as in the answers, and Rilke famously encouraged his readers to "live the questions."

           Many JwJ readers are pastors who follow the Revised Common Lectionary and use us for sermon preparation. If you want to gain a new respect for your pastor, just try to write a sermon every week. So, we honor pastors at JwJ. And even though the church "swarms with many faults," as John Calvin once said, we affirm the role of the church in the life of faith.

           The church is the world's first and most globalized institution. I'm always amazed at JwJ's global reach, thanks to the distributive power of the internet. Every week readers from 100 nations visit our site. About 35% of our traffic is international. And so JwJ encourages a global vision. Since God's kingdom encompasses "every nation, tribe, people, and language" (Revelation 7:9), Christians ought to be geographic, cultural, national and ethnic egalitarians; for us there's no geographic center of the world, only a constellation of points equidistant from the heart of God.

           Finally, JwJ celebrates ecumenical generosity. The Spirit of God blows where he will. We typically think of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant believers, but Christian diversity bursts those simplistic boundaries. Philip Jenkins reminds us of our Syriac cousins in his book The Lost History of Christianity. And according to David B. Barrett's World Christian Encyclopedia, global Christianity has experienced an explosion of what he calls “neo-apostolic” movements. Distinct from traditional Protestants, and numbering about 400 million Christians in 20,000 “movements,” neo-apostolic believers will constitute 581 million members by the year 2025, 120 million more than all Protestant movements.

Woman at prayer.

           Then there's the second milestone for this week. June 30 marks the end of our budget year.

           If you'd like to support JwJ, here are three suggestions. First, share our site with your friends. Just use the "Email this Page" function. You can enter multiple email addresses with a single request. Second, I'll follow Paul's example in Ephesians 6:19: "Pray for me, that whenever I open my mouth, words may be given me so that I will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel."

           Finally, to support JwJ with a donation, click here. As a 501c3 tax exempt non-profit corporation, in the United States your gift is tax deductible.

           And so with your support and encouragement, we begin year ten. ---dan