Video Transcript: Introduction
Welcome to Writing for Ministry, a course on how to be the best writer you can be wherever you are in ministry. I'm Adam Navis, and I'll be your teacher for this course. Before you start listening to what I have to say about writing, you have the right to know a little bit about me. I am a writer. I write sermons, articles, blog posts, novels, and academic papers. I face all of the same struggles and fears that you might have when it comes to writing. I ask myself questions like, does my writing make sense? Has someone else already said this, or said it better? Who do I think I am that the world needs to read what I have to say? What I'm saying is that we're in this together. I don't have a magic wand or a secret key that is going to make writing simple and easy for you. That doesn't mean I don't have anything to say when it comes to writing. I am an ordained minister in the Reformed Church and have an advanced degree studying the intersection of faith and writing. Not only have I done my fair share of writing, but I have also worked hard to develop a method to help other Christians become better writers. While good writing is a lifelong pursuit, this course is filled with a lot of good information. You can learn from my own bumps and bruises and mistakes, then I'm happy to save you the time and energy. I really do believe that writing can be fun and fulfilling, and that traditional Christian disciplines like scripture reading, attending church, and prayer can actually release writers from some of their fears and insecurities when it comes to writing. I'm excited to share those ideas with you later in this course. This is not a course about the basics of English spelling or grammar. This course assumes that you have the basics down, but that you want to take your writing to the next level. I'm excited to help you meet this goal. Writing is a great way to promote your ideas or your ministry, but more important, it's a way that we participate in a wider social conversation, your writing will become a way that you react to other people, to what you've read, what you see in the world, and is a response to what God is stirring in your heart. I hope that this class will help you, even if only a little bit, to discover that you have something to say to the world, whether it's a word of comfort or of challenge. This class is structured as a step-by-step process. It is going to be important that you don't jump around from week to week, because each step builds on the previous one. As you proceed through this course, you will be creating an actual piece of writing. I encourage you to see this class not as practice for writing that you'll do someday, but as a real attempt to get an idea or a story out in the world. After all, when it comes to writing, experience is the best teacher. It's my hope that the step-by-step structure of this course is one that you could return to and will return to again and again after you're done with this course, of course, my method is is just one method for writing. There are lots of other ways to get ideas out of you, but I'm hoping that after you learn my method, you will then take what you like about it and develop your own writing process. One final note for those students for whom English is not your heart language: Don't worry. Most of the steps in this course can actually be applied to
any language. Don't let the fact that English isn't your first language scare you off from engaging with this material. The truth is that a lot of what makes writing powerful and effective has less to do with correct spelling, though that is important, and more to do with your willingness to be vulnerable. To trust God, and to stand up and say what you think and what you feel. I am genuinely excited to take this journey with you. Let's write.