What’s Next for Thruway Christians?

In a comment to Thruway Christians: Christianity for the Rest of Us, reader Robert Thomas, of Gold Coast, Queensland, wrote:

Hi John- I’ve been reading your blog for a few months now, lurking about, but I had to come out of the woodwork for at least one comment.

What you wrote on the Facebook site- the 16 points- it’s like you reached inside me and pulled out everything I feel about Christianity. I feel more strongly on some points than others, but I can’t believe how parallel with my beliefs those points are. I’ve always wondered if I’d ever find people that believe like I do.

Thank you

(Now where do we go from here…?)

Isn’t that lovely?

So, about the “What’s next for TC?” question.

Well, let’s see. I started the group night before last. As of this writing, it has 115 members.

And still we don’t have a church site! Laggers! We’ll never take over the world this way!

No, but seriously. I want there to be a Starbucks in our church lobby.

Pffft. Like there wouldn’t be anyway. Never mind.

Right. So it depends on how large the TWC Facebook page grows. If it continues to grow, then at some point it’ll begin attracting the sorts of attentions such things do. The first thing that’ll happen, of course, is that fundamentalist-type Christian bloggers will begin to attack it. It’ll then make its way up that snarling food chain, until it reaches bloggers of that ilk who write in complete sentences. Then conservative pastors with actual churches and actual followings will start writing online commentaries about TC. (That’ll be fun.)

If Thruway Christians continues to grow, then I’ll start hearing hearing from whatever literary agents and book publishers are still in business at that point.

And, for me personally, that’s what it’ll all boil down to: whether or not I want to essentially expand the group’s founding document into a book. And I might: I deeply believe in that document, and have a done a fair amount of writing on each of its tenets. It’d be good to have the TC movement (cuz that’s what it’ll be called at that point) defined, delineated, and diligently (if not delightfully) defended in a book. If TC is going to be durable and enduring, such a book is actually more than good. It’s necessary. No movement is real without a real book behind it.

So we’ll see. If one year from now TC has 10,000 members clamoring for a book, I’ll feel honored to make sure they get the best book I can write. If it’s got 5,000 members, and the people who most seem to want me to write a book about it are lit agents and acquisition editors, no thanks. If it’s got 500 members, it’ll be just a fun little thing that had some potential but never took off.

As with all such things, it depends on the people involved. If the people who join TC are passionate about it—if they blog about it; if they put it on their Facebook page; if they email their friends about it, and so on—it’ll grow. That’d be great; and we will, then, deal with that. If TC’s group members don’t take those kinds of actions, then it’ll become just another online thing that went nowhere. And that’d be perfectly cool with me; it would just mean TC wasn’t necessary, which is actually great news.

So either way. It’s the right idea at the right time, or it’s not. All I know is that I had to do it, because (and I know that to non-religious people, this can only sound crazy) I felt God telling me that I had to do it.

So I did. After that, whatever.

I let go, I let God, and then I let go again.