Hey there!
As you may have noticed, Into The Fray has been staying silent these last few weeks. With exception of a spontaneous blog post published from Austin’s journal entry we have been silent.
In the last episode of Into The Fray(episode 4 of our Reading Revelation series), I(Austin) shared that me and my wife would be taking a brief hiatus to focus on celebrating our one year anniversary and to work on recording more episodes to continue our ‘Reading Revelation’ series.
Around that time I had been having talks with the leaders at The Bridge Church about becoming the official Youth Pastor. And after a few weeks of meetings and lots of prayer, I am moving forward with taking on that role and responsibility.
Being a pastor has been a dream of mine for probably half of my life. I first sensed the call to miniastry when I was a freshman in Highschool and specifically felt called to be a Pastor my Junior year. Since then I have been working towards this calling not just by studying theology and church history but by actively working on my character.
God has had to grow me in a lot of areas of my life. Many that most people do not know about. I’m extremely thankful for all the work the Spirit has done in truly changing my life for the better over the years no matter how long of a process it has been.
This does not mean the Spirit’s work on my life is complete, as I am writing this many more things have came to mind that I still need to have sanctified, but God has opened the door, or more accurately I have finally stopped being so stubborn and chose to walk through this door that God has had opened for quite some time.
All of this has been in God’s timing.
I am writing to update the Into The Fray community that for the foreseeable future I have no official timeline for how things will play out with the podcast and blog. I have maybe around 50 blogs I could post including the rest of the Reading Revelation series but no timeframe on how I will role it all out.
I have one episode of the podcast recorded that is a conversation about Pastoral Ministry that I would like to come out after I officially become a pastor as I think it may be more helpful within that context.
Me and Berlin will try our best to record some episodes but I do not want to promise that we will be consistent.
Into The Fray is not my number one priority. My apprenticeship to Jesus, my relationship with my wife and raising my daughter are top priority. Now accompanying that is my role as a pastor for The Bridge Youth.
God has called me to these first and I want to aim to do these well.
Producing Into The Fray content is way more time consuming and tedious than many people may realize. I spend hours studying topics or Scripture, then I spend hours writing down official posts on the research done, and then I have to edit and rewrite. Follow that up with recording the actual episodes, along with the hours it takes to edit, and then the additional hours to make promotional material and promote.
This can all be very exhausting. I hate social media despite my active presence on it.
At this point and time in my life, I cannot promise to be consistent with Into The Fray. I would still like to finish the Reading Revelation series and could confidently do that through the blog, but when it comes to the podcast version of the series, I am unsure.
I know this resource has been helpful to so many and I am encouraged by that. But I have never believed that the digital ministry should take precedence over the life on life ministry that I have actually been called to fulfill.
In short I am saying:
Into The Fray has been a fun ride, and hopefully we can continue this journey somehow. As of right now, I would like to take a step back and focus on my new role as pastor.
Thank you all for following along!
Hope to see you soon!
-Austin
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