This website is 20 years old this month.
For 20 years I’ve tried to read up on answers to questions I and many others are asking about God and life. Then tried to simplify those answers down to a reasonable length to be read online.
My understanding of God, life, science, history, philosophy, people and myself have all changed over this time. Here’s a brief outline (if anyone’s interested).
It all started with a question
I was asked by someone close to me why I believed in God. I wrote down the answer and gave it to them.
Then I thought, why not turn this into something useful, like a small printed document. So I worked on that for a while, until I thought no-one’s going to read this, better try something different.
Blogs were a growing thing back then, so I started my own website. The title, the content and the appearance were all totally different to today, and it attracted few readers, but I persevered. I read up on improving how I ranked on Google, on how to improve the design, on the questions people were asking, and on how to write more engaging copy. I’m not sure how much better things got, but I persevered.
From little things, big things grow
A few free Google ads, growth and changes in the blog (you can check all that out in 20 years of this website) all helped, and somehow I started to get readers and comments.
Over the 20 years, I’ve written almost 600 posts and 228 pages. Half a million people have visited over a million pages in that time (see graph). Visitors have left almost 2,600 comments and I’ve made about 1,650 replies.
The heyday
The great increase in readers in the period 2012-2019 coincided with a rising interest in blogging generally. It was a time when many atheists felt motivated to argue for the foolishness of Christian belief. I along with other Christian tried to answer them.
Around this time I was a member of several online forums where Christian and atheists, and others, argued sometimes passionately against the opposing beliefs. Some of my friends and adversaries then (and many were both) came to visit the blog.
I learnt a lot in those years. I tried to avoid being too adversarial and certainly not rude, but others on both sides didn’t always feel the same way. This led to some strained discussion which I don’t think I always handled well. But like I said, I learnt a lot.
Many of the visits and comments were by people opposed to what I was writing, but whatever else it achieved, it boosted my statistics and led to me rating well on Google for some search terms.For a while I even rated higher that NASA for the search term “How did the universe start?”, which was crazy, and couldn’t last.
Making friends
As well as comments on my blog posts, I also had literally hundreds of people email me asking questions (and occasioanlly insulting me!). Some of these correspondences went on for scores and even hundreds of emails in total – the record was over 700 back and forth between me and a reader with lots of questions.
In this way I got to know people from countries all over the world – most from USA, UK and Australia, but others from Belgium, Brazil, Denmark, Indonesia, Italy, Netherlands and Singapore. I have eventually been able to meet up with a couple of them, which was fun and rewarding.
Things don’t stay the same
By about the time of Covid in 2020, interest in blogging was waning a little and the Christian-atheist “wars” had subsided. Many people on both sides found better things to do, a number of the argumentatve forums closed down or went quiet. Less people visited my website and even fewer commented.
Along with this was a chnage in what pages people most chose to visit. Instead of pages about evidence for God (in the Clues section), visitors were more interested in life and religion, especially in difficulties in the Bible.
Every good series has a spinoff!
I originally aimed this website at agnostics asking questions about Christian theism. I tried to give them reliable factual information from a neutral standpoint while making clear my own beliefs.
But I found that many of my visitors, and especially many who wrote comments or emails, were Christians with questions and doubts. Many of them were in churches (or had just left churches) where questions weren’t encouraged and often not answered satisfactorily.
So in 2011 I began a second website, now named Way Forward from an open-minded and progressive Christian viewpoint, and it continues.
The beat goes on!
And so my humble (??) website begins its third decade. Who knows how long it will last? Who knows how long I will last?
I don’t post as often as I used to, but I try to keep up with relevant ideas in theology, philosophy, science, history and life. I don’t suppose I’ll ever run out of interesting things to write about.
Thanks for reading – this page and the blog generally. I hope you’ll be back to read more and maybe to comment.
Meanwhile, if you’d like to check out the many name and design changes over the years, find them at 20 years of this website.
Photo by Rodolfo Quirós modified by unkleE.
