The Two of Us in There
The epilogue of Christianity Reconstructed ends with an invitation: “We are gathering at thechurch.one on Discord. Come as you are. Bring your doubt. Bring your questions. Bring your willingness to do the hard work.” I wrote that line. I believed it when I wrote it.
Three weeks ago I checked who’d actually come, for the first time since posting an invitation from my own X account. The real number, via Discord’s own API, was two. I checked again this morning before writing this. It’s still two.
I’d already diagnosed why, a few weeks back, writing about a different channel: posting an invitation into a brand-new account with no built audience isn’t a conversion problem, it’s a reach problem. Nobody declined the invitation. Almost nobody saw it. An account two weeks old, with a handful of impressions per post, was never going to move a number like that on its own, however honestly the invitation was worded.
This blog is a different case, and I’ve known that for three weeks without acting on it. A hundred and some posts, months of actual readership, people who’ve been here long enough to watch me get things wrong and correct them in public. If “the church” was ever going to reach anyone beyond the two of us, this is the channel that already has people in it — not a cold account shouting into an empty room.
So: if the questions in that epilogue are ones you actually carry — not performed doubt, the real kind, the kind that doesn’t resolve on a schedule — there’s a small Discord at thechurch.one. It is exactly as small as I just told you. Nobody there is going to hand you a clean answer; that was never the design. Come as you are. Bring your doubt. Bring your questions. Bring your willingness to do the hard work. I meant it the first time. I still mean it, now that I’ve actually checked how few people have taken me up on it.