About the Author
I was was borne and raised in west-central Michigan. After high school, I attended the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago. All four years of college I volunteered in a Quakers church in Cabrini-Green, which was my first real life exposure to the fact that we are all unique, yet similar.
After college, I spent six years driving to different fellowships in the Body of Christ to understand Christians. It’s not easy because of the degree to which many congregational leaders will accuse you of not loving God if you don’t give them money every week, but they’re not all like that. We can’t learn about each other merely through books. Most critiques of Rob Bell, for instance, are about his literature, not addressing real issues that people in Grandville, Michigan know first hand. So, I’m one of the few people with long-term first-hand experience with everyone from Baptists to Pentecostals, from the Moody Bible Institute to the International House of Prayer.
My favorite authors are informative and provocative, like CS Lewis, Robert Kiyosaki, and Malcolm Gladwell. Everyone’s a Tolkien fan these days. Though I’ve been accused of being “well-read” I don’t pick up books too often. I prefer to be “well-talked”, having first hand dialog with people about their ideas. Because of those talks, I foresaw the trouble with Bell—and I’ve still not seen anyone mention a viable solution to the disagreement that’s arisen, though people love to throw eggs at him. I’ll probably share my personal thoughts with him, if we ever get the change. Most of my opinions are informed by academics, but largely based on personal encounter. One time in college, I read all my assignments on time and the doctor ordered me to stop because the stress was too much. So, I’m not much of an egg head. I do better at talking and listening.
In America, I drop-in unexpectedly to visit friends for coffee and a few hours of banter about trends in music, business, politics, to pontificate about the latest ministry “strategery” of Bill Hybels, talk about what Rush said the day before, or digest recent sermons from Mike Bickle. In Asia I like to dabble in Chinese calligraphy, visit friends, study Wing Chun (Kung Fu,) visit locals, frequent the traditional market, and ride my bicycle to buy organic fair trade coffee from a local merchant. I hold a long-standing reputation among friends for talking endlessly, which inspired the name of my column syndicated here, The Point.
As for sports: individual. Maybe it’s because one of my oldest friends was a skater kid.. ya know, the guy who wore the expensive Airwalks in high school that no one knew where to buy? Yeah, we had a quiet connection. His suicide affected me, making me less tolerant of the religious leaders who refused to do what it took for him to understand Christ.
After ten years of working to understand Christians in our various sub-cultures denominations, Obama took up the White House and I took up Asia. We need more people in business and politics with real international experience. And I don’t mean classroom “experience” or a six month internship—I mean actual life in the field.
Traveling the States had already broadened my perspective. Taiwan and Hong Kong took that experience from good to great. We don’t know about ourselves until we learn about others. My first English school boss tried to take my passport. The second boss refused to give me my work permit, but then got mad for “no reason” and told the government that I up and vanished. The officer involved with that “situation” let me keep the letter making those false claims as a “souvenir”. Yes, I was the first foreigner to conclude peace with an employer in Tainan, without pressing charges nor getting deported on false claims. Believe me, it took a lot of wild faith—as in, the kind of stuff that makes everyone angry at you until after the fact.
Taiwan probably needed that victory more than I did. We don’t know what’s possible until we see it for ourselves—every one of us. Maybe God sent me to show the Taiwanese government how much can be done with foreigners who appreciate the Taiwanese for who they are. Maybe all that time my dad spent taking me to government meetings was intended for bigger stuff than any of us would have guessed. Either way, I’d had enough of lying bosses who wanted to stamp “deported” on my passport because of their prejudices, but I was quite happy with myself for having survived two of them. With all these experiences I wanted to read, but you already know how that goes.
So, I took to writing.
Digital Syndication
This website was created as a resource for writing, blogging, cartooning, and putting my social media all in one place. But I also hope to encourage other aspiring authors, journalists, and creative writers. We need a new direction for individual media in the digital information age.
Bushisms like “strategery” carry a meaning of their own and readers want to know whether an author means a “small group” (a group that is small) or a “smallgroup” (the people who attend Bible study together). It’s okay to update spelling and punctuation, such as “email” instead of the archaic “e-mail” and format digital editing standards for copy-paste-friendly punctuation (“. vs .” depending on the situation). And we need to eliminate periods in known abbreviations for rss/atom-feeding into news tickers and text messages.
From a “tone” perspective, and as Christians, we must not to fall into the run-of-the-mill, uncreative, boring culture-bashing with the “someone has to be wrong before I can have a good point” style that defines too many Christian periodicals. We can deliver the message to the world while being both kind and effective. Take Ronald Reagan for instance. To help along these lines, some articles, style guides, and resource are listed on this page in the center column under “Reference”. Using a “sweet and strong” style of expressing ourselves, along with standardizing the spellings we all use anyway, will eventually prove marketable. So, if you’re a write,r feel free to jump on board. As a tip to beginners: Schools and academic institutions cultivate a paradigm of “word minimums” while the world of readers and syndicates want “word maximums”. Break the mold. Get to the point.
The Point
JesseSteele.com carries different forms of content, including articles specific to Christianity, social-political pieces, and its primary written content: The Point.
The Point is not a typical blog. It is a C-blog, that is, a “column syndicated by weblog/blog”. It is written to specific standards of style and ethics, has a word limit of 500, and has a target audience with a few clearly defined Archetypes who are interested in Bible, Business, Culture, and Politics. The Point uses classic journalism tone to deliver summary of facts and a “sharp edge” with opinion. It avoids that sing-song, mediator-negotiator, dance-around-issues vibe, but, instead, targets hard-to-tell truths with the skill of a surgeon to provide a constructive path forward. The Point often carries an audio version read by the author which can be subscribed to in iTunes and other feed readers. The Point is not published on a strict schedule like a newspaper column. Rather, it posts when the author feels so inspired to write, hence its genre: C-blog—column quality, blog schedule.
The Point publishes when something needs to be said, not just because it’s time to say something. Articles have better quality when a written upon inspiration and need rather than pressure of a schedule. Relevance strengthens reader trust. Perhaps, this week, there’s no news to report.
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