Happy Birthday To Us!

Ten years ago, on the first of August 2005, I wrote my first post in the new “blog” section of our family website.

Welcome to this new section of the Kouya Chronicle. The idea of this ‘blog’ is that it should be easier to update our family news and photographs. It will be interesting to see if it works. I’ll also try and use this as a place to put some more profound thoughts and ideas, but they will have to wait until I have any.

In the intervening years, we have published 2,390 posts and had 5,615 comments. Rather surprisingly, the most popular post has virtually nothing to do with mission or theology.

Though I say it myself, that’s quite an achievement. There aren’t a lot of blogs that keep going for ten years. Lots of high profile blogs have come and gone in that time, meanwhile, we keep plodding on, poking the missionary movement and asking difficult questions. It’s a testimony to the kind people who read kouyanet and who recommend our posts that we regularly figure in or around the top twenty religious blogs in the UK – that’s not bad when you consider that we aren’t exactly high profile or famous.

However, self backslapping apart, in a fundamental way, kouyanet is actually a failure. The original purpose was to find an easier way to put family news online and to stay in contact with our supporters. Somewhere along the line, the family news and photographs aspect of our site fell out of focus and we started to concentrate on the ‘profound thoughts’ angle.

However, people seem to appreciate what we are doing and I quite enjoy writing this sort of thing (though it is a bit of a strain trying to come up with something new and profound every working day). However, this does seem a good time to remind readers that we don’t receive a salary for our work and we are dependant on the goodwill of our churches, supporters and friends to carry on our work in Bible translation, mission support and writing a blog. If you’d like to make a contribution to keeping us in the manner to which we’d like to become accustomed, there are some suggestions here. Even if you aren’t able to support us, we’d love to keep you updated with what we are doing; you can sign up for our regular email news on this page.

Ten years ago, I fully expected that we would be back in Africa by now, working to support Bible translation in some fashion. I didn’t think that I’d have spent most of the intervening time as CEO of Wycliffe Bible Translators or that I’d be working with Global Connections. Sue has carried on working in Madagascar, doing a great job as a translation consultant. I wouldn’t like to predict what will happen in the next ten years; perhaps we’ll still be blogging.