...and the next thing I know, I'm managing The Gospel Coalition's social media

One year into the most unexpected thing that's ever happened to me, with Substack updates, book updates, life updates and more.

This post is the official re-launch of Passing Through Digital Babylon. After nearly a year and a half of absence - for good reasons that will be explained below - I am not only ready to resume writing, but resume writing for the long haul. What follows here is a brief summary of where I’ve been, what I’m currently doing, and the new plans for this Substack going forward.

The most out-of-left-field thing that’s ever happened to me

When I last wrote in April of 2023, I thought I had the rest of 2023 clearly lined out ahead of me. Mending Division Academy was still in post-production, and once the material was complete, I would begin marketing the course and eventually assume a director position of the program (pending funding). All along the way I’d continue my seminary degree while holding down my two quarter-time roles at my church and chipping away at a book via this Substack as time allowed. The trajectory of my year and the next steps of my career seemed, at the time, fairly stable and secure.

But God had other plans.

The story of how I went from two quarter-time roles at my mid-sized Texas Panhandle church to The Gospel Coalition is a lengthy story for another time, but to say “I didn’t have that on my bingo card” is an understatement for the ages. Since August 2023, I have had “extreme ownership” (per my boss, drawing from the book of the same name) of all TGC-US branded social media accounts wherever they may be found. Outside of ensuring that the organization’s social media needs are met, the majority of my work so far has been behind-the-scenes. Managing social media at this scale requires large infrastructure and clear systems for planning, scheduling, publishing, monitoring, and evaluating content, and I’ve spent the better part of the year R&Ding some new systems and scaffolds that will make TGC’s current social output stronger and give us bandwidth to consider new approaches for content, strategies, campaigns, and more. Managing a small team of incredibly talented contractors has been another major source of work, and I am eager to see that team grow and expand over the years to come.

I had once sworn that when the time came for me to leave my social media role at my church that I was never managing social media again, so to go from “I’m never doing this again because social media is awful and terrible and I hate what it has done to the world” to “Sure, I’ll just make social media management for a large digital ministry my full-time career” is a genuine work of the Spirit. I’ve long seen my duality of being a hardcore Postman-ite working in social media as an irresolvable contradiction, and my work on my Digital Babylon framework as an attempt to create a coping mechanism to relieve that tension and justify talking out of both sides of my mouth. With this role, that sense of contradiction has been transformed into a sense of equipped purpose, and my Digital Babylon framework has become the grid through which the Word strengthens and encourages me in this work. I am not exaggerating when I say that all my work on tech/media discipleship, from the first season of Breaking the Digital Spell in 2018 to the work I’ve done with this Substack, feels as though it were all building up to this season of my life and to a job I never saw coming in a million years. Nothing has gone to waste.

As if all this weren’t enough by itself, here are several other major life updates that have happened over the past year-and-some-change:

• Mending Division Academy released! Here is a YouTube playlist with roughly 2 hours of some of the best material from each of the courses.

• I graduated seminary! I started my M.A. in Biblical Studies at Reformed Theological Seminary’s online campus in the fall of 2019 and, barring a year off due to a family medical situation, was full-time before, during, and after the pandemic. Seminary was the biggest obstacle to me writing on this Substack on a consistent basis, and since I am truly “done” with school for the first time in my life, I am able to commit to writing on this Substack as the only writing I have to do¹.

• I ended nine years of bi-vocational ministry at my church. When I began my role with TGC I kept my associate youth minister role on the side, but as I got deeper into the TGC role, it became clear that I would not be able to continue giving my ministry role the attention it deserved. With a young and upcoming leader in the church ready and able to step into my shoes, I made one of the hardest and most painful decisions I’ve ever made and stepped down to pursue this work with a single-minded focus. The new journey of learning how to be a normal layperson in a church you’ve worked at for nearly a decade - with coworkers you’ve long considered some of your closest friends - has been slow, and often excruciatingly lonely and disorienting. However, I am very thankful to give my family a level of presence and attention that I’ve not been able to up to this point.

• I am now a cohost of What Would Jesus Tech? alongside Andrew Noble and Joel Jacob. It’s been an absolute blast to talk about tech and media discipleship in the church with two brilliant sharp dudes with wildly different backgrounds (two Canadians, one Texan) and experiences than my own. You can find WWJT? wherever you get your podcasts, on YouTube, or here on Substack!

• Last and most recent: my wife Melissa and I welcomed our son, Moses Basil Gravley, into the world on June 12th. We went “old school” on whether we were having a boy or a girl, so the moment we learned that we now have a son is among one of the most joyful moments of my entire life.

  

  Adjusting to working and writing with a newborn has been difficult, and yet I wouldn’t trade it for anything. Being a father is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done, but it’s unquestionably the best.

A new, permanent chapter for Passing Through Digital Babylon

I created this Substack to slowly chip away at a book on my Digital Babylon framework while I finished seminary. Now that I have graduated, I am ready to begin working more intently on the book. I have never been more confident in the future of this project, and I now have all the ingredients I need to make the book come together and give it a legitimate shot at life.

Because of this, PTDB will have a shift in focus. The Digital Babylon framework has been my lifeline for my work with The Gospel Coalition, and most of what I write going forward will relate to Digital Babylon in some way. However, I want to expand the scope of my writing with this Substack while I work on the book separately. Specifically, I plan to write more on:

• Shifts and changes in the social media landscape. You think the past two years have been tumultuous and chaotic? You have not seen anything yet.

• Social media management and the church’s role in discipling a new generation of digital workers with a strong work/faith ethic.

• Observations on Christian social media culture (based on my experience with the cumulative 1.55-million-plus global followers of TGC’s social media accounts).

• Internet culture as a byproduct of Digital Babylon. There are plenty of Christians writing about the Internet’s impact on culture, but there are not many Christians writing on Internet culture as a unique, self-contained phenomenon, especially when it comes to Internet fandom and gaming culture. My recent article for Endeavor on Internet culture was only just the beginning.

• The current state of tech/media discipleship discourse, and the current blind spots that need to be address and opportunities to take the conversation deeper.

• Social media’s inflation of political/cultural polarization and the church’s continued opportunity to break the social media prism.

Posts from here on out will likely be shorter than what I’ve published in the past, with minimal formatting or flare. This will allow me to publish something with regular consistency, and let this Substack serve as my release valve for writing about things I have things to say on but maybe aren’t destined for the book. Following this post, I will also adopt the same content strategy I’ve pioneered with TGC and adopt a zero-click-content approach to my work, sharing entire posts in the spaces people are at rather than trying to funnel them to one single source. If you’ve seen that and have wondered if that works - trust me, it’s working very well.

Thanks for reading. If you’ve enjoyed this piece, please consider subscribing and sharing with your friends! And remember: together, all of us are passing through this temporary digital empire towards the celestial city.

- Austin

1. Unless you’re in the TGC Slack, to which you’re subjected to very lengthy Slack messages from me at least once a week.