I still remember the first time I met Gordon Atkinson. I had recently come to work for the H. E. Butt Foundation (now the Foundations for Laity Renewal) and I was visiting a Laity Lodge retreat for the first time in order to hear Dale Bruner. Dale was amazing. He preached on Pentecost, reciting the Greek and translating it on the spot, explaining the power of God. It was incredible.

Then, at the end of Dale’s morning talk, just before lunch, he held up a copy of Gordon’s book RealLivePreacher.com and read from it for about ten minutes. Gordon’s fictionalized versions of gospel stories breathed new life into the old text. (The book is still available for purchase  here.)

From that day, I was hooked. I became a regular reader of RealLivePreacher.com. I started emailing Gordon. I hired him to write articles for our online magazine about God and work at TheHighCalling.org. To date, he has written fourteen articles for us, nearly a record, including titles like Thus Spake the Head of Marketing, God Doesn’t Reward Bloody Knuckles, and Zacchaeus Was a Wee Little… Mafia Don.

As you can tell, Gordon has a way with titles. He also has a way with videos. One of my early impressions of Gordon came from a video he recommended called the Monkey Chow Diaries. (I watched the first episode again today. It is still funny, and it still raises interesting questions about what it means to be human. Are we, after all, just big monkeys?)

Then, Gordon himself followed up with the Communion Taste Test video. A bit longer than the Monkey Chow Diaries, this video is funny, irreverent, and oddly poignant.

Around this time, we started to notice a strange trend in our web traffic. Every time Gordon posted an article on TheHighCalling.org, our traffice increased five fold. Some of these folks were coming to us from RealLivePreacher.com where Gordon always dutifully linked to the article with his nifty promotional manner. But others were coming from copycat bloggers. They saw Gordon link to his own article, then they went back to their sites and linked to the article as well.

And we’re not just talking about a small amount of traffic. That first year, Gordon himself sent us more referral traffic than Christianity Today’s FaithInTheWorkplace.com. I won’t go into all of the details of those various relationships, but suffice to say Dan Roloff and I took notice.

We decided to have lunch with Gordon since he lives in San Antonio, just an hour south of Kerrville. It was at TGI Friday’s I think. Or Bennigan’s. Maybe Gordon will remember. At that lunch, he drew some things on a napkin, explaining how SEO worked, how blogs created a hefty portion of the search engine’s metadata, and a bunch of other things that are really cool, but much too boring and technical to talk about right now.

Essentially, he wrote the social media version of ”Let It Be” right there on a napkin next to his Diet Coke. He always drinks Diet Coke.

That was the beginning. I won’t go through all the iterations of the High Calling Network, but we’ve had many. We sold it internally to our advisory council for TheHighCalling.org.  We built and rebuilt the architecture with Chris Cree. And finally, last Spring, we grew beyond our ability to listen and had to close everything down for a few months.

During that time, Dan Roloff and Gordon and Chris and L.L. Barkat and others took a long hard look at what it would take to build a community in the right way. We studied IdeaCamp. We studied marketing reports. We talked with other bloggers like Darren Rouse at BlogWorld, Tall Skinny Kiwi at GodBlog, and Liz Straus at SOBcon 2007. Finally, we produced a long business plan that nobody read, but that had so much heft that people began to think we knew what we were talking about.

Who knows if we really do. But we’re going to take a good hard stab at it. And Gordon Atkinson–RealLivePreacher.com, my good friend, my favorite Baptist, and a man who can lead a mean Franciscan Retreat–he is going to help lead the way.

Now, the sermon is over. It’s time for the altar call. Are you ready to take action? Here are three steps to consider:

1) Read: If you haven’t seen Gordon’s series about Online Retreat–you need to take a look.

2) Consider: If you think you might be interested in the High Calling Network, read a little about us, read some of the ways you can participate, and consider joining the network.

3) Watch: If you’ve never watched the Communion Taste Test video… BEHOLD!

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