Meet Chris Cree, Senior Editor for the High Calling Network

The teenagers on the streets of Chicago were all dressed like their favorite Anime characters. I was wearing normal clothes, and I stuck out. Also, I couldn’t help staring. Their costumes were really weird.

“What are you here for?” they asked.

“A blog conference,” I said.

“What’s a blog?” they asked. “Sounds weird.”

It was early 2007, and blogs weren’t quite mainstream yet.

That didn’t stop Gordon Atkinson from helping us sell the idea of a blog network organized around TheHighCalling.org. We really didn’t know what we were doing at the time. Maybe Gordon did.

So there I was in Chicago in March 2007 for the first SOBcon—that stands for the Successful and Outstanding Blogger Convention, by the way. Liz Strauss dreamed up the event as an extension of her site and the SOB awards she handed out each week to various bloggers. (I actually won an early SOB award back in 2006.)

The conference was small and intimate—only slightly larger than a Laity Lodge retreat. I met lots of fantastic folks there, but Chris Cree ended up being the frienship that stuck.

Chris was working in shipyards at the time. He described his job as a massive game of tetris with pieces the size of semi trucks and a control room filled with salty sailor talk. Chris himself was not so salty, but he later wrote about his work for TheHighCalling.org: Are You a Lighthouse or a Chameleon at Work?

In Chicago, Chris and I hit it off during a dinner at an Indian restaurant with Phil Gerbyshak (who suggested the restaurant), Liz Strauss, Wendy Piersall, Dawud Miracle (who introduced me to Rumi), Robert Hruzek (who won a writing contest for a free retreat to Laity Lodge), Ben Yoskovitz, Drew McLellan, Terry Starbucker, and a bunch of others. (I love good Indian food, and Kerrville has none.)

That dinner opened the door for an ongoing friendship and business relationship.

Chris helped us decide on Wordpress as our initial platform—and he helped us with the network setup. Gordon and I learned quickly that we could not have too many people helping us organize the project, listen to online writers, engage with them, and minister to them.

A lot of what Chris did for us in those early years had to do with themes and widgets and strategy and such. He posted his share of articles on HighCallingBlogs.com for a time. He headed up our social media tips for a time. He’s generally been there to do whatever needed to be done.

But his real love has always been helping people. After volunteering his services off and on for nearly 9 months, we were able to contract with Chris to help us even more. During 2008, we described him as the hands of HighCallingBlogs.com. (Gordon was the head. I was the heart.) With his help and Gordon’s help, the network exploded to nearly 300 members in just a few months.

Now Chris is starting his third year on contract with us at the High Calling Network. We’re all hard at work merging TheHighCalling.org and HighCallingBlogs.com. The project has grown so big that we’re shifting to the Drupal platform. Chris was dismayed by our decision to leave Wordpress behind, though all other Foundation sites will remain on Wordpress—Laity Lodge, Laity Lodge Family Camp, Laity Lodge Youth Camp, Foundation Free Camps, and the soon to launch uber-site Foundations for Laity Renewal.

Without Gordon, we would not have started to run this race.

Without Chris, we would have never run so far.

Addendum: You can read browse Chris’ social media history by looking over his first blog, his business site, and his new video blog.

Or click over to HighCallingBlogs.com to see what all of this has grown into.