Hebrews 13:4 “Marriage is to be held in honor among all…”
This month
Our theme is about marriage this month, and we’ll include everything from choosing a spouse, to wedding hair and helping on the big day, to being a godly wife after we say the “I Do’s.” All of the volunteers have worked hard to put together the summer edition of the magazine, and we hope you’ve enjoyed our articles about career and college in June and July, and that you’ll also benefit from our marriage articles this month.
New Direction
When the idea for the magazine was formed in January 2008, Lisa had two children and I had one. We were both planning on homeschooling our children, but that seemed very far away. Since that time, we’ve both added an additional child to our families (her third son was born in May; my second daughter was born in July), plus we will begin homeschooling next month. We are much busier with our home and family lives now than we were when we began the magazine, and being managers of our homes needs to be our top priority (Titus 2:3-5).
We’ve also lost several of our teen writers to the busyness of school and jobs, and while we’ve added a few new writers, we’re still writing many of the articles ourselves each month. We’re also both becoming further and further removed from the teenage group as our families grow and our energy and time is directed toward being godly wives and mothers, so we’re finding it increasingly difficult to write relevant teen articles each month.
We do, however, love the ministry of an online magazine, and the amount of hits the site receives each day suggests that this ministry is reaching many people. The type of comments and e-mails we’ve received about the magazine leads us to believe that our largest audience is not the teen girl audience we were originally striving to reach, but instead the majority of our audience seems to be mothers and young women. And the more we try to attract teens (giveaways, dating articles, etc.), the more we seem to attract the women in our stage of life!
So, after much thought, prayer, and discussion, Lisa and I have decided that beginning on September 1, 2009, Pierce My Heart will change directions–we will still be an online magazine, but we will no longer be geared toward teens. We will instead change our format and our articles to reach a new target audience of stay-at-home Christian mothers. The new format will be simplified to make the magazine more flexible and less time consuming, so we can spend more time focusing on our families, and more time working on our own spiritual lives so that we can be the godly wives and mothers God wants us to be.
We will have a “Teen Scene” column on the magazine, which will include the majority of the articles for and by teens. We are planning on continuing this column as long as the teen writers choose to continue assisting in the new direction of this ministry.
The articles this month will still be geared toward our original target audience of young women, but you will notice changes to the overall look and format of the magazine, as we’re preparing to change things to better accommodate mothers of young children. These changes will happen gradually over the next two months, so we can have everything in place by the end of September to begin our new direction.
Your input
We would love to receive your input, thoughts, and suggestions of ideas, columns, or topics you’d like to see (or things you’d like to stop seeing) on this magazine in the future. You can either leave your thoughts in a comment below, or contact us with your suggestions.
Thank you for your continued support and encouragement as we begin a new chapter of our ministry with Pierce My Heart.
Davonne Parks
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