Missional Mindset for Writers: What Rachel Allord Taught Us About Letting God Grow Your Audience
This post was adapted from Writing Off Social: The Podcast, Episode 96. You can listen in here!
There are interviews that leave us with a running list of practical takeaways, and there are interviews that leave us a little undone, in the best possible way. Our conversation with Rachel Allord, city missionary and YA author based in London, was firmly the second kind.
Rachel has been writing for over twenty-five years. She’s published traditionally, self-published, written ministry curriculum, freelance articles, devotionals, and now she’s three books deep into a contract with a UK publisher — all without chasing a platform. What she brought to this conversation wasn’t a marketing strategy. It was a theology of surrender.
From Wisconsin to London: A Hard Right Turn
Rachel grew up in Wisconsin, became an English major, taught for a while, and then — when her son was born — started writing a novel as a creative outlet. That novel took over ten years to find its shape and a publisher, and in the meantime she was freelancing for MOPS (now TheMom.Co), contributing to Chicken Soup for the Soul, writing three-hundred-word devotionals for Our Daily Bread, and teaching homeschool writing classes.
Then in 2018, everything changed. She and her husband left their life in the States — he had been a worship pastor for nearly twenty years — and moved to London as city missionaries.
“It was a really hard right turn in our mid-forties,” Rachel admits, laughing softly about the timing. “Most experts would say you don’t uproot your family in your mid-forties. We had teenagers at the time.” She’s quick to clarify that dragging her feet might be a generous description of her response.
But they went. And when they did, something shifted in her writing life too.
Releasing the Writing Dream as an Act of Obedience
Moving to the mission field meant Rachel felt genuinely convicted to let go of her writing ambitions — what she names plainly as an idol.
“I wanted to be the next Francine Rivers,” she says. “That wasn’t happening. But I knew it was such a heart struggle for me that I felt like, once we stepped into the mission field, I just needed to let that go.”
So she did. She threw herself into whatever the ministry needed — kids’ holiday club curriculum, parent blogs, outreach articles for UK organizations, writing for international students. She stopped thinking about publishing.
And then, in 2021, an editor found one of her parent-focused articles and reached out asking if she had any YA story ideas. That conversation became a book contract. That contract became three books. The Addie Brown series is now available in both the UK and the US.
She tells that story carefully, though — not as a formula. “It’s not a guarantee,” Rachel is quick to point out. “We give up our agenda and surrender something to the Lord. That does not mean he’s going to give us a book deal.” She had genuinely reached a place of peace with whatever shape her writing life took. The contract came after the surrender, not because of it.
What “Starting Small” Actually Looks Like
Early in her career, a writer further along in the journey told Rachel to start small. She didn’t love hearing it.
“I think it’s hard to hear because we are in love with our own words too much,” she reflects. “At least that was the case with me. We want what we want, and we’re impatient.”
Starting small, for her, looked like $25 devotionals and humor pieces for a parenting magazine and stories submitted to whatever anthology happened to be sitting on her mother-in-law’s bookshelf. None of it felt significant at the time. All of it mattered.
That kind of writing taught her to meet deadlines, stay within word counts, and produce something useful to an editor rather than just something she personally loved. It also loosened her grip on her own words — which is, counterintuitively, what made her a better writer.
“The more you write,” she explains, “the less precious you become with your words. So much has to be cut. So much has to be edited. But that messy process is how the work gets to where it needs to be.”
Building an Audience Without Building a Platform
Rachel’s readership has grown almost entirely through relationship and ministry — not strategy. She partners with her missions organization, connects with international schools, contributes to ministry publications, and guests on podcasts. Her target audience for the Addie Brown books is largely TCKs (third culture kids), so she started with the communities she was already embedded in and let the connections branch outward naturally.
When we asked how she identifies the right communities without social media as the engine, her answer was disarmingly simple: start with your circle.
“When you’re writing for God’s glory and to serve others,” she says, “and you truly believe that what you’ve written is worthy to be in readers’ hands — you have to take your name off of it. Ask yourself: if this floated up on my desk, would I love this? Would I talk about it?”
That posture, she explains, changes everything about how you talk about your work. It moves from self-promotion to genuine recommendation.
She does maintain a purposeful presence on Facebook and Instagram — mainly to stay connected with ministry partners and to share content when her publisher leads. But she’s not on Twitter or TikTok, and she recently took Facebook off her phone entirely after hearing that tip from a previous guest on our show. “It was kind of life-changing,” she admits, “realizing how much time I was devoting to it when I didn’t actually want to.”
The Heart Issue Underneath It All
If there’s a single thread running through everything Rachel shared, it’s this: the platform problem is really a heart problem.
“We can be off social and still be striving,” she says. “We could still have our wheels turning about what audience we want to get in front of. It really is paying attention to our hearts.”
She draws a meaningful distinction between diligence and striving. Diligence is doing the things that are wise and consistent if you want to write and grow. Striving is the frantic, panicked feeling of not having enough time to build enough of a name. One is faithful. The other is fear.
Her encouragement to the writer who feels stuck? Pray.
“Come to the Lord and tell him all of your hopes, your dreams, your agenda, what you would love to see happen,” she urges. “Say the hard things. Say, ‘I wanted to be the next Francine Rivers and it’s not happening.’ He knows it already. Just say it.”
And then — maybe delete one app.
“Don’t despise the small things,” she adds, smiling. “We define what is small and what is big. That’s not how God’s economy works.”
We walked away from this conversation with the important reminder that the call to write faithfully in small places is not a consolation prize. It might just be the whole point.
This post was reformatted from our original transcript by Claude and edited for accuracy by Mary K.
