Blogging Ministry

Here’s an interesting story about different kinds of Christian outreach and evangelism on the internet. Included is a interview of the writer of "Holy Mama" Blog.              

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By Jonathan Yang (London, UK: Rough Guides Ltd, Oct. 2006, 208 pgs.)

Read the review on my BOOK Reviews site.              *Top

Here’s a link to a great series by Cory Miller: "Blogging for Pastors 101". He encourages Pastors to blog and has 27 posts on how to get started. Cory follows up the series with interviews of 50 Pastors/Believers involved in blogging. What a valuable and incredible series it is, I highly recommend it.

One warning however, if you start browsing his website: ChurchCommunicationsPro.com you can easily spend a couple of hours and just scratch the surface. It is full of good stuff for churches and for those involved in ministry on the internet.                *Top

A year ago I started out using Yahoo as my web host for my first blog. I didn’t know anything at the time and they presented a near turn-key operation for beginners. I am still with them for all my major blogs simply because I found them to be very reliable and their customer service and technical backup has been excellent. (Note: have since moved to Blue Host)

They are a little pricey but I am glad to pay extra for dependability. There are hosts out there that are just as reliable and less expensive. It just takes a little research.

There are a lot of hosts out there and it can be confusing to a beginner and even to someone like me who has been around only a year or so. The following are web hosting evaluations and ratings on the following sites to help in the process:

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There are a number of things that you can do to increase the visibility of your ministry blog and the number of different people actually visiting your site.  Are numbers all that important?  Ask a Pastor if he or she would rather have a growing church or a stagnant one.

A lot depends upon the goals and reasons you started the blog in the first place.  If it is primarily a house blog that is designed to meet a need in your church or ministry group than promoting your blog on the internet is probably unnecessary.  If it was designed to target your own group but to also minister to anyone else who happens to stumble on the site, then you might consider doing a few easy things to increase that possibility.

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I just stumbled across this great series on blogging written by Brian Bailey, (on staff @ Fellowship Church, Dallas, Texas) author of The Blogging Church. I recently posted a review of his book and also linked to a review by MinistryToday Mag.

The articles are posted on his blog: Leave It Behind

Why Blogging? Because God and his son Jesus Christ need equal time in the blogosphere.

Pastors have so little real time to influence their people and blogging can extend and increase the opportunity to share the Gospel and the Christian world view not only with their own congregation, but also with anyone else who happens to come across the site. Best of all, blogging can literally be done at anytime, and the time investment is minimal compared with the possible results.

View this great video that I came across on the Revival Blog. It is less than three minutes long and more than worth the time:

"What People Need From Their Pastors" -John Piper (3min.)

This video is for you Pastor, but there is all sorts of great stuff like this that you can share with your people on a blog. Why should the ol’ adversary have all the great media?

Got this at Google Video, there is all sort of good Christian stuff there along with everything else under the sun. You just have to search for them. John Piper has over 500 listed! *Top

Tad Thompson, Sr. Pastor @ Harvard Baptist Church -Siloam Springs, Arkansas, set up a blog for a series of sermons called The Core. Take a look, it is pretty impressive and a great idea.

He mentioned it in a comment made on a previous post. Then he expanded on it in an article at his Total Leadership blog:

“I recently began a sermon series called the The Core. This series covers 15 essential doctrines of the faith. I decided to create a blog that goes along with the series. You can read it at www.thecoreconvictions.wordpress.com . Now people can interact with the material all week and discuss the topic. Do I have most people discussing, no, but they are reading. Another plus is that people can stumble across the page and read the material and the blog points them to the sermons online. The key is multiplication. Multiply your ministry and you will multiply influence for the glory of God.”

What an excellent use of a blog for ministry. Notice that Pastor Tad used WordPress.com to set up this blog. Cost= Zero $ @ ministry multiplied exponentially. Blogs like this can be set up as temporary sites, or a more permanent blog could be set up to post current sermon notes along with keeping the old series notes in the archives.

Blogging programs make this all possible and easy to post and organize. WordPress.com is a particularly good choice for this purpose since the program offers static pages that can be used for various purposes. Notice that Pastor Tad used one page on his blog as a Core Reading List. Thanks Pastor Tad Thompson for the great ideas.            *Top

I found this question on the Total Leadership blog. There are some great comments following.

**Update: Conversation continues in later post.             *Top

Here’s a great article with reasons why blogs work well as a Youth ministry website. Shows how easy blogs are to set up and maintain. The post written by Cory Miller even includes a sample Youth Ministry blog to check out. Found on ChurchCommunicationsPro.com.  Actually, a lot of what Cory writes would also apply to many other church ministries.              *Top