outside is better

Three ways to blog as a Pastor

Over the last month, my primary activity in life has changed. Instead of being a full time seminary student, holding multiple jobs, volunteering at church and blogging as a student, I now serve as the Associate Pastor of Contemporary Worship and Student Ministries at St. Paul's United Methodist Church. This change means many things. One of them was thinking how my blogging will transition. I spent most of a 12 hr drive thinking about this a few weeks ago and I have some thoughts.

I have always said that blogging should be an intentional activity. Just jumping into it without a plan really just lets your blog be a personal dump yard for random thoughts. If folks in ministry are writing online, they need to have a plan. The internet is part of their ministry. Here are the three areas I identified:

 

1. The Blog as an Experimental Playground:
Many pastors, especially those fresh out of school, really like to use their blog to flex intellectual muscles. They might be in a doctoral program or part of an existing online community and they want to have a place to show personal study and deep thought.

I know some great examples of this type of blog. These are the guys I count on to point me towards resources I might never have found.  Blogging keeps them connected to the academy and allows a continued voice in certain circles.

The Con of these blogs are they really don't allow the pastor to connect online to the folks they minister with. The occasional post might inform of a controversial theological or denominational idea, but generally isn't intended to be directed at those in the pew.

2. The Blog as a Personal Platform:
These pastors are looking for a place to brand their ministry or find income in non-traditional ministry venues. They might travel often, or use the blog for connecting to a wider community than available in their immediate local. They could run a para-church ministry or serve in denominational leadership and the blog helps them communicate the wider sense of their ministry to those they might minister alongside for short periods of time.

The Con to this blog is for those who don't vocationally fall into this category. If you are serving a church and pimping your blog to get a book deal........you need to rethink your strategy. There are multiple reasons this can be unhealthy for your day to day ministry. If what you have to say is good enough to publish, the right folks will find you down the road.

3. The Blog as a Formational Pulpit:
In current social media use, a pastors blog can serve as a relational platform for spiritual leadership. With Facebook "liking" and Twitter retweeting, congregants who encounter worthwhile blog posts can share them with those in their own network.

The means the minister needs to write in mind for sharing. They need to stay on top of culture. These are pastors that curate spiritual content for others. They understand the blog can be a great place of interaction, with those who want to go deeper engaging in these discussions. They tweet like Kim Kardashian. They can use the blog to talk about things that just didn't make the final sermon edit. They understand the fine line between challenging and confusing. In short; they see their blog as an extension of their ministry in the local congregation.

I think every blog will look different, regardless of the topic. Those in ministry will probably have a mixture of all three. I tend to think the weight should exist on the 3rd, but every situation is different.

What do you think? Do you have another way?

6 reasons Pastors should blog

I was refered to this post by a friend.  It is from the Desiring God blog by Abraham Piper (son of John Piper).  I think there are some very good points made, so go check out the post.

6 reasons Pastors should blog.

Christmas and the power of long tail blogging in the church

If anyone wants to know what to get me for christmas this will work

More of a real blog post

Most of you know that I really dig blogging.  I try to teach others about it and why it should be important to us in the church.  I imagine alot of us post things that may embarrass us in 20 years or so, but I never imagine we think about how our blogging can affect the future of the church.

A friend of mine brings this up in passing at the end of a larger post.  Ben Howard is a good buddy and an editor/compiler of the Asbury Reader.  Ben is talking about what happens when we put stuff up on the internet here, and at the end he says

My biggest fear with the quote form the Nestorian liturgy is that some student hoping to do a nice 'emergent' liturgical service will Google the liturgy and unknowingly have his or her parishioners partake in a heretical liturgy. For what we practice will slowly become embedded in us and become part of our belief system

I know that if you google "emergent liturgy" out of the top 5 hits, my blog is number 3 and 4 (as of this date).  That is why a good stat service is necessary.  You see where you get hits.   With this comes the practice of grooming and maintaining a blog.

I understand Ben's fears and as bloggers whose main identifier is our life with Christ we need to understand the impact of our internet ramblings.  So get a good stat service (I use statcounter.com) and see where you are getting hits...you would be surprised.  I don't want to talk about it, but if any wilmore folk ask me, I will tell them what the main google search is that sends people to my blog.  I won't mention it here because of how it may get caught up in search engines.

So don't think about the image your blog may give you in 20 years, but think about how it may affect the Church in 20 years.

 

Learning to translate part deux

Sorry that this has taken awhile.  Our friends Ryan and Amberly gave birth on Monday and their are/were some complications.  Please be in prayer for their son Athan over these next few weeks.

OK.  There has been some great response over the last few posts and I have decided to do a part II on them.

There were some questions raised on blogging and what this has to do with us as Christians, and I think that these need to be addressed.  There is a fear that people will withdraw and only really share themselves online.  I think this danger is justified because this is an easy thing to do.  When we make the decision to blog in community we are putting ourselves out there.  For the people that read my blog and I see on a daily basis, I hope that they would feel comfortable raising these issues in face to face conversations.  I was a part of a group that practiced (without knowing how formational it would be for me) this type of blogging.   In this relationship I saw many different situations, both good and bad, and how blogging affected our relationships.

When we blog in community we are telling our friends to confront us on what we blog about.  When this is realized, our fears are public and we invite a deeper level of friendship.  I had a post a few months ago that I was hoping would make my wilmore family ask me about things, and also for me to put my fears on the table.  So when we blog, we must have these intentions in our writing.  So if you see me, you have my permission to ask me anything you want...I want you too.

I think that Christ is a part of my blogging.  I am not a fan of aggressive "witnessing".  I grew up interrupting people dinners going door to door to share Christ, and I really never saw anything come out of it.  I have had many more situations to discuss Christ with people when I try to wear my faith on my sleeve.  I think that blogging with the incarnation in mind is something that we should think of.  I hope that by me working things out on my blog (which is one of the main reasons I do it) that people can see where I am and what I have been thinking through.  It is part of the practice of intentionality and forcing myself into Christian community.  I really don't believe in a Sacred/Secular split if one is full of the Holy Spirit.  My hope and prayer is everything I do is sacred.  I want to go to bed at night thinking that I acted like Jesus.  As much as I love Rock and Roll, I don't think I could play it anymore because any poetry I write isn't very hip...it usually sounds like liturgy.  I guess this just follows with the more deeper view of salvation that I have grown into over the last five years or so. 

This is another reason that I don't like blogs that just communicate how many poops your kid had today.  My blog does terrible things to my seminary papers, the usually turn out to be way to causal.  I guess I may try to post more serious things to counter-act that one day.  I guess blogging for me is a way to show non-Christians a different view of the people of God.

This either answered some questions or caused some more.

Work stuff and a paper

Most of you know that I work here at Asbury doing various internet related things.  We have just started to get a new site off the ground that should be really interesting.  An outgrowth of the Asbury Bloggers site, we have been working on the Asbury Blogging Society website.  This is a more integrated approach to blogging at Asbury that will be expanding over the next few weeks.  There is a button on the sidebar that will take you to the site if you are interested.

I have a paper that I write off and on the tries to explain blogging.  I revise it and work on it around once a month.  It is my attempt at explaining why blogging is important to Christians.  Until now, I have just let a few people see it but I decided to put it up here.  It is a paper that will probably have no end, and I wish that I had all of the different versions of it still on the hard drive.  But since many of the ideas in it are really fleshed out here, at my blog, I think it is time to share it.  It is short, so if you have five minutes to burn go for it.Download incarnational_blogging.pdf

Our blog party at asbury was tonight. We had a great time and it was great to see people excited about everything.  I actually felt like I knew what I was talking about and it was awesome to see everyone.

Since this is the big thing that I have been working on lately I now get to shift efforts over to something else.  We started producing a podcast at Asbury with the Seminarius.Net initiative.  It looks like it should be a great little show, with alot of different content.  The link to the podcast is right here.

Over the last few weeks my random method of organization has gone to pot (sorry Jeremiah).  I have a modified method of GTD that I use (for that post you can go here to check it out), and I need to re-introduce myself to it.  For people that are as frazzled as I am, it really helps out.

A few posts ago I kinda bared it all out, and I am glad I did. I want to thank everyone for the encouragement via comments, texts, and emails.  I am starting to try to get to the underbelly of what has been keeping me awake at nights.  If you are curious as to what I have been reading over lately check out Mark 8:27-9:29.  That has started to be a integral section of scripture for me (and it was a homework assignment..who would have thought?)

My new favorite podcast/blog. The Catholic Underground. This guys blow my mind. Subscribe...now

Thanks for reading guys. In next few days I will post some media content from tonight.

Monday Night

Over several posts I have been talking about some of the things we are doing at Asbury dealing with blogging.  This is a idea still in process but we are having our first event this Monday night.  If you are in the Lexington area you should try to make this.

Here is the blurb:

What’s Blogging got to do with it?
Pursuing the practices of an online life in common.

With blogs turning into a preferred method of communication, many are using them to interact with family, friends and complete strangers in different ways.

At Asbury, we are really interested in blogging. We are thinking through some of the issues with blogging and how we can use them to communicate the Gospel. There are a few of us at Seminarius that are concentrating on this right now and we want to bring you into the conversation.

This evening will be a time for us to hear from a few bloggers around campus and to start talking about this with each other. 

This is just the first in this ongoing conversation, and we are excited about it. Let us know you are coming (asburyblogging@gmail.com), so we can get some stuff ready for you, and we look forward to seeing you.

Trust me, you will want to be a part of this.

Monday March 26th 8 P.M. in cordelia A and B

And a Youtube video promo

re-thinking

I am in the middle of re-thinking how I am going to do my site here. In the process I decided to do a mild, real dirty update, just because I am tired of the old look. I also wanted to add some links to my friends on the side, I have never really done that before and I feel bad about it.

I have a few things up my sleeve that I am excited about, but more than anything I am excited about the recent activity here in the last few months.  I want to try to think these things out a bit more, and re-gear some of the site towards what I am currently thinking about the most.  Its great to have a stat service that really shows you what your blog is doind. I use statcounter and so should you.

This weekend I am going down to Tennessee to spend some time with some dear friends and then come back to start all over again. Have a great weekend.

Asbury Blogging Services

After several months of prep work, I am happy to announce AsburyBlogging.blogspot.com.  One of the services that Seminarius.Net (my main gig) offers is blog building for those in the Asbury Community.This is a new step for us, and it is all still in Beta stages, but we really think that blogging is a formational practice. This is our first step in a larger investigation towards how the Church can use new forms of communication for the Kingdom of God.

We are excited about this, and I wanted to post the final version of our promo here. Some of you may have seen this in different stages, but this is the final one.

The Beginning

I guess this will be the formal beginning to my series of postings on intentional living. I guess some of you are wondering why I am 1.Talking about this so much and 2.Blogging on it so much.

1. I have been into the idea of living with my friends since I was a kid. I really enjoyed camping trips, road trips, mission trips....pretty much any time I got to spend an extended amount of time living with people I cared about. College was a great exercise in this, because I learned how to function with others 24/7.

When I really started getting into Jesus, I was fascinated by the groups of people that lived together as Christians. At first this was with groups like JPUSA. Later as I became more and more disillusioned with the modern church, I really wanted to just move away and not deal with it. But I also knew that it was impossible to fulfill the Great Commission and do that. I now understand more of the ideals behind Catholic monastic separation and the Orthodox views as well, and I really respect what they have going on.

But I really just was into the idea of deeper relationships with the people that I was worshiping with. After some time last year when Meredith and I lived with our best friends the Delattes, I started to realize that this wasn't a fanciful idea, it could actually work. I just have to think it out.

2. I have started to blog on it alot for several reasons.
a. I see blogging as a formational activity where I get to hash things out in public, and this helps me alot.  The communication that started through commenting is really sweet, and I hope it keeps on going. The possible interaction is great.
b. I hope to encourage others. I know that there are people that are trying to do this too.
c. I have been getting some hits from various Google searches involving my posts on intentional living, and I want to try to bring some of my views and research out on it a bit more. Yes, I realize this is a selfish reason. But I think it ties into reason "a" (above) and it goes along with spreading a life with Christ.

I don't think that you can separate Christ from his people and I don't think that we should separate ourselves from others.

I guess this is a decent primer on why I am doing this.

So I guess it starts...........