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Should My Church Start a Blog?

Jan 9, 2009 Blogging

The most appropriate way to answer the question on whether or not to start a church blog is to sit down with your church staff and ask more questions.

  1. Is it a tool or a toy?
  2. What problem are you trying to solve?
  3. What is the return on ministry?

According to The Blogging Church, a so-far great read by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch, you shouldn’t start a church blog until you are satisfied with your answers to these questions.  I think the hardest one of these to answer is number three – What is the return on ministry?

The answer is likely going to be different for nearly every church.  Bailey visits a few possible answers:

  • Casting the vision of the church again and again
  • Connecting volunteers with each other and church staff
  • Knowledge sharing and the support of other church leaders
  • Make a big church feel small (by providing honest insights)

Bailey also points out that there is no other technology that can provide the benefits blogging can with the same minimal investment in training, time and money.  Ultimately, Bailey finds no reason why blogging is wrong for any church.  On that point, I definitely agree.

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 9th, 2009 at 9:51 am and is filed under Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 5 Comments

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    Interesting post. I have stumbled and twittered this for my friends. Hope others find it as interesting as I did.
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    @ryanv - You make a good point here. I think the questions in the post are ones you must ask to start a blog - but then you need to make sure you have all of the correct ingredients to put it together. So, in theory, it may be right for your church, but you may not have the right team to make it happen.

    Another point that Bailey makes in the book is that you MUST be passionate, or the blog will not be a success. This is VERY important.
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    I think it's a great idea. In fact, I have a blog for the music ministry portion of my church and it has be a great benefit for interacting with singing groups and soloist who are interested in worshipping at our church. We also gain benefits from social networks such as Facebook (which is where I discovered the link to this post), Twitter, MySpace, and MyChurch. We can all socially interact, discuss church events and also spread the Gospel message to the masses. I believe there is a closed-mindset with lots of folks when it comes to using such tools. Blogs and websites can have good and bad results. The most important thing is the administrative tasks. It must be well supervised and maintained.
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    I had the task of revamping my church's website last year and in the process incorporated a blog. It includes periodic updates on what is coming up in the church, recaps on things that happened, and recaps of the weekend messages.

    Of course it may be coincidence but in the time frame since the new site released we have seen a 35% increase in the number of young adults visiting our church on Sundays and the number of young adults getting involved in the church.
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    "ultimately, Bailey finds no reason why bloggins is wrong for any church."

    I would tend to agree at first thought. A blog would be great.

    However, I can think of one reason why it would be wrong for a church. Say the personality of the pastor, and the rest of the staff at the church do not lean towards writing in form of a blog. Where it would be hard to keep a consistent blog with consistent updates. I think then that the blog would be wasted and the efforts and time put into it may also be wasted.

    Sorry if my thoughts are not too fluid, they rarely are :)
 

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