I already have a blog. Actually, two of them: this one, and my devotional blog. And now I have a third. My small groups blog.
Exactly why I now have three blogs is because I was trying to talk Sojourners Church into recognizing the value of blogging. In fact, I thought it would make the church’s site a whole lot more interesting if they simply turned it into a great big blog and let people post things to it that way. It was a cutting-edge idea, and I definitely believe the church as a whole should be on the cutting edge of every society God puts it in.
Except if you’re too cutting-edge, you scare people. And that idea did. “Who,” they said, “is going to maintain that thing?”
Well, that’s part of my job, isn’t it? …Actually, not really. Once they realized that there was no guarantee that I’m going to be around after May 2006, it feels like they’ve been slowly phasing me out. So my replacement will have to maintain the thing, and it’s a little hard to find people with my skillset that won’t charge them a lot of money. (Unless they’re teenagers.) Plus pastors, by and large, are control freaks, and there’s just enough control-freak behavior in our pastors to make them wonder how they could ever regain control of their website if it joins the blogosphere.
So, so much for being cutting-edge. Instead, we went back to the same old type of church webpage that people only refer to when they need to know the pastor’s email address. ’Sokay; it’s less for me to worry about and maintain. Maybe that was the point. I just hope that attitude doesn’t spread to our other ministries… “Why evangelize anyone when you’re just gonna have to disciple them?” “Hey, we’d really cut expenses if we just had worship services once a month instead of every Sunday.” “Electricity? It’s a fad. Let’s go back to candles. Christians have used candles for millennia.” And so on.
So there’d be at least some blog presence, I turned the main blog page into a small groups blog. So I’ll likely talk (or rant) about small groups there, and we’ll see how that goes. My pastor is a little astounded that I have time to write my other blogs, but I don’t think he realizes how fast I write. Especially when I’m ranting, like now.
Comments:
BradShim. Unfortuntly it is all too true. At the
CCC Lay leadership summit a couple of years ago, they had a seminar on how to use the internet to reach out. Though I did not know what a blog was at the time, I now realize that is exactly what he was talking about. Good ideas, too bad they were not well recieved.