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The Book and its Topic
The Blogging Church is a long overdue book. To newcomers, the blogosphere can be a very intimidating place. What do you read? Why? What does Technorati, FeedBurner, del.icio.us, Digg This! and similar terms mean? How do you create your own blog? Why? Where?
Add to that the responsibility of communicating clearly as a disciple of Jesus, and you are almost sure to be petrified…
Enter The Blogging Church. This book will tell you all you need to know, and set you free to read blogs, create your own blog, and manage the whole process with confidence. You will feel like a native of the blogosphere, where now you feel like a tourist in a strange land, speaking the wrong language.
Throughout the book he has little Q&A sessions with leading pastors, and other blogging disciples. These help a lot, and have the additional benefit of creating awareness to the reader. I didn’t know Mark Driscoll has a blog!
He then goes into the main things a church can use a blog for. Share news, cast vision, reach out, connect staff, etc. It is useful information, though as a revolutionary infopreneur for Jesus, my ministry and website are not directly related to any church. Brian’s suggestions here could have been a bit more general to cover ministries and other inter-church movements as well.
Nonetheless, I found all the information very useful, and in the last part of the book, where Brian goes into the details of how to build a blog, and how to do it better than the next guy, I benefited hugely. I hope that this will show on my own blog (and this website for that matter) in a year’s time.
I also hope that once I have put enough thoughts into writing on my blog, I can piece together the contents and make them see the light in a book at a late stage… that’s just me dreaming off-topic again!
This book is a very helpful guide to a largely unexplained and difficult to navigate new world. Brian does an excellent job in getting the need-to-know information across, and helping poor, lost guys (like me) to get going. Brian also skillfully gathered helpful contributions from experienced bloggers to add value, and to stimulate the reader to keep the creative juices flowing. I am sure that this book will bear much fruit.
BookDisciple.com Power Quote
that we seek out new modes of worshiping, preaching, and reaching
out, we must find new methods of sharing stories. The
message doesn’t change when the methodology changes. If
the methodology fails to change, however, we begin to
distance ourselves from the people we are called to reach,
and we risk becoming irrelevant.”
– The Blogging Church, p.169.
So, how does it read?
I liked the slightly larger than normal format. It suits a how-to book, and (even though the emphasis is not specifically put on that term) that is what The Blogging Church is.
You will find your curiosity growing as you go along, and I think it would be murderous not to be able to explore the blogosphere while you are reading this book. Therefore, don’t venture to a remote bush cabin where there is no internet access…
What did this book mean to me personally?
Actions speak louder than words… I started my own story-telling blog. Here I will share my passions, mistakes, answered prayers and struggles. I will tell readers about my life, my ministry and my family, while hopefully not losing focus of the main aim – to create awareness around useful, high-quality Christian resources.
My blog is called Carbon Copy > Dries Cronje. Go subscribe to the FeedBurner feed, or just look around if you are not into blogging (yet!).
As you should know by now, this website also has an RSS feed to which you can subscribe, also at FeedBurner. This is not a blog in the traditional (!?) sense, though. It is a feature added by the SiteSell staff to enable a surfing audience, in love with the blogosphere, to stay informed about their favorite websites. As reviews or other articles are added, entries are posted to the blog, and you can stay up-to-date with the website’s content.
Conclusion
We need to embrace the world we live in. Not to become like it morally, but to reach (read ‘love’) those who live in it.
If we are going to do that, we had better be prepared to start communicating in ways that suit this world. That means… start blogging. The Blogging Church is your manual. Use it!
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