Pastors, Get Blogging

I have to admit that I was at first a reluctant blogger. Having imbibed joyfully a great deal of Neil Postman, I'm always wary of new mediums and their effects upon their adherents. I was struck though by the argument of a pastor friend who eventually convinced me that I should be blogging.

That friend (whose blog can be found here) convinced me that blogging was an extension of something I already did in my congregation. A bit over two years ago Phil Ryken, Senior Minister at Philadelphia's Tenth Presbyterian Church convinced me at a conference to begin addressing cultural issues with my congregation.

Ryken accomplishes this development through the publication of a weekly "Window on the World" (some of which have been collected in He Speaks to Me Everywhere: Meditations on Christianity and Culture). I set to work in my congregation and began in May 2003 writing "Cultural Perspectives". My congregation greatly profited from the very enjoyable time I spent writing those pieces. I will likely continue those pieces at a future point in my congregation's life. But for now, I'm switching to blogging with joy.

Why you might ask? Ryken's congregation gets a weekly dose of developing their Christian worldview for most of the year. My congregation - at the height of my writing Cultural Perspectives - got two doses per month. This is a reasonable pace at which to teach people but not ideal.

I've recently been preaching on the Ten Commandments and was reminded when I read Calvin's sermons on the Commandments from Deuteronomy that a number of the sermons were preached not on a Lord's Day but on a weekday. It used to be the case that church people received doses of God's Word multiple times during the week. Sometimes we pastors are lucky to get them once a week now. Obviously we don't lower the importance of weekly attendance at church. But could we recover the daily interaction people need to have in order to develop their Christian worldview in the midst of a culture which pushes them in pagan directions constantly?

In my mind blogging is not at the same level as hearing Calvin preach a sermon a weekday. Preaching and blogging are different tools in the pastor's tool kit. But my contention is that it ought to be in the pastor's tool kit. Your people called you be their pastor for a reason, they wanted to hear what you have to say week in and week out. Blogging serves a similar need as is usually taken care of through a phone call or email asking for a Christian perspective on this or a Christian answer to that.

But blogging is better because it's an answer given to everyone in your congregation who wants to know. Blogging is a multiplication tool. Better than that, when the pastor reads other pastor's blogs he can point people to significant things that other people are saying. Just today I pointed my readers to a friend's blog where he did an excellent job of explaining the nature of Biblical forgiveness. Now I don't have to write that, I can point people to that blog entry and then we can talk about it if necessary. In my mind blogging is the shorter version of giving someone a book to read to gain perspective on an issue.

Does blogging take time? Sure, everything takes time. But if you're like the typical pastor, you spend an enormous amount of time reading and interacting with cultural media forms. You constantly thinking through things and assessing how you might teach your congregation how to think Biblically. All blogging does is allow you to bear the fruit of your thinking sooner than later.

Conclusion ... pastors, get blogging. It'll be good for you to be forced to synthesize your cultural thoughts more frequently and it will bless your congregation as their Chrisitan worldview is built piece by piece day by day.