Grapevine Article on Blogging

If you find your way here from Grapevine (Bath and Wells monthly Diocesan Newspaper) then you are welcome. If you are interested, the article David Keen and I wrote follows. It didn't appear in quite such coherent form in the newspaper.

Thoughts on Blogging

Blogging vicars sounds like an expletive. But wait. ‘Blog’ is an abbreviation of web-log - a publicly-visible computer journal. Think captain’s log but online. But why would anyone want to share their diary with the world?

Whilst there are things best left private, many church folk use blogs to share news and discuss ideas.

We are enthusiastic bloggers. David’s blog is a mixture of missional thinking, statistics and thoughts about life, leadership and Doctor Who.

Steve’s is more whimsical and tries to be amusing (if offended you were probably meant to laugh). He manages two other blogs, one for his church and one to support Local Fresh Expressions.

Instead of being confined to a few minutes on a Sunday, a blog enables you to comment on events as they happen. For some, the blog has become the new ‘vicars letter’.

Other churches use blogs for church notices, group study notes or updates for prayer – as the Bishop of Bristol did after he and his wife had a serious car accident.

Putting your thoughts in a blog is a way to get an instant reaction. If you are planning on doing something new there will be someone who has done it before and learnt lessons.

There are blogging politicians, newspaper blogs, radio blogs and TV show blogs. Making a comment on an event has never been easier and ‘from the blogs’ often becomes a magazine article in itself.

You can measure how many people visit your site and where they are from. Our current visitors are from as far away as Argentina, Pakistan, Thailand, Mecca and Lesotho.

Every blog will have links to others. It’s a crazy, joined-up world. Why not surf around?

David Keen and Steve Tilley