The Blogging Church

I just finished reading Brian Bailey and Terry Storch's new book "The Blogging Church: Sharing the Story of Your Church Through Blogs" (published by Jossey-Bass, another imprint of Wiley) and I'm fantastically impressed with the book. Well done guys. I bought 3 copies: 1 for myself, one for Courtney the minister at our church who blogs and also one for our senior minister Randy. I think that much like we saw with the sales of our business blogging book Naked Conversations, we'll see many people buying multiple copies of this to evangelize blogging within their churches.

Some of the things I really liked about this were Brian and Terry's passion for blogging and for ministry. It really comes through in their writing. That does a great job of showing how meaningful this is to them and also of underscoring one of the points they and many of their guest experts make in the book: for your blog to be successful, it has to be passionate.

Brian and terry speak with some real authority on the subject, since both are experienced church bloggers who also have a deep understanding of ministry and technology. So they're also able to looking at blogging as yet another tool in your technology tool chest for spreading the good news.

I really enjoyed their interviews with some of the other big-time blogging pastors. Those were scattered through the book every other chapter. I forced myself not to skip ahead and read all of those first so it was a real treat to come to each of them. And likewise, they authors did a stunning job of assembling some top bloggers to give blogging advice at the end of the book. Robert Scoble, Shel Israel (2 favorites of mine<g>) both contributed. Robert, your list of "words that make me think of a church I'd like to attend" are all words I'd associate with the church I attend, if you're ever in Indy, you have a standing invite to attend with me. And other stars in the blogging world including Guy Kawasaki, Dave Winer, and Kathy Sierra gave fantastic insight.

I loved the "build a really bad blog" chapter. That was genius titling and approach.

It's a short book, you'll find you can probably read it all in a couple of hours. I admittedly didn't read deep on some of the technical how-to chapters near the end of the book, just skimmed them enough to be convinced that a beginning blogger would indeed be able to get started with these and nothing else. And although experienced church bloggers (Courtney!) might look at this at first and think you don't need this book, I guarantee that Brian and Terry have some ideas that will help any church blogger improve their blog and their mission through their blog.

Now, given that I'm an editor, and a former development editor at that, I can't ever write a review about the perfect book. And there were a few things not covered, angles not approached, in this book that I would have loved to have seen explored in it. But given that the book and the authors have blogs, it's very possible they've already covered these online or will.

So I guess this biggest item within that missing angle is how a layperson, church member like myself can blog my faith even if I'm not part of the official church blog. The book briefly touches on that when it talks about a church blog example where members contribute to a conglomerate blog and flickr feed. But the book never really talks about what I saw as 2 important issues: 1. should churches encourage/discourage/be neutral about members who blog about their faith and church life 2. how members who do this should approach their blogs. The bulk of the book really does assume you are church staff. I respect that choice and without explaining it explicitly, I think I can infer Brian and Terry's reasoning for doing so when I read their description of who on staff should blog and what rules they should follow. At one point they contrast the first Microsoft blogger (Josh Allen) who started his Microsoft blog without senior management knowledge or approval with what a disastrous approach that would be in a church setting. It's pretty easy to take that one step further and think that many senior pastors won't want their members blogging about church.

I think that's unfortunate on a few levels. One, I think the book might have reached an even broader audience by explicitly addressing the when and how of church member blogs. Two, there are more members than staff. Members can put a real face on their spirituality, frailty, humanness through their blogs, things that Brian and Terry point out can help the unchurched be attracted to a church. And as Terry and Brian point out, church staff are already frequently overloaded to the point that regular care and feeding of a blog may just not make their mission priority list. And finally, if you attend a church that encourages you to evangelize the gospel, invite new members, spread the good news, blogging is a great way to do that.

I think the other missing angle I would have liked to see more of is what churches shouldn't blog. (we had a chapter on businesses that shouldn't blog in Naked Conversations.) Terry and Brian's church (with senior pastor Ed Young) as well as most of the example church bloggers cited in the book are examples of the many vibrant and growing independent (what I think used to be called "non-denominational") churches. That is, most of them are not associated with any specific denomination. Their senior pastor is the final say. That's unlike the situation with the older protestant denominations (Lutheran, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian) etc where each local church is a member in a much larger organizational hierarchy. So not only is the senior pastor the final say, but many of these churches are newer (established in the last 10 years, 20 years at most) and growing at unheard of rates while many of the older denominations have seen shrinkage. I think this mindset and outlook of the independent Christian church subconsciously blocks a lot of the questions that might come up about blogging in an old-school denomination, or even in a newer denomination. So, I think that issue affects the "which churches should and shouldn't blog question."

And I think they kind of dodged the issue on church/staff size relative to blogging. The only pastor of a small church may not find the "return on ministry" in blogging that Terry and Brian do. While they state "return on ministry" as one of the principles that should guide a blog or not decision, I would like to see more discussion (hopefully on their blogs). For example, what small percentage of the current general population uses an RSS/newsreader? based on that %, how large does your community have to be to have a hope of attracting new members to your physical church if that's the goal of the blog?

In the final analysis, it's a great book, one I'm proud to recommend to anyone involved in the ministry especially the 2 pastors at our church I'm sharing it with. I'm also thrilled to have played a small part in bringing this book into being, from recruiting Brian after the initial introduction from Shel and Robert to introducing them to their eventual editor at Wiley and publishing home with Jossey-Bass.

Comments

[Brian Bailey]

Thanks for your thorough review, Jim. You make great points - no wonder you do what you do!

Maybe you can help with the 2nd edition :)

Thanks for everything!