Church Group Blogs
Saturday, March 10th, 2007 • Related • Filed Under
Last year we started a group blog for our church. Not that I didn’t think folks had it in ‘em, but the level of discourse and conversations has been truly life-giving for the church and I suspect for those on the blog team.
Unexpected joys . . .
- Feedback and continued conversations around issues/thoughts raised during Sunday services;
- Input and interaction between folks who may not otherwise participate;
- Access point for some many who have a hard time connected in other ways: stay-at-home moms, introverts, etc.
- Finding out how damn smart and thoughtful folks are;
- Being reminded that I need not always lead, drive or instigate the conversations;
Has anyone else been doing this? Would love to see some other blogs our there in case we can “liberate” some design or content ideas. Blog on ya’ll!
Comment by Jim Bonewald on 12 March 2007:
I still have elders who don’t really use e-mail!!
Comment by drew on 12 March 2007:
Tried it, unsuccessfully, with both youth and parents at one church. May try it again at the next one–haven’t decided yet.
Comment by Reyes-Chow on 12 March 2007:
Drew, any reasons why you think it didn’t work.
Comment by Neal Locke on 12 March 2007:
We’ve done something I think is a little unique–half of our church website IS a blog, including the main page.. It’s set up as a group blog, where the session members are the group. Unfortunately, our pastor is pretty much the only one who posts, and even then it’s mostly event & announcement driven.
What’s been far more interesting and productive is the other half of our website — it’s a wiki that anyone (church members or otherwise) can edit. And they do. We’ve had people contributing everything from program descriptions to theological issues to Sunday school curriculum.
Comment by Reyes-Chow on 12 March 2007:
Neal, do yo have a link. The wiki thing sounds pretty cool.
Comment by drew on 13 March 2007:
I think its a church culture thing. While members of our church way tech-savvy at work and at home, many still divide church from the rest of thier lives, and so tend to prefer “old church ways” of communicating.
Or maybe they just didn’t like online interaction.
Or maybe they didn’t want to add one more site to thier routine.
Or maybe the content was boring (it was open to all but only I ever posted).
Comment by Neal Locke on 13 March 2007:
Our website is at www . faithbridgechurch . org, and you can get to the wiki by clicking on the “Community Wiki” link in the sidebar, or just by going to www . faithbridgechurch . org / wiki [spaces inserted to avoid spam]
Comment by Tara Eastman on 30 July 2007:
We have begun to build on communication with starting a group on Facebook and have had many members ( even the not so computer savvy) join in on communicating with each other and discussing Sunday topics in response to seeing the messages in print on the group site. Not everyone is consistent in logging in - but life is not consistent either. As we are currently developing our website, I’m sure that will only help in developing an online community throughout the week as well as on Sundays.
Comment by Tara Eastman on 30 July 2007:
Here is the url for our Facebook group:
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2228702763
Enjoy,
Tara