Presbymergent Bloggers and Friends of presbymergent

Hello friends. We are doing some cleaning up of our blogrolls on the presbymergent site over the next few days, and if your blog is listed, or your church/worship service is listed, please get in touch with us. Currently, we have three lists: Presbymergent Bloggers, Presbymergent Churches and Presbymergent Worship Gatherings. We are going to add one more list: Friends of presbymergent.

We want to keep the “Presbymergent Bloggers” list for those who would self-identify as a presbymergent blogger. But we wanted to have a space for those who are interested in the conversation, but who wouldn’t necessarily want to be labeled as a presbymergent.

So, if you’re currently listed as one of our Presbymergent Bloggers, please email us and let us know which subheading you’d prefer to be listed under: Presbymergent Bloggers or Friends of presbymergent.

Also, if you’d like to add any other churches or worship gatherings, email us with those links as well. Thanks everyone!

Subscribe to Comments

Just wanted to let you all know of a recent addition we’ve made to the site. When you click on an individual post and write a comment, before you click on Submit to publish your comment, you can now check a box that says, “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail.” This way, even though a post may not be the most recent, you’ll get notified if someone else commented on a post that you’re interested in. It’s a great way to stay connected with the wonderful conversations that are taking place on presbymergent.org – I just wanted to let everyone know how appreciative I am of your posts and comments on this site. I think this is where a lot really good presbymergent work is happening. Please keep it up and keep writing posts and submitting them to be posted.

One other note: when you do write posts, please remember to select a general category for the post, as well as inserting in some Tags directly below the area where you write the post. These can be more specific, and they help connect different posts with each other, as you’ll see if you click on the “Related” link under the post title.  Thanks!

Presbymergent Retrospective, 2007

2007 was Presbymergent’s best year ever! Well…actually, 2007 has been our only year (so far), but it was still a great year. Here are some of the milestones and highlights:

  1. Welcome to Presbymergent.org! With this short post, a community is born. The brainchild of Adam Walker Cleaveland and Karen Sloan, Presbymergent aimed from the start to “serve as a portal for all who are interested in connecting with Presbyterian and emerging pastors, leaders and lay people who are interested in and wrestling with how to live in and work in a ‘presbymergent’ world.
  2. The blogosphere begins to take notice of Presbymergent, and people start to subscribe, comment, and add their blogs and church sites to our directory. Additionally, Presbymergent begins to accept User Driven Content, allowing any registered user to post articles and blog entries.
  3. Presbymergent’s panel of editors kick off a series of posts on the theme “Why I Am Presbymergent.” Notable guests like LeRon Shults, Nannette Sawyer, and Troy Bronsink, weigh in with posts of their own.
  4. Presbymergent passes the 100 member milestone, and the Presbymergent Facebook group makes its first appearance (March, 2007)
  5. Presbymergent Parties bring presbymergents together face to face at conferences spanning the country, including our very first 100% Presbymergent Conference in Pittsburgh.
  6. Presbymergent is featured in an article of the Prebyterian Outlook, and later several presbymergent members take over the Outlook to produce an issue on Web2.0.
  7. In November, Presbymergent.org passes the 200 member mark, while The facebook group reaches 248 members.
  8. The website gets a fresh new look, some upgraded functionality. and even some pretty faces!
  9. The PCUSA reaches out to Presbymergent.org to help find and fund Emerging Presbyterian churches with grant money: The Open Door (Pittsburgh) and The Living Room (Atlanta) are awarded funding.
  10. Some of the year’s most popular posts (by comments) were:

It’s been a tremendous year, bringing together new faces, friends, ideas, and ideologies. Through all the blog posts, comment threads, conferences, conversations, and shared meals, we hope that God’s spirit has touched you in some way, and brought you closer not only to the presbymergent community, but to a King and a Kingdom – one that is (especially around here) often full of “loyal radicals” and “reformed reformers.” Happy New Year, and see you in 2008!

Grab a Gravatar

You may notice in the comments section now on this site, there are little places where a silhouette placeholder graphic exists. However, if you check out my author archive here, you’ll see there is a little image that I use as my avatar. In case you’d like to add a little more personalization to your experience here at presbymergent.org, head on over to Gravatar.com and sign up and upload your own photo/avatar. Then whenever you leave a comment on the site, we’ll see your picture/avatar.

New Media and Outreach

A question for the Presbymergent cognoscienti:

How and to what extent does your congregation utilize new media as an implement for evangelism?

I know that we blog, and that we’re open to integrating media into new forms of worship. This is good. But that we have connectivity within our respective fellowships doesn’t speak to how deeply we utilize internet media as a tool for bringing those outside our churches/faith communities into relationship with us.

I’ve been encouraging my little church to view our suite of web-based materials as a support for relational and affinity-based outreach. Between our website, a Google groups, a YouTube channel, and my own compulsive text and video bloggery, there’s a tremendous level of congregational and pastoral transparency.

The issue, as I see it, is moving those essentially passive media into a more engaged and active mode. The potential seems great, but I’m not sure what to do other than working to teach and empower my flesh-and-blood congregation to view our blogging and vlogging as a vital resource for our outreach efforts.

For those of you who’ve been actively using new media as part of your congregational life…how have you seen this played out? Are there any good best-practices resources in this area?
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As a side note, as I reviewed the Categories to tag this post, I noticed that neither “Evangelism” nor “Outreach”…nor any other variant of those concepts…seems to be present. Hmmm.

New Design: Thoughts?

You’ll notice that we’re using a different WordPress them for the presbymergent site right now. I think this theme adds some helpful usability to our site and is more pleasing to look at. But what does everyone else think? We’ll be doing some work on the site over the next few months, and hopefully this is a step toward improving the design of the site.

But we want to hear from you – what do you think?