A quick google to find some other churches and blogs, for interest if anyone has time to look at them!
Seattle Metro Church
Family Worship blog
Sanctus 1 Blog
Paul Reid’s blog
Real Live Preacher
And then a short explanation of blogging and what a church blog could be.
Firstly, for the very uninitiated, a ‘blog’ is short for ‘web log’, which is, as it says on the tin, simply an internet based journal. These have been around for a long time now but have recently grown enormously in popularity – most of the major UK newspapers have a blog as well as their regular news sites, for example. Blogs can be used for all sorts of purposes, from news reporting to more personal diaries. One nice feature that most blogs have is that users can comment on the post, and thus discussion is generated, and many blogs have their own ‘community’ of readers.
For Isca, the idea could be to start off communicating a ‘thought for the day’, similar to the way in which Andy has been emailing prayer points out during the 40 days of prayer and fasting. It could also communicate news from overseas (Gemma, Bob & Muriel, Sheila, etc), as well as news from youth, and around the other churches in the city even perhaps. There could be the option of including prayer requests etc. if this could be managed properly. If people wanted it to be, it could be as diverse as including book reviews, film reviews, music reviews, personal testimonies, news from life groups, At Home news, Fair trade news, justice issues, notes from Sunday morning speakers – even worship through writing poetry, prose, artwork – whatever you wanted! It could be a good way for people to keep in touch and be part of another kind of community. Probably the best way for it to work practically would be for one person to be in charge of the blog itself, but for lots of people to send contributions in via email.
There are two parts to the blog – the main ‘window’ where the content appears, but also the sidebar, which can include relevant links. Probably the best way to see what a blog is would be to look at a couple online so if anyone has time to click through these links:
Community Church Northampton (led by Mark Norridge) has a blog here: CCN-Online
Demonstration blog by the Church Times! (amazing what you find when you google!): Church Times demo blog
Blog from an Anglican vicar – quite a nice example I thought: All Souls Church
Posts can be organised into categories which makes it really easy to find things should you need to – or just to read posts in one category, for example. It can have multiple users so different people could write on the blog if they wanted to. It also supports plugins which can do all sorts of different things – one useful one might be the ability to have user levels for registered users of the blog so that you can control what is seen by the public and what is seen by registered users, as long as they are logged in.
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