July 10, 2006

Blogging for Jesus

The WaPo has a story about cyber-savvy pastors becoming bloggers...

In the four years since Arment started the site, blogging has become as much an instrument of his faith as the pulpit. "As a pastor, I shouldn't be just leading a church but connecting with people using the same formats they use every day," Arment said. Blogging is "a forum that's successful because it corresponds with how younger generations think."

The WaPo also quotes Mark Batterson, lead pastor of National Community Church, a fast-growing mega-church in the nation's capital.

Few ministers in the United States have used blogs as successfully as Mark Batterson, the lead pastor of National Community Church in the District. Batterson estimates he spends 20 percent of his workday updating his blog, "Evotional." He recently hired a "digital pastor" whom he met through the blogosphere to maintain the church's Web ventures.

"I used to think that the blog supplemented my weekend message," said Batterson, who draws upward of 25,000 visitors a month to http://www.evotional.com. "Now I wonder if it isn't the other way around. It's hard for me to imagine why a church that has younger members wouldn't have a blog component."

Unlike standing in the pulpit, virtual preaching allows pastor-bloggers to reach people from all over the world, they say. "John Wesley [a prominent 18th-century evangelist] had to travel 250,000 miles on horseback to reach people, and I can do it with one click of the mouse," Batterson said.

The Rev. Jan Edmiston, pastor of Fairlington Presbyterian Church in Alexandria, said the historical analogy is apt because the blogging phenomenon is part of a larger shift in the way religion is practiced -- although she is unsure what form that change might take. She now devotes every other Monday to "monastery day," when she sits in a coffee shop reflecting on the state of the church and expressing her thoughts on her blog, "A Church for Starving Artists."

"I'm doing the things you would do in a monastery except with a cup of coffee and my laptop," she said. "It's completely spiritually energizing in ways a lot of people wouldn't think possible. I think the church is going through a transformation similar to the Reformation, and blogging helps me work through where I fit into that."