July 24, 2007

Bible Blogging

Here's a link to a fascinating blog I found today, thanks to the One Year Bible Blog. When I was a teenager, the church I attended encouraged all of its members to read through the Bible in one year, following a calendar that divided the Bible into 365 daily readings. I wish I'd had the One Year Bible Blog back then.

Which reminds me - I'm scheduled to speak at the Society of Adventist Communicators' convention in Nashville in mid-October (brochure PDF) on the subject of blog ethics. I'm not a member of the Seventh Day Adventist denomination, but I'm happy to help them better communicate the gospel message in whatever small way I can. My talk will be titled Being Paul in the Blogosphere, a reference to the story in Acts 17:16-23 about the Apostle Paul visiting the Agora at Athens, a great marketplace of ideas that is not too unlike today's blogosphere, a free-for-all of ideas and ideologies, faiths and disbelief, and very few rules.

How Paul handled himself is the model for today's Christian wanting to operate ethically and faithfully in the world of blogs and related social-media such as YouTube, MySpace, Second Life and Digg. Paul's approach to the people of Athens was ethical, transparent and bold - good strategies for the blogosphere, too.

Here's the story from Acts 17:16-23:

While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, "What is this babbler trying to say?" Others remarked, "He seems to be advocating foreign gods." They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, "May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean." (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)

Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: "Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.

Last month, teenagers in Pastor Victor Hulbert's youth group put video clips of mountain boarding and other antics from a church camping trip on YouTube. They said their friends, who aren't Christian, saw the clips and were surprised that Adventists were "normal" people.

"This is actually evangelism," said Hulbert, communication director for the Seventh-day Adventist Church in the United Kingdom. "They're seeing Adventists as real people who can have fun."

Learning new methods of such subtle, or even overt, evangelism brought together about 100 Adventist Church leaders, communication professionals and technology experts from around the world for the fourth annual Global Internet Evangelism Forum at Newbold College in Bracknell, Berkshire, Britain, June 28 to July 1.

"Those who are still not with us need to know that there is a deliberate approach to the Internet in the church," said Rajmund Dabrowski, communication director for the Adventist Church world headquarters, which sponsored the event.

"Some are stuck with the predictable approach to evangelism," Dabrowski said.

Your church isn't on YouTube and MySpace? It isn't using blog and podcasts? Chances are it isn't growing as fast and reaching as many younger people as the church down the street that is.