Exploring the Use of Blogs and Social Media in Ministry
Millions of people are involved in blogging, look at blogs everyday, and search the internet. There are 10s of millions of blogs that post about religion and proudly wear the title of ‘Godblogs’ and probably even more websites that can be identified as religious.
Many of those sites are produced by the writers as a hobby, and then there are other sites which are obviously designed to be an internet ministry.
Soon nearly every family in America rich or poor will have a computer or access to one and/or a tablet or cell phone with access to the internet. Internationally, the internet is growing at a phenomenal rate. As a media for ministry the potential is really unlimited.
It is really amazing how many people can be reached and how many nations can be touched by a very simple ministry located on the World Wide Web.
Among the many confusing terms that you run into when you are just starting out in the blogosphere is “RSS”. Yet this term is of prime importance to understand if you are going to expand the influence of your blogging ministry.
What is RSS? Simply defined it stands for : Really Simple Syndication.
According to a MinistryToday article written in 2009:
“On Feb. 1 youth groups around the world will be going on a two-week missions trip—from the comfort of their homes.”
A new ministry called ‘Online Missions Trip’ is encouraging young people to evangelize via social networking Web sites like Facebook, MySpace, and World of Warcraft. Tim Schmoyer, pastor of student ministries at Evangelical Covenant Church of Alexandria in Alexandria, Minn. talks about the new online missions ministry for youth:
Here’s a good article from DailyBlogTips: “Write Your Titles CAREFULLY and AFTER the Post”
Daniel Scocco writes that titles are important and more time and effort should be given to composing the best possible headline for a post. It is a fact that most decide whether to read an article or not based upon the title alone.
Anyone who’s been publishing a blog for a while has received comments that are inappropriate for a Christian site–comments full of obscenities or bearing links to pornography–or comments that you would rather not have published on your blog.
There are always those Christians who consider it their mission to drop pre-written articles into the comment line of any post that comes close in anyway to their specialty issue. Mention ‘baptism’ in a post and you might receive an unsolicited 2 page teaching on "why infant baptism is a false practice"–posted on the comment line. You may even agree with the teaching but it really doesn’t respond in any way to the original post–what do you do?
