Why Pastors Should Blog

A pastor friend of mine through CB connected me to a post on Abraham Piper's blog about reasons why a Pastor should blog. I was intrigued and went to read it myself. I found it really interesting and want to share the main points here. I found that some of the reasons he gave were reasons I wanted to begin the blog, and other reasons were things I have discovered since beginning the blog. Below are his points with my own commentary. You can read his original blog entry HERE if you are interested in his commentary.

• 1. to write. Writing and thinking go hand and hand and the more you write, the more it can help order your though process. I have found that before I need to work on a message, writing a blog post really helps warm up my thinking and help me do much better in my other work. It also let's me test drive ideas and thoughts that later get developed into radio shows and devotionals. Yesterdays blog made it into my prayer meeting devotional last night. The other way this helps is the discipline. I try to write each day that I have any time in the office. There are days when the schedule is just too busy, but for the most part I have been doing well on this. The discipline is good for me as I continue to work on what is one of my primary weaknesses.
• 2. to teach. Sometimes there is just more I want to say than will comfortably fit in a sermon, and as I am constantly trying to learn, I come across a lot of things that it would be great to share, but there is just never a place to. This becomes a great place to do it.
• 3. to recommend. Like the previous item, I come across articles and tools that may be helpful and this provides an easy forum to mention them.
• 4. to interact. There is more that could happen on this one. It would be great if more people, after reading an entry, would take a moment to comment. Now and then someone does and that is always great. Several sometimes leave the feedback over on Facebook and that is helpful too. Facebook often becomes a good interaction forum. It is great to connect and hear back what people are thinking about the things that we as pastors share.
• 5. to develop an eye for what is meaningful. This is so true as I have discovered after doing the blog. When you read something or experience something, you begin to think "would this work on the blog?" It is a great habit that helps to record things that then also may find their way into sermons and lessons.
• 6. to be known. Piper says, "This is where I see the greatest advantage for blogging pastors." This was my primary purpose in writing the blog. Just to reveal more of myself. Too often pastors consider their private lives as more of a secret to be kept. But as they drilled into me at pastors school, "more is caught than taught." You can not get to know me very well just by listening every Sunday. Yes, I share my life from the pulpit, but it is still a very small window. On here you can hear me talk about the Red Sox, the kids and our parenting, what I like and don't like and what my week is looking like. When something is on my mind or heart, I often end up with a blog post about it. Another quote from Piper's blog on this point.

  You can't be everybody's friend, and keeping a blog is not a way of pretending that you can. It's simply a way for your people to know you as a human being, even if you can't know them back. This is valuable, not because you're so extraordinary, but because leadership is more than the words you say. If you practice the kind of holiness that your people expect of you, then your life itself opened before them is good leadership even when you fail.

I think that last point is so critical and I really like what he says there in that quote. Too often us pastors can mistake privacy for secrecy. There are elements of my life and marriage that deserve some privacy. I don't share the content of every fight Sarah and I have or everything we do, but my life should be an open book where you know how my marriage is going and how my kids are doing and how I am doing. If my private life becomes a secret life and all you see is a performance I put on at church, where is the connection with your life? How can I be real if you don't see the real me? It won't be as pretty, as you who know me already know, but it will be genuine and hopefully something you can relate to. And just a warning to you blog readers, I'm probably going to use some of this stuff in the next church newsletter (which is WAYYY overdue!)