Not dead - well, not yet

Richard Floyd wrote a short post on 'when blogs die' recently. This is an equally short post (in fact, considerably shorter) to let you know that this blog has not died, and doesn't intend to in the near future. I've been on leave for a week, keeping warm inside while the snow, hail, sleet, and winds buffetted the house outside. And that is my perfectly good reason for not having posted here for about a week.

We'll be back with a vengeance in the next day or so.

Top Ten NZ Christian blogs (for October 2009)

The stats are a little behind, but for those who are interested in such things, here are the top ten NZ 'Christian' blogs as at October 2009. (The post I found this on was actually published only a couple of days ago.)

I've put 'Christian' in quotes only because some of these sites, while written by Christians, don't necessarily focus primarily on the subject of Christianity - and some of them such as Something should go here - maybe later, a blog I'd never heard of till today, are as in-your-face as they come, while still definably Christian.

The MandM site, which posted this information, comes out on top. The blog is written by a husband and wife team, and tends to focus more on the political than the spiritual. However, their foundation is Christian.

1. [1.] MandM 14.5 (3 – 26)
2. [2.] NZ Conservative 17 (5 – 29)
3. [3.] MacDoctor Moments 17.5 (18 – 17)
4. [4.] Something Should Go Here, Maybe Later (HalfDone) 19 (10 – 28)
5. [5.] Say Hello to my Little Friend (Beretta Blog) 21.5 (8 – 35)
6. [6.] Being Frank 34.5 (36 – 33)
7. [7.] Liturgy Worship Spirituality* 37 (34 – 40)
8. [8.] Brad Heap 44.5 (46 – 43)
9. [N.] Manawatu Christian Apologetics Society 46 (43 – 49)
10. [N.] The Briefing Room 51 (81 – 21)

While you have a few moments, check these blogs out. I've only ever come across the 1st and the 5th before, myself, so I'll be doing some investigating of the others over the next period.

Spiritual Practice of...you name it!

Want some interesting topics for sermon ideas? Check out the growing list of Spiritual Practices at Godspace.

Spiritual Practices? Nah, been there, done that. Don't want to go down that old road of contemplation and monasticism again. That's so 90s (or maybe it was 80s?) and so Richard Foster.

But you might be a little surprised by this list: it includes the spiritual practice of love-making (I'll never forget hearing a guy at a Full Gospel Businessman's meeting telling us he and his wife used to kneel down and pray before making love), the spiritual practice of composting by New Zealander, Steve Taylor (I can fully understand composting as a spiritual practice); the spiritual practices of driving and smoking - these are two separate practices, I hasten to add. And don't forget twittering, blogging, and taking a shower.

My apologies

Every so often you need to do a bit of housekeeping, and this time it's involved the links down the side of the page. I discovered that a couple of Dunedin blogs, both run by the same person, haven't been added to for several months, so they've been deleted from the list.

And Glocal Christianity had changed its URL....I've repaired that on the list.

Sorry if you've been trying to access any blogs and haven't been able to, or have found them out of date.

Blogging's Six Pillars

The following is taken from Naked Conversations: how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. (John Wiley and Sons 2006. page 28), and I include it because of my ongoing posts about the Church and the Internet.

Blogs are:
1. Publishable: Anyone can publish a blog. You can do it cheaply and post often. Each posting is instantly available worldwide.

2. Findable: Through search engines, people will find blogs by subject, by author, or both. The more you post, the more findable you become.

3. Social. The blogosphere is one big conversation. Interesting topical conversations move from site to site, linking to each other. Through blogs, people with shared interests build friendship unrestricted by geographic borders.

4. Viral. Information often spreads faster through blogs than via a news service. No form of viral marketing matches the speed and efficiency of a blog.

5. Syndicatable. By clicking on an icon, you can get free ‘home delivery’ of RSS-enabled blogs. RSS lets you know when a blog you subscribe to is updated, saving you search time. This process is considerably more efficient that the last-generation method of visiting one page of one web site at a time looking for changes.

6. Linkable: because each blog can link to all others, every blogger has access to millions of other bloggers.

This is a topic of continuing interest (to me, at least!) The Naked Conversations blog is now called Global Neighbourhoods. (Not nearly such an eye-catching title!)

And in September, Shel Israel will publish Twitterville: how businesses can thrive in the new global neighbourhood. (Or should we substitute 'churches' for 'businesses?')

Twittering during the sermon

Some churches in the States have decided to allow people to Twitter during the service. Westwinds Community Church in Jackson, Michigan, for example, flashes worshipper's Tweets on large video screens.

Distracting? You bet!

However, this is a church that already twitters people with information about service times, sermon titles (The Top 5 Things We’ve Done That Made People Mad but Were Worth It, for instance), church notices and congratulations on people's baptisms. So twittering is part of their modus operandi.

But then there a church that's well and truly into the techno age: a look at their homepage shows podcasts listed, video streaming, blogs (there are at least five, and here's a post on the twittering 'issue'), and various other Internet-based areas on prayer, discipleship and so on (which I spent far too much time playing around with).

Here's a comment from the blog I linked to above: For Westwinds, the use of Twitter, among many other things, are [sic] appropriate for us but may not be for everyone. It is our culture. It is expected we will try different things. Some will fail. Some become part of us.

I'm happy I found out about Westwinds....they look as though they're trying out all sorts of possibilities in the technological area, and doing well with most of them. And here's another blog post from another one of their staff with no less than 25 points on the Twittering issue.

More on Virtual Community - and Top Blogs

At the risk of pointing you too often towards the Out of Ur site (though it is regarded now as one of the top Christian blogs), I just want to follow up on the last post in which Shane Hipps talked about virtual communities not being 'real' communities.
Scot McKnight has written a brief but sensible response to this - and, as always, the comments that follow the post are well worth a look.

In regard to the 'top' blogs, Matt and Madeleine Flanagan have given a very up-to-date list of the top New Zealand Christian blogs. The Flanagans give the reasons behind the rankings, based on the stats from two other sites: Half Done and Tumeke, neither of which are familiar to me. In fact, only three of those listed below are ones I've heard of previously. Plainly I'm not moving in the right blog circles!

1. NZ Conservative
2. Something Should Go Here, Maybe Later
3. The Briefing Room
4. MandM
5. Kiwi Polemicist
6. Say Hello to my Little Friend
7. Put up Thy Sword
8. Samuel Dennis
9. Contra Celsum
10. Star Studded Super Step

It would be interesting to spend an afternoon checking out these blogs to see what they've got to say. And for those with absolutely nothing else to do, check out Kent Schaffer's 60 Top Christian Blogs from around the world.

Blog Action Poverty Day 2008

By the time you read this, Blog Action Poverty Day will be well over. This is just a bit of feedback on some of the stats related to this rather amazing day in which thousands of bloggers around the world raised some consciousness regarding world poverty, by all writing about it on the same day (Oct 15th). I missed doing so on this blog, but did write about it on one of my others, a couple of times.

The day brought 12,800 Bloggers together on the same topic.
They wrote 14,053 Blog Posts, big and small, important and not so important.
There were some 13,498,280 Readers - don't ask me how that was figured out, but it's pretty impressive.
17 Top 100 Blogs were involved, along with lots of non Top 100 Blogs, like my own.

If you go to the Blog Action Day site, you'll find a bunch of the posts, and how they focused on ways the world has been helped, who helped, and how it was done.

Through this Action Day, Kiva was brought to my attention. It's the online equivalent of World Vision or CCF, except that through it people can lend money to individuals or groups around the world who need some additional funding to improve their lifestyle. It's a superb approach, and easy as pie to join. Recommend it highly.

Blogging Church

I've been reading the book, Naked Conversations: how blogs are changing the way businesses talk with customers, by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel. It's focused at businesses more than mission-minded people, but one church in Dallas gets two pages in the book, because Brian Bailey began a blog there under the church's wing (originally not under its wing, in fact), and is cited for showing how a large organisation like the Dallas Fellowship Church, can improve its communication skills both in-house and amongst its congregation through the use of blogging.

Bailey's blog is called LeaveItBehind (not LeftBehind, as I first read it).

Brian Bailey has gone on to write a book with Terry Storch called (not particularly originally!) The Blogging Church. Further, they've also set up a discussion board on Facebook. Now this is an interesting thing. We seem to have gone full circle here, since the Internet used to consist mainly of discussion boards (their proper name escapes me at the moment, but no doubt someone can remind me). Anyway, if you're not already a member of Facebook, you can join in half a moment, and joining the discussion board is even faster.