Is Your Church Social – Part 26 – Blogs – Church Blog Tips

If your church is going have a blog, what should that blog be?  How should you go about doing the blog?  Who should manage the blog?  What should you blog about?  These are all good questions to ask yourself before you start a church blog.  In this post I’ll give some tips about the who’s, the what’s, and the how’s of church blogging.

Who Should Do The Blogging?

Anyone in the church can have a church blog.  One of the characteristics of blogging is that it is relatively casual.  This allows the church to be a little more relaxed about who blogs on the church website.  This is a great thing because you probably have several people in your church who would love to have a blog.  It allows different people in the church to become more engaged and may allow you to blog about a wider array of topics.  So, who should blog?

• Pastors – I know, it’s just one more thing for the pastor to do, but this is something a lot of pastors would love to do.  It can allow them to engage in casual discussions of a variety of topics, allow them to expand upon ideas from their sermons, and it can make them a “real person” instead of just the pastor.
• Church Leadership – If your church is like my church you have several groups within the church to help lead the church in various ministries.  Blogging is a great way for the leaders of these groups to make the church aware of what they are doing and engage members in their area of ministry.  Imagine the leader of the Sunday school blogging about Sunday school activities or someone leading Evangelism in the church blogging about ways members can share their faith.
• Church Members – Like I said, anyone can blog.  In addition to church topics members can blog about, allowing church members to blog can enable your church to blog about topics not directly related to the church.  Maybe a member is involved in fitness and weight loss and can blog about that or perhaps one of your members is very involved in the community and can blog about what’s going on in the community.  You could even have a blog about political matters, but be cautious with that.  I’m a very politically minded person, but I tend to hold back a bit at church because I don’t want my political views to become a barrier to how I can minister to people at the church.  So, be careful with it.

How Should You Blog?

There are several things you can do to help your blog to be successful.  Here are a few tips:

• Blog about what you are passionate about.  Readers can usually tell the difference between someone writing about something they care about and something they don’t care about.  When you’re passionate about something, you tend to know more about the subject and what you write tends to be more interesting.  Additionally, it will be it’s own incentive to keep blogging.  You’ll just enjoy blogging more.
• Have a goal or topic for your blog.  It’s easy to get caught up in the idea that in order to reach more people, you should blog about a wide variety of topics.  In practice, however, the opposite tends to happen.  Instead of attracting a variety of people with content they are interested in, you end up boring everyone with content they are not interested in.  So, choose a topic or goal and stick to it.  If you have several topics you want to cover, create several blogs.
• Tell stories.  People like stories.  It will make your posts more interesting and allow readers to get to know you better.
• Write about something useful.  Not every article has to be useful, but people do tend to like to read information that will be useful to them.  This can help keep the blog interesting.
• Monitor the blog.  There are two reasons to monitor the blogs.  First, it’s important to respond to comments and do so in a timely fashion.  So, check the blog at least once or twice a day to see if there are any new comments.  Secondly, if you have members posting blog articles, it’s good to have the church leadership keeping an eye on the blog.  This can both prevent any issues stemming from what is being posted and it can allow the leadership of the church to participate in the blog and show support for the blog.

Do you have any additional tips for having a successful church blog?