In the beginning was the Word, John the evangelist proclaims—and thus Christian communication was born, always using the latest forms to proclaim the timeless gospel. So through the 1990s, Christians began to surf the internet for news and information, online Bibles, and to connect with others through e-mail, discussion groups and personal or church-related websites.
Imagine then a new kind of website—part “dear diary,” part link-laden commentary or rant (on any possible topic or current news), with comments from the readers and updated on some regular basis. It’s a web-based diary, a web-log, most often shortened to just “blog.” And blogs are hot.
Through free software via sites like Blogger.com, Xanga.com and WordPress.org, millions are blogging. According to “The State of Blogging,” a report released by The Pew Internet & American Life Project in January, more than eight million people have created a blog in the U.S. alone; over a quarter of internet users read them regularly.
Web-logs inexpensively serve up richly-linked information, detail and fact-checking. They also showcase the particular skill, humour, expertise and sometimes idiosyncratic personality of the particular blogger.
Blog-readers can comment on a link or story, and with one another, or with the blogger. Blogs also link to one another, forming an online community with connections and a running conversation sometimes spanning continents. Successful blogs demand “a passionate and personal response,” says blogger Keith Robertson. Bad blogging—like bad preaching—doesn’t inspire, agrees fellow blogger Eve Tushnet.
Blogs have come into their own during the past year and a half as up-to-the-minute alternative news sources to “mainstream media” carried via television, newspaper and radio stations. Some sources say Blogger blogs alone get more traffic than NYTimes.com. Worldwide, blogs probably number in the tens of millions.
Blogs have even played a significant part in the debates over Terri Schiavo, the Iraq War, same-sex “marriage” battles in society and the churches, the recent CBS media-scandal, the controversy over Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, the U.S. election, abortion and euthanasia, the rise of democratic protest-movements in the Middle East and China, the U.S. priest abuse crisis, new Bible translations, the recent tsunami disaster, the war on terror, worldwide Anglican divisions and almost any other topic that inspires opinion, discussion and interest.
The director of the Pew Project, Lee Rainie, estimates that 10 to 20 per cent of web-logs are religion-themed. “There are blogs for Wiccans, blogs on the Talmud and blogs for mainstream and non-mainstream denominations,” says Rainie. “They run a very broad spectrum of institutional connection.”
For some God-bloggers, says New York Times writer Debra Nussbaum Cohen, “…the medium provides a vehicle for evangelism. For others, it is an opportunity to educate. For many, it is a way to get their beliefs into the public square and, with people who comment on their postings, wrestle with the issues of the day.”
For Christians—who get filtered news via the mainstream media (often not religion-friendly), or via the filter of denominational news (often not controversy-friendly)—blogging is a real eye-opener. It has become a form of “citizen’s media.” Others call it “participatory media, open media or grassroots publishing.” For this reason, mainstream or institutional news-sources often label blogs as unofficial, untrustworthy, or even dangerous. They take a shortcut around what bloggers term “MSM” (mainstream media), or “old media.”
Canadian science writer and journalist Denyse O’Leary asserts that for some divided churches, “minimally Christian bureaucrats…misrepresent whatever branch of Christianity they are associated with. As a result, lay Christians need an ethical, clued-in blogger just to tell them what is even happening. I predict the confrontation will grow, and that the administrative world will fade, and the blog world will win. More importantly, the gospel will win.”
Partly through the growing influence of blogging—and the fact that some journalists, clergy and professors read and write blogs—issues of theology, Christian controversy, and faith are probably getting more widespread and balanced exposure in the media than in the past, and more quickly.
Says Canadian author and blogger Kathy Shaidle, “A blog like GetReligion.org is able to jump on the latest mainstream media religion story and praise it or pick it apart. Immediately, this critique is out there to be heeded, ignored or developed further by commentators and other bloggers.
“It used to be that a book would appear every few years or so with a title like The Media and Religion: Two Solitudes or something. Books few people read. However, the immediacy of GetRelgion’s criticism increases the chance that religion reporters may catch on that much faster to the problem of referring to Cardinal Bernard Law as ‘the head Rabbi of Rome,’ which apparently happened earlier in March.”
What next? God-bloggers have recently organized a first-ever “GodBlogCon” (or Religious Webloggers Convention) in California for October 13-15, 2005, at the Torrey Honors Institute of Biola University, under the direction of blogger John Mark Reynolds.
“We invite all Protestant, Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christian bloggers,” reports the SmartChristianBlog. “GodBlogCon is a Christian convention which is rooted in historic biblical faith and Christian creeds.” Featuring well-known Christian bloggers, workshops include “Blogging Youth Pastors,” “Video Blogging,” “Theology Blogging” and “Blogging Pastors.” It represents a new step in blogging and the Christian world, as a people share insights and new ideas on telling the old, old story via a new medium.
While not all are called to GodBlog, we can read, ponder and learn a great deal through this new medium as we seek the renewing of our Christian minds, the building-up of our faith and the fellowship and connections we can make with fellow believers here and around the world.
Sean A. Taylor surfs the web and lives in Nova Scotia.
