blogging church

I just started reading The Blogging Church by Brian Bailey and Terry Storch, and it is getting me pretty pumped up. Our church produces a weekly “vmail“, which is a video we send to our members of our pastor talking about upcoming events, sermon topics, and just being silly. It has been going on for over 4 years now (before the videoblog), and our membership pretty much eats it up. This past fall we did a series at church called “My Space”, which was a play on the myspace.com phenomenon and was combined with content from the Cloud/Townsend book Boundaries. The series actually got some local press from the Express News, which was also noticed a national church marketing blog, but that’s beside the point. As a part of the series we created a myspace page for Robert, our pastor. The response from our congregation has been huge. Right now, he has just over 600 friends! The craziest thing about it is the amount of comments he is getting on the page. People are so open and honest to him, and are sharing very important parts of their life with him through.
So, the combination of these things is really making me think that we need to marry the idea of the vmail and the myspace blog. The real advantage of this is that it makes the vmail more interactive, and it essential makes our large church seems much smaller. I liked this quote from “The Blogging Church”:

For a large church, an answer to the ministry benefit question might be: blogs make a big church small. As a church grows, it becomes an increasing challenge to connect people with one another and with the staff. People want a window into the heart of the church. How does the church remain personal and retain personality?

So what I am thinking is that we crate a blog on our church site that Robert blogs to, and that we also post the weekly vmail on. We could push people to this page from Robert’s MySpace page. The vmail could then include interative parts. For example, we could shoot a vmail this coming week with a Valentine’s Day theme, and ask the vmail watchers to send in a picture of their homemade valentine’s day card for Robert. Maybe not the best example, but it has the potential of really connecting a different segment of our church in community. I think community is really important to the growth of the church and the people within the church, and this could be a great tool to accomplish more of that.