3 Reasons Your Pastor Should Maintain a Personal Blog
Content+Strategy Rob LaughterThis post is sponsored by PastorBlogs.com, an up-and-coming resource to help pastors and ministry leaders share their message with their churches and communities.
1. Maintaining a blog helps pastors become better communicators.
Every pastor should be actively working on his communication skills. While the weekend message is usually only one of many tasks that a pastor is responsible for during the week, it’s often one of the greatest opportunities to equip his congregation and clearly share the gospel message with people who have never heard it.
Putting pen to paper — or fingers to keyboard — to create blog content helps pastors become better communicators by forcing them to distill and clarify their message. Writing out your ideas rather than keeping them bottled in will help improve your communication skills in all areas of your ministry, from email to counseling to your Sunday morning sermon.
2. Maintaining a blog helps pastors get more out of their sermon content.
Let’s be honest: your pastor puts way too much work into his message each week to preach it once and leave it to be forgotten on Monday morning. By repurposing sermon content into blog content, pastors get more out of each and every sermon, reinforcing their message throughout the week and reaching a wider audience with the message of the gospel than they would if they only preached the message on the weekends.
Each main point of a sermon can be broken out into its own blog post. If your pastor preaches from a manuscript, repurposing the content into text takes minimal work that yields huge benefits. Paired with publishing a podcast of your sermon content, converting sermons into blogs can extend the life and reach of each sermon.
To see an example of how I’ve repurposed my sermon content into a podcast and blog posts, see the links below.
- Sermon podcast example.
- Blog post series: first post, second post, third post.
3. Blogs are a great way to provide additional resources for your congregation.
A 30 to 45 minute slot on Sunday morning usually isn’t enough time to really dig into a passage of scripture. As I prepare and edit a sermon, I generally cut between 25 and 50% of the total content, not because it wasn’t good content, but because it wasn’t the best content to reinforce the main idea of the sermon.
For every main idea in your sermon, there are a dozen related ideas that never make it into the sermon. These ideas make great content for blog posts. In the example that I posted above, my sermon on submission to government authorities raised a lot of questions for our congregation. I was able to expand on some specific scenarios in my blog content that I couldn’t include in the sermon.
Need help getting started?
I’m working on a brand-new product, PastorBlogs.com, that is designed to help pastors and ministry leaders get started with blogging faster and become more effective at managing and promoting their content. To be one of the first to have access to the tools and resources we’re developing, sign up for early access and get notified when we’re ready to launch.